The Medical Treatment of Land Price:
A Corrective Measure
Bryan Kavanagh
[16 August, 2012]
Land price has repetitively blighted the body economic with its
poison.
When the price of land reaches a critical level the body will become
comatose.
At such a crisis, feeding the body intravenously with credit may
alleviate pain for a short period but because the vital organs are
already badly infected by an excess of credit, the patient cannot be
expected to resuscitate in the longer term.
An alternative treatment proffered on occasions has been to deny
nutrients to the body in an effort to deal with the superfluous credit
in the cells. This starvation technique, sometimes known by palliative
economics experts as the taking of "austerity measures", has
been found to be akin to strangulation and is no longer recommended.
The method has been banned in a number of countries.
Attempts to employ a combination of the intravenous "credit drip"
and the "starvation/strangulation of labour and capital"
methods have also proved ineffectual in treating the land price threat
which has currently achieved pandemic proportions.
The pathology of the land price coma is often misdiagnosed, and in
these circumstances the body will slowly deteriorate into black death.
Despite notable exceptions in the economics profession who appear to
have both diagnosed the condition and promoted an effective
remedy-included amongst which are US professors Mason Gaffney, Michael
Hudson and Fred Foldvary-the profession continues to promote various
forms of the "credit" drip or "austerity" as a
cure for the fatal form of land price illness.
The latter eminent people and their support laboratories have
identified the land price virus to stem primarily from two sources,
namely, tax regimes which actively peddle it to unsuspecting users,
and the banking system which shamelessly makes billions of dollars out
of funding it under the mask of ignorance about the precise nature of
the disease.
It is now widely believed elected representatives are in the thrall
of the economic quacks who remain numerous in the profession, those
persons tied to fatally poisoned taxation and banking mediums. Most
politicians appear inalert to the salutary interventions of the
aforementioned so-called 'heterodox' economists and their growing
cohort, whilst others are actually complicit in aiding and abetting
the pushers - the 'Mr Bigs' - of the land price disease. [Their
oft-heard claims are "Increasing land price is good for you!"
"Why not let this innocent culture flourish?"]
The relatively small band of economists, sometimes known as "Georgists",
has long promoted the taxation of land price and the euthanasia of all
other taxation, as the only effective means of curbing deathly
outbreaks in land price, strongly arguing a case for it to be the
ultimate cure for the body economic.
We must trust the response of politics and the economics profession
will be to accept this proven remedy.
Without this prescription, the prognosis is terminal.
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