In just two decades the market value of land has quadrupled, increasing recorded wealth by over £4 trillion. The driving force behind rising house prices — and the UK’s growing wealth — has been rapidly escalating land prices.
For those who own property, this has provided enormous benefits....
Interview with Vlado Plaga in the German magazine FAIRCONOMY, September 2017.
VP: You are advocating a revival of classical economics. What did the classical economists understand by a free economy?
MH: They all defined a free economy as one that is free from land rent, free from unearned income. Many also said that a free economy had to be free from private banking. They advocated full taxation of economic rent. Today’s idea of free market economics is the diametric opposite. In an Orwellian doublethink language, a free market now means an economy free for rent extractors, free for predators to make money, and essentially free for financial and corporate crime.Good one.
Michael Hudson is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents. His most recent book is titled Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.
CHRIS HEDGES: Hi, I'm Chris Hedges. Welcome to Days of Revolt. Today in a two-part series we're going to be discussing a great Ponzi scheme that not only defines not only the U.S. but the global economy, how we got there, in the first segment, and secondly, where we're going. And with me to discuss this issue is the economist Michael Hudson, author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. A professor of economics who worked for many years on Wall Street, where you don’t succeed if you don’t grasp Marx's dictum that capitalism is about exploitation. And he is also, I should mention, the godson of Leon Trotsky.…Real News Network
The five largest landowners in America, all white, own more rural land than all of black America combined. This tiny group, who would fit comfortably in a mid-size sedan, own more than nine million acres while all of the African American population combined, over 40 million people, own just eight million acres. The recent report, “Who Owns the Land,” released by the United States Department of Agriculture breaks down the land ownership in the country exposing this massive disparity.…Inequality.org
I think that the thrust of my book, The Price of Inequality, and a lot of other work has been to question the margin of productivity theory, which is a theory that has been prevalent for 200 years. A lot of people have questioned it, but my work is a renewal of questioning. And I think that some of the very interesting work that Piketty and his associates have done is providing some empirical basis for doing it. Not only the example that I just gave that if you look at the people at the top, monopolists actually constrain output. People who make the most productive contributions, people who make lasers or transistors, or the inventor of the computer, DNA researchers, none of these are the top wealthiest people in the country. So if you look at the people who contributed the most, and the people who are there at the top, they’re not the same. That’s the second piece.
A very interesting study that Piketty and his associates did was on the effect of an increase in taxes on the top 1 percent. If you had the hypothesis that these were people who were working hard and contributing more, you might say, ok, that’s going to significantly slow down the economy. But if you say it’s rent-seeking, then you’re just capturing for the government some of the rents.INET
Paul Krugman is tinkering with a model which explains monopoly rents on products with ‘zero’ or at least very low production costs (pharmaceutical products, computer programs like Excel). But he does not yet mention that (A) electronic fiat money is the ultimate zero production costs product while (B) the seigniorage interest profits made by the banks which produce it are to quite some extent based upon ‘land’related loans. Think of a loan for house purchase, financed by freshly produced money and a 4% interest rate. This income often is, to the extent that it’s used to buy already existing land with a high location value or leads to an inflationary increase of house prices, an often overlooked rent income.
In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus. “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”(13)
Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith(14) and many others have pointed out, those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They “levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry.”(15) Land value tax recoups this toll.Monbiot.com
