The Tory Brexit squad just announced protecting landowner subsidies as an overriding Brexit priority!

Ten weeks after Brexit Theresa May's Brexit minister David Davis finally gave a speech to parliament to give details on his plan of action. His speech was widely derided as 15 minutes of pointless waffle because it contained far more sound bites, platitudes and vague aspirations than anything resembling a coherent strategy for leaving the EU without causing significant damage to the UK economy.

Jobs for the boys

His speech did contain a few interesting nuggets of information. One of them was that they have already built up an impressive 300 strong "jobs for the boys" force. It's not entirely certain what these hundreds of people have been doing all summer given the paucity of David Davies' speech, but I'm sure these wonderful unelected technocrats will do a great job of freeing us from the tyranny of the EU's evil army of unelected technocrats.

The austerity U-turn

When it comes to actual policy there really wasn't much to go on, but in the part where he spoke about maintaining economic stability there were a couple of interesting things. One of them is that the Tory Brexit squad have secured an agreement from the new chancellor Philip Hammond that structural and investment fund projects signed before Autumn statement would continue to be funded by the UK treasury after Brexit eventually goes ahead.

This is interesting because it's a 180° U-turn on the previous Tory position that austerity creates economic stability. For the last six years they endlessly chanted George Osborne's ridiculous austerity mantra that they have to ruthlessly slash spending on stuff like infrastructure projects, local government, emergency services and public sector wages in order to achieve economic stability. Now Davis is saying the precise opposite, that in order to achieve stability it's vital to not slash funding.

Whichever way you look at it it's an admission that they're wrong. Either Davis was wrong to seek assurances that agreed structural fund projects wouldn't be axed, or he's right that austerity at a time of economic instability is harmful (he is), which is proof that the last six years of Tory austerity has been needlessly destructive ideologically driven nonsense.

If austerity made any economic sense at all (it doesn't) then Davis and his Tory chums would have gleefully withdrawn funding from the structural fund investments. They didn't do it because they know, as they knew all along, that Osborne's austerity agenda was a socially and economically destructive con job.

Landowner subsidies

One of the only other bits of actual policy announcement in the speech was this bit of nonsense:

"Agriculture is a vital part of the economy, and the government will match the current level of annual payments that the sector receives through the direct payment scheme until 2020, providing certainty."

 Agriculture accounts of just 0.62% of the UK economy. It's obviously an important sector that employs several hundred thousands people, but it's utterly absurd that the Tories give landowners a special policy announcement when other sectors like manufacturing, science, education, health, retail, energy and transport get nothing at all to provide them a measure of "certainty" in the entire speech.

The idea that the EU direct payment scheme represents a subsidy for agriculture is a convenient fiction anyway. These payments are nothing more than taxpayer funded handouts to landowners. They come with no obligation to actually produce agricultural outputs at all. The more land you own the bigger the handout, that's just the way it works. Even landowners who leave their land barren and use it for nothing more than grouse shooting get piles of cash showered on them.

This direct payment scheme is just a way of using the tax system to extract wealth from those who have no large tracts of land to subsidise those who do.

It's just a method of further entrenching inequality by making the "have-nots" subsidise the haves, so no wonder the Tories are so fanatically in favour of it that they prioritise landowner subsidies so brazenly above blatantly much more important stuff like the manufacturing sector (no guarantees that they won't have to pay import and export tariffs on trade with the EU for example).

On the face of it it's extraordinary that the protection of such an unjust landowner subsidisation system is considered something that takes such priority over all of the various other sectors of the economy that didn't warrant any kind of reassurance in David Davis' speech, but then the landowner class are probably the most loyal Tory demographic of all so it's understandable if you look at it from the insular self-interested Tory perspective.

The Tories must have been inundated with calls from their wealthy landowner mates worrying about their taxpayer funded handouts coming to an end, so the Tory Brexit squad have decided to throw them a big juicy bone by promising that they'll still be getting their handouts come what may for the rest of us.

Just look at the fact that Paul Dacre (the editor of the rabidly anti-EU Daily Mail) has claimed an astonishing £460,000 in landowner subsidies for his country estates in Sussex and the Scottish Highlands since 2011. If he hadn't had guarantees from his Tory Brexiter chums that these vast handouts were going to continue, do you really think he would have pushed so strongly for Brexit?

The fact that the Tories see the placation of their land monopolist mates with vast taxpayer handouts as one of their absolutely core priorities in their Brexit "strategy" just goes to show how catastrophically unfit these people are to be negotiating on behalf of the British people.

That they've identified such a ridiculous thing as an overriding priority is compelling evidence that they're going to negotiate the whole thing on behalf of their financial backers (bankers, the landed gentry, corporate fat cats, tax-dodgers and private health corporations) and screw the consequences for the rest of us.

