photo credit: derekkeats Mark Braund Guardian UK The South African government’s recent decision to abandon its Expropriation Bill, aimed at addressing the painfully slow pace of land reform, prompts the question: how can the country move towards a more equitable distribution of land and natural resources 14 years after the end of apartheid? Given the catastrophe in Zimbabwe following Mugabe’s … Read More
Bailing out the Bubble’s Enablers
photo credit: laurenatclemson Michael Hudson July 14, 2008 I am writing this article about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while sitting in the Queens Botanical Garden. This was not my plan today. The central air conditioning in my apartment broke down six weeks ago, and still has not been fixed. (It’s a nice condominium building, but accidents happen.) It is … Read More
Toronto Collects Economic Rent to Finance Infrastructure
Frank de Jong, Green Part of Ontario Leader Frank toured Australia this time last year for the True Cost Economics Forum. He wrote this piece in lieu of exciting developments in Canada. For the first time to my knowledge, Toronto will be collecting economic rent to pay for infrastructure — in this case to redevelop a section of a busy … Read More
Tax Scams & Banking in Russia
INSITE: Bulletin of the Land Policy Council
Editor: Fred Harrison, April 1996, Vol 2 (3)
Kill the Tax Scams and Create Jobs
IT’ S ENOUGH to make Marx turn in his grave! His arch champion, the Soviet Union, capitulated to the capitalists in 1991 just as the market economies crashed into their most severe crisis since the 1930s.
Government ministers from the seven richest nations on earth burdened with 24m jobless people, double the number since the spirit of Thatcher/Reagan was unleashed in 1979 – met in Lille on April 2 to agonise about what to do. Global unemployment is running at 700m people, according to the International Labour Organisation, but governments are bereft of ideas about what to do to liberate the labour market.
The Middle Class Must Not Fail Or All Is Lost
TAYLOR CALDWELL
THE MIDDLE CLASS
With the rise of the Industrial Civilization in the world about two hundred years ago, there also arose a social body which we know as the middle class. Before that, most of the world suffered under a feudal system in which the people were truly slaves of their governments in all things. There was no strong buffer between them and their despotic rulers, no assurance of freedom to pursue commerce and to live decently, to keep the fruits of their labor and hold the paying of tribute at a minimum. The middle class made the dream of liberty a possibility, set limits on the government, fought for its constitutions, removed much of governmental privilege and tyranny, demanded that rulers obey the just laws as closely as the people, and enforced a general civic morality.