BLOG: Commentary

  In his paper American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990 (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol 14, Number 1) John Joseph Wallis demonstrates that US government finance experienced three separate phases:- Asset Finance Phase 1790 to 1842, where...

by Jesse Hermans In an AFR op-ed this week , the Federal Member for Banks, David Coleman asks, “What Australian really wants lower house prices?” Australian’s are obsessed with housing, he writes. Everyone is piling into bricks and mortar. The value of property is...

  All the great social philosophers have held that land must be rented, not sold, if communities aren’t to implode. One of them put it into a formula, saying that if we were to capture the social surplus, then labour and profits will receive their full and...

  Turns out she is! She pays the rent .... In 2015 the Crown Estate delivered a record £328.8 million to the Exchequer from its thirty wind farms and central London assets. This was up 8.1% on the previous year, taking the total the Estate has returned to the...

Cross-posted from Alan Kohler's The Constant Investor, the 2nd time he has written about Georgism in recent years. Saturday was the 178th birthday of Henry George, who, in 19th century America, worried about inequality and puzzled over why technology was not...

Economists are very strange people.  Some of them say private debt doesn’t matter much, because banks simply act as intermediaries between people in the community who lend to each other, so that any private debt cancels out.  More realistically, other economists say...

What's the problem? Class struggle? Population? Money? Debt? Banks? Something else? ‘Something else’ is more important than each of the others, but we always say it’s “too hard and will never happen!” And so we continue to plod along in an economic slough of despond,...