What Happened To Japan

Karl FitzgeraldInternationalLeave a Comment

Investor’s Business Daily Feb 27, 1998 reports:

“Asia’s largest economy is in trouble

A long-awaited stimulus package announced last Friday (Feb 20) showed once again why Japan’s model of government-business collusion cannot thrive in a free market.

The package did not cut taxes or try to ease the burden of regulations on the Japanese. Instead, the govt proposes letting Japanese financial institutions package bad loans and sell them as securities. The govt might then buy them up in a bid to stimulate the economy…

A January estimate pegged the amount of bad loans at Japanese banks as worth about 15% of GDP…”

The Danish Experience

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by Knud Tholstrup, University of Bergen 1974

Sensational practical experience in taxation of land values was gained in Denmark in the years 1957-60 when the Danish Justice Party, promulgating land value taxation, free trade and equal rights, formed a so-called ‘land tax’ government, together with the Social Democrats (Labour) and the Radicals (Liberals). The three parties made an agreement based on the following:

1. Collection of land rent
2. Liberalisation of trade: including closing the Department of Supply and Import Control
3. A tax freeze

Although the Justice Party was the only member of the triumvirate of parties forming government to have agitated and worked for the introduction of land value taxation, the election programs of all three parties did include a land tax on the growth in land values.

Answers for Indonesia

Karl FitzgeraldInternational1 Comment

by Bryan Kavanagh, Director, Land Values Research Group

President Suharto has been poorly counseled by the International Monetary Fund. Its economic prescriptions are pointless and wrong. He needs to take independent economic action if he is to avoid the social chaos erupting out of Indonesia’s financial turmoil. He could do worse than immerse himself in the history of his own ‘Spice Islands’, the wealth of which centuries ago attracted the Portuguese and the Dutch to the great chain stretching between Malaya and New Guinea.

The Indonesian financial crisis is the result of a phenomenal land boom that was a re-run of the West’s late-1980s boom period. It is little remembered that a very similar financial collapse was experienced by the ‘Dutch East Indies’ in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and that an amazing Englishman employed a successful technique to overcome it.

The Silence of The Historians

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FWG Foat, MA, DLit


There is a Secret of History. The mot de l’enigme is Land. The great historians of the rank, for instance, of Mommsen, say the word, but then pass on, as though in haste to leave a dangerous ground. Lesser historians shun the mention of it altogether, or mention it in faltering accents. Time, with its effacement of old meanings, helps this obscurantism and oblivion falls upon the theme.

What is the cause of this conspiracy of silence? The answer is again in one word, landlordism. Historians are proteges of those whose interest lies in keeping dark concerning land. Now a protege must not discuss what patrons do not wish to mention. But that would come to writing nothing of man’s greatest struggles, longest wars, and bitterest distress. “Well, then, let the historians write of wars, political struggles, and distress in social life. Let them write freely of the things that happened, and the suffering endured. But let them never mention land and the ownership of land as being the ultimate causes of these happenings. They can write out the story, showing their knowledge of the facts; and if they are pressed for explanations they can point to intermediate collateral causes: man’s natural pugnacity, notions of honour, foolish mistakes, wild aspirations towards political freedom, and the like. That will satisfy the few inquiring minds, and the rest will never question. Only no mention of the land and the landlords!”

The Corruption of Economics

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by Mason Gaffney, Professor of Economics, University of California, Riverside

The following is the introduction to Professor Gaffney’s paper Neo-classical Economics as a Strategem against Henry George, 5 July 1994.

The paper formed the basis of a book: The Corruption of Economics, Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd, London, 1994.

Introduction: The Power of Neo-classical Economics

Neoclassical economics is the idiom of most economic discourse today. It is the paradigm that bends the twigs of young minds. Then it confines the fluorescence of older ones, like chicken-wire shaping a topiary. It took form about a hundred years ago, when Henry George and his reform proposals were a clear and present political danger and challenge to the landed and intellectual establishments of the world. Few people realize to what a degree the founders of Neoclassical economics changed the discipline for the express purpose of deflecting George, discomfiting his followers, and frustrating future students seeking to follow his arguments. The stratagem was semantic: to destroy the very words in which he expressed himself. Simon Patten expounded it succinctly. “Nothing pleases a … single taxer better than … to use the well-known economic theories … [therefore] economic doctrine must be recast” (Patten 1908, p.219; Collier, 1979, p.270).