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What is ... Land Value Tax?

The idea of Land Value Tax (LVT) Land Value Taxation is a method of raising public revenue by means of charges on the value of land. LVT is widely regarded as a very efficient form of taxation, not least because it's pretty much impossible to avoid/evade.

Land monopolists
Throughout history one of the most commonly proposed solutions to the problem of land monopolists is forced redistribution, where the land is simply taken by force and redistributed to the community, but LVT advocates take a different approach. They propose that that wealthy landowners who monopolise land shouldn't have their land taken by force, but that they should pay a tax to the community.

LVT would act as an incentive for them to either put the land to productive use in order to cover the cost of the tax, or to transfer ownership of the land to someone else who would put the land to better use.

Advocates

The idea of taxing the value of land has been around for thousands of years. The Apastamba Dharmasutra is one of the oldest Hindu documents in existence and in its section on property and taxes it states that "If any person holding land does not exert himself and hence bears no produce, he shall, if rich, be made to pay what ought to have been produced", which is an expression of the view that tax should be applied to the potential value of the land, not to the actual produce of the land.

The most famous LVT advocate was the 19th Century American economic philosopher Henry George. George was clearly influenced by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who decried the inequalities caused by land monopolisation in the 18th Century:

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."  Rousseau

Other early LVT advocates include the physiocrats (most notably Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and François Quesnay) the British economists Adam Smith (probably the second most egregiously misrepresented economist in history behind Karl Marx) and David Ricardo and the British-born US revolutionary Thomas Paine. 

Modern advocates come from across the political spectrum. The Green Party have been long-term LVT advocates, the Corbyn-McDonnell Labour leadership are much more open to the prospect than any Labour leadership in decades. On the right, the free-market fanatic Milton Friedman advocated LVT saying "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land".

Benefits

There are many potential benefits to Land Value Tax. It would discourage rentierism and land speculation, improve land use, raise wages and eliminate the need for taxes on productive activity. One of the biggest benefits of all is that it's a tax that would be almost impossible to avoid/evade because it's simply not possible to move vast tracts of land to tax havens like the British Cayman Islands.

The economist Fred Foldvary states that  LVT encourages landowners to develop vacant/underused land or to sell it, and that it deters speculative land holding, dilapidated inner city areas return to productive use, reducing the pressure to build on undeveloped sites and so reducing urban sprawl.

One of the main benefits of LVT is that it would allow taxes on productive activity to be reduced or abolished. The idea of using a land tax to reduce or eliminate income and consumption taxes would clearly be to the benefit of millions of working people who own little or no land, but the wealthy landowner class obviously wouldn't like the idea at all.LVT is rightly regarded as one of the most efficient taxes imaginable because it doesn't deter productive activities by taxing them and because it would be almost impossible to avoid.

A fairer system

A tax system that targets the asset-rich rather than the hard-working, and that is pretty much impossible to avoid/evade would clearly reduce inequality and improve social mobility. People who work hard would be able to keep more of their income, while those who generate their wealth by idly monopolising land would have to pay tax to the rest of society for the privilege.

The current system of imposing taxes on income and consumption instead of land value clearly benefits those who derive most of their wealth from property and rent, and who have the financial means to pay tax advisers to hide their incomes in tax-havens.

Just look at the way the Grosvenor dynasty managed to avoid paying £3.6 billion in Inheritance Tax through the use of trust funds so that the young Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor could inherit a £9 billion property empire from his father.

Society is set up in a way in which the poor and ordinary have to pay taxes on their income, and tax on their consumption, and another load of tax if they're lucky enough to inherit some wealth, meanwhile the tiny super-rich minority repeatedly sidestep paying their share of tax.LVT would massively reduce the iniquity of the tax system. If you own land, you pay tax on it. It doesn't matter whether the landowners register themselves as a company in a tax haven or not; it doesn't matter if the land is owned through an elaborate network of off-shore trust funds; if they own land in the UK they need to cough up the tax. If they don't pay the tax, the land can be incrementally taken in lieu of payment and redistributed to people who will bother to pay the tax.

Resistance of the land-rich

Given the incredible power of the inherited wealth aristocracy in the UK, the prospects of a fair land tax system being introduced here look very slim indeed.

The British political class is absolutely riddled with landowning aristocrats, especially the ruling Tory Party and the unelected House of Lords. The prospect of a Tory government introducing LVT is absolutely laughable (Tory MPs have twice wrecked Labour Party efforts to introduce LVT, once in 1931 and again in 1951).

