For whom are we voting on August 21st?

Election time’s here and shallow humbug’s in the air again. I don’t know for whom I’ll vote, but I do know that it’s impossible to understand world events, history, or even the collapse of empires, until the devastation wrought by taxation and the private capture of publicly-generated land rent is understood.

Although Professor Michael Hudson is undoubtedly the authority here, I have elsewhere touched upon rent’s role in the cause of World War I and World War II, respectively. It’s chilling that failing speculative economic regimes seem to be slowly but surely directing us towards WW III.

Two visitors

Popular British historian, Niall Ferguson couldn’t see beyond debt in an otherwise good article “Decline and fall of the US” in The Age (June 29, 2010). He was unable to make the connection between impossible debt levels and the privatisation of the public’s land rents.

At the same time as Ferguson, Nobel prize-winner and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz also visited Australian shores.

Noted author and journalist Greg Palast provides the following insights into Stiglitz that demonstrate Stiglitz has progressed further down the track in his comprehension of the role of economic rent than Niall Ferguson:

“(Palast) So then I turned on Stiglitz. ‘OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations?’ Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of ‘landlordism’, on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50 per cent of a tenant’s crops. So I had to ask the professor: ‘As you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn’t the Bank follow your advice?’

‘If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That’s not high on their agenda.’”

In The Age (June 30, 2010) Stiglitz also demonstrated what should constitute the basis for a fair mining rent:

“You need to have a well-designed competitive auction to have different companies compete so that companies get the necessary returns to do the investment - but the surplus goes to the Australian people.”

In the absence of another Janine Haines, or our own Joseph Stiglitz or Michael Hudson, this election is already a crock.