News

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ft7ZOtRRxb0HBJKL-GWWTEMdRn_uEkbD/ed…

Let’s take a look at a diagram of the 18-year land price cycle since World War II. It’s based upon the writings of the six people shown at the foot of the chart and is not financial advice. The 18-year cycle peaks were in 1954, 1972, 1990, and 2008, with another anticipated in 2026. After each peak, there’s a steep four-year correction, followed by a recovery and a mid-term peak. The mid-term top is usually accompanied by a two-year recession. As we approach the final “Winner’s Curse” phase of the cycle, shown at the top of the chart, whereas many analysts had expected a recession in 2023/24, it has failed to materialise. So, if the 18-year cycle does hold, it may be be a case of “off to the races” next year, with a land price surge that could herald a crash in 2027. I guess we’ll see?

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) was among the most important and widely read books published in the 19th century, but George’s work and the single tax movement it spawned had largely faded common knowledge by the 1930s. George’s central idea was that a single tax on land values was sufficient to fund the government, and that private appropriation of land’s value was the cause of the persistence of severe poverty even in the richest and most developed cities in the world.

https://schalkenbach.org/exploring-universal-basic-income-and-its-imple…

A Commonwealth Proposal in Canada

In Canada, a group of UBI advocates who make up an organization called Common Wealth Canada propose that collecting value from Canada’s land and resources would create $241 billion dollars of wealth annually that could be distributed to Canadians. They propose that it is enough to provide each adult with up to $7,600 per year in dividends.

Using Power Well: Bob Williams and the Making of British Columbia - Bob Williams
with Benjamin Isitt and Thomas Bevan
Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions, 2022, 235pp.

Review by Francis K. Peddle
Henry George Foundation of Canada
August, 2023

The two greatest challenges facing the world in 2021—climate
change and growing inequality—could both be addressed by the
application of a fundamental remedy: Henry George’s misnamed,
misunderstood, and much-maligned single tax. Taxes are burdens,
charges levied on activities and commerce that very often discourage the
very kinds of productivity that the taxing body would be better off
encouraging. George understood this and proposed the elimination of
every tariff and tax save for the one on land. In a nutshell, that’s it. Henry

AKHIL SAXENA | DECEMBER 3, 2021

In many major American cities, housing affordability has become a pressing issue. In cities like New York and San Francisco, rents have continued to rise over the past decade, leading to increased homelessness and housing insecurity.

https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/the-perfect-tax-land-value-tax…

Jeff Smith has written a remarkable monologue, with Thomas Paine telling his life story and the story of his times (the times that tried men's souls). I have converted this into a video and did my best to play the role of Paine as he might have spoken. So, take a listen, provide any comments and forward the link onto others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2vPjadsoCw

by Frank de Jong

“No army can stop an idea whose time has come” — Victor Hugo

https://schalkenbach.org/pricing-carbon-is-a-magic-job-machine/

Hugo was referring to the French Revolution, but his quote also nails the unstoppable logic of carbon pricing. Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada wrote, “Climate change is a real and existential threat to the entire world, and evidence shows a price on pollution is a critical element to addressing it.”

Four transformative ideas are now putting economic theology through its paces: Land Value Taxation (LVT), Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Universal Basic Income (UBI), and Bitcoin (BTC).

Let’s examine why...

https://schalkenbach.org/lvt-mmt-ubi-btc-the-alphabet-soup-of-economics/

“We continue to privatize the essence of our humanity. Those of us who claim to own land and therefore claim the rents that are produced in our societies are actually enacting the role of slavery. We are appropriating other people’s humanity.”

https://www.prosper.org.au/2021/01/we-are-rent-with-fred-harrison/?fbcl…

Part I of Fred Harrison's latest work. Humans became a hugely successful species because we generated rent and shared it. But now the rent is being appropriated and misused by a minority impoverishing the majority and destroying nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8sPymki0JI&ab_channel=geophilos

https://wearerent.com/

BY MATTHEW DOWNHOUR ON MAY 4, 2020

In preparation for future challenges like COVID-19, we should take steps to address the root causes of low societal resilience. An important such step is a move to Land Value Taxation. This financial modification would turn the tax structure into a policy tool to boost community resilience without additional taxation or micromanaging legislation.

Land Value Taxation

Every citizen has a right to a Basic Income, a right to their share of the surplus wealth produced by their local economy.

But Basic Income plans should be funded out of unearned income, NOT earned income. People with jobs should NOT be taxed to pay for people without jobs.

About 30% of the GDP in every jurisdiction is economic rent, variously called the economic surplus, super profits, royalties, capital gains, unearned income, monopoly profits, or profits without a corresponding cost of production.

These days most Davos types get rich through stock option buy backs and then avoid taxes through offshore tax havens, shell companies, equity swaps, shell trust funds and real estate borrowing. To reduce the obscene wealth gap plus boost the economy, governments should finance programs by collecting unearned income (economic rent) in lieu of taxing jobs.

Renegade Economists Show 572 Subscribe to the weekly podcast.

Frank de Jong talks about the fading political currency of policy makers and their inability to meet the demands of inequality alongside rampant right-wing influence. How can a pre-emptive economic system be enabled to deal with issues at source? Taxation is not just to raise revenue, but to improve economic outcomes.

Check his work via https://earthsharing.ca/

http://www.earthsharing.org.au/2018/12/the-end-of-the-month-or-the-end-…

The Georgist case in 2 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_W7qwtYaL0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwA…

Léo Klag (1920-2018), longtime student of the economic philosophy of Henry George, passed away in his ninety-eighth year this past March. I first met Léo in the 1980s when he was on the governing board, along with Ben Sevack and the late Harry Payne, of the Canadian Research Committee on Taxation (CRCT), the predecessor to Earthsharing Canada. The job of Research Director for the CRCT was vacant. As a young academic I was keen on doing work in the areas of tax reform and normative economics.