The prospect of getting LVT through the House of Lords is not quite as ludicrously unlikely as the Tories introducing LVT, but Britain's bloated and unelected upper chamber is utterly riddled with wealthy landowners who would obviously be inclined to protect their own self-interest by fighting tooth and nail to scupper any proposed LVT legislation.

There are clearly a great number of unelected Lords who would prefer to see the burden of taxation put onto workers and productive businesses instead of onto their property empires.

The mainstream media is also heavily dominated by billionaire tax-dodgers with vast property portfolios. Any politician proposing LVT would have to expect  a vicious propaganda war to be waged against them by the likes of Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star).

Landowner subsidies

The introduction of a Land Value Tax would have loads of social and economic benefits, but it has been fiercely resisted by the powerful landowner class because they know that they'd be unable to avoid paying it. In fact the privileged European landowner class have resisted Land Value Tax so successfully that they've actually managed to establish for themselves a system of taxpayer funded Landowner subsidies!

In the past farmers received subsidies for their produce, which is problematic in its own way, but kind of makes sense. Nowadays there is no necessity for them to actually produce anything at all, the EU pays out vast subsidies to landowners simply for owning the land.

The UK electorate has voted to leave the EU, but thanks to the extraordinarily reckless lack of a government contingency plan for Brexit and the interminable foot-dragging over Article 50 we're still in it.

When the Tory government does eventually get around to developing an actual plan of action and then leaving, they've already made it clear that the taxpayer funded handouts to landowners are going to continue if not increase. It would be crazy to expect anything different from a political party that counts inherited wealth aristocrats and farmers as two of its most loyal demographics.

Instead of having a fair tax system based on taxing wealth, we've got a system based on taxing consumption and labour in order to actually hand out subsidies to idle land monopolists!

Henry George's Land Value Tax is a great idea because it taxes the super-rich on wealth that they simply cannot hide, but the European landowner class are so powerful that they've not only successfully resisted Land Value Tax, they've actually had politicians devise a polar opposite system to further entrench their privilege by diverting the money raised from taxes on consumption and labour into lucrative subsidies to be showered on wealthy landowners whether they put their land to productive use or not!

LVT and Basic income

The concepts of Land Value Tax and Basic Income often go together. In 1797 Thomas Paine wrote that every person should be entitled to a basic subsistence income funded by a tax on land "as a compensation in part for the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property".

The majority of modern-day Basic Income advocates suggest that it should be funded through some form of Land Value tax.

If you want to know more about Basic Income check out the following articles:

• An introduction to Basic Income (simple)

• Basic Income vs the current UK welfare system (a little bit complicated)

• A Basic Income Labour Market analysis (a bit more complicated)

Progressive politics

Any political party with a genuine interest in the development of a fair and efficient tax system should at least consider the benefits of LVT.

The benefits would go much further than just making sure that the wealthiest in society actually pay tax, it would also significantly reduce the problem of land speculators hoarding land and inflating property prices, and it would drive the economy by encouraging people to put land to good use, and by removing taxes on genuinely productive activities.

The first step towards a fairer system is the abolition of the ludicrous system of taxpayer funded subsidies for land monopolists, and the second step it to set about reducing taxes on productive activities and their replacement with LVT.

As far as I'm concerned, any political party that supports landowner subsidies and rules out LVT cannot possibly be considered progressive. If any political organisation insists that it is the responsibility of the landless to subsidise the land monopolists, rather than the responsibility of landowners to compensate society for monopolising the land, there's absolutely no way they can be considered progressive.

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Universal Basic Income from a libertarian perspective - A labour market analysis

In this article I'm going to consider Universal Basic Income (UBI) from a libertarian perspective, focusing mainly on analysis of the labour market, rather than the much more common libertarian "small state" argument in favour of UBI.

The crux of the article

The current labour market is terribly unfree as it is because it relies on coercion, workfare, sanctions, draconian anti-labour legislation etc.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would would create a much freer labour market (no more threat of destitution, sanctions or forced labour schemes, and much freer labour contracts between employers and employees), but this increased freedom for the majority would come at the expense of necessary measures in order to control inflation (which would rapidly destroy the project if left unchecked). 

The reduction in aggression against the majority of workers would outweigh the infringements on the current rights that rentiers have to exploit access to basic commodities in order to extract profit for themselves (which it can be argued is another form of aggression against the majority anyway).

What is libertarianism?

Libertarianism covers a wide range of political stances, from
left-libertarianism through to anarcho-capitalism. The thing they
have in common is that they promote freedom (although in
completely different ways).

Many people are under the mistaken impression that the word "libertarian" refers exclusively to an extreme form of US free market fundamentalism associated with Ayn Rand, the Tea Party and the like. However the right-wing fringe in the US appropriated the word for their own use with little regard to the other inherent meanings it had before.

The origins of libertarianism can be traced to the 18th and 19th Century anarchist and and socialist movements in Europe, however it was quickly embraced and integrated into laissez-faire capitalist theory too.

One of the most famous left-libertarians was the American Henry George (1839-1897), who opposed rentierism, and argued in favour of Land Value Tax. Many Georgists have argued that the proceeds from Land Value Tax should be used to fund a citizens income, or Universal Basic Income.

Left-Libertarianism is not as famous as its rabid Ayn Rand inspired American cousin, but it is an increasingly popular political stance, and one which I personally embrace.

What is Universal Basic Income
[Main article]

If you're not fully versed on what Universal Basic Income (UBI) is, I suggest that you read my introductory article before coming back to finish this one. If you haven't got time for that, or you are reasonably clued up about what UBI is, I'll just provide a short summary.

UBI is an unconditional payment that is made to every qualifying individual within an economy. There is no means testing at all, other than determination that the individual is eligible (a citizen in the economy for example). Ideally the UBI is set at a rate which is sufficient to ensure that all recipients have access to basic human necessities (a home, sufficient food and water, basic energy needs ...).

This concept is generally appealing to libertarians on a basic level because it dispenses with almost all forms of state means testing, meaning a smaller, and less obtrusive state. In this article I'm not going to focus on this compelling "smaller state" argument for UBI, in favour of considering the libertarian case for UBI from a labour market perspective.

What makes the current labour market so unfree?
[Main article]

Labour is a fundamentally important factor in any economy. Orthodox economic theories tends to treat labour as if it is just some other kind of basic commodity, however, if it is to be referred to as a commodity at all, it must be recognised as a very special and distinct form of commodity, one that can be created at will, and which takes myriad potential forms.

The neoclassical orthodoxy fails to treat the labour market as utterly different to other commodities markets and it also fails to recognise the unequal nature of the market in labour, where the employer at a huge advantage over the employee. There are innumerable factors that put the buyer at an advantage of the seller in the labour market, but perhaps the most significant is the creation of false abundance via political policies aimed at retaining a constant pool of unemployment, the "reserve army of unemployment" as Marx defined it in the 19th century, or the "price worth paying" as it was described by former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991.

In 1918 Bertrand Russell argued against this inequality in the labour market, proposing a kind of basic income so "the dread of unemployment and loss of livelihood will no longer haunt men like a nightmare".

The constant threat of destitution is a powerful means by which employers can drive down wages and working conditions, putting them at an unfair price advantage over the worker. If the scale of unemployment has been brought about via deliberate economic policies based on the equilibrium rate of unemployment, this is a clear case of the state trampling all over the libertarian non-aggression principle. If government policies result in your labour being coerced from you at a lower rate than you would be willing to sell it, solely because you fear destitution if you don't work for low wages, you're suffering aggression at the hands of the state.
 
The spectre of unemployment and impoverishment created by economic policies aimed at maintaining "extra capacity" in the labour market is not the only current example of aggressive coercion in the labour market.

Workfare blatantly violates the libertarian non-aggression principle
[Main article]

One of the starkest examples of a labour policy which violate the libertarian non-aggression principle is the kind of mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed collectively termed "Workfare".

These schemes coerce the unemployed, under threat of absolute destitution, into giving up their labour for free, often to highly profitable corporations.

It's bad enough that the state uses the threat of destitution (via welfare sanctions) to undermine the aggregate value of labour, but that ministers of the government openly declare that they believe that the state has "a right" to extract the labour of the individual for no wage at all, demonstrates an extremely illiberal attitude towards the labour rights of the individual.

These mandatory unpaid "Workfare" labour schemes demonstrate beyond doubt that the ministers involved in administering these schemes believe that the labour of the individual actually belongs to the state.
If your government acts as if it believes that your labour is a commodity which belongs to the state, and which can be extracted and distributed for free to favoured corporations, the labour market isn't just unfree, it is grotesquely authoritarian.
 
How would UBI make the labour market freer?

If every individual received an unconditional basic income sufficient to meet their fundamental human needs (housing, food and water, energy, health care ...) the threat of destitution would cease to necessitate people into accepting wages and working conditions they deem unfair.

An unconditional basic income would also render totally unworkable the draconian regime of "Workfare" labour extraction schemes enforced via draconian welfare sanctions regimes. If the individual has a right to an unconditional subsistence income, the state loses the power to coerce and intimidate the individual into giving up their labour for free with threats of destitution, starvation and homelessness.

Even if we accept the wrong-headed idea that labour is a basic commodity with a defined value (the national minimum wage for example), we have to accept that coerced unpaid labour represents theft, and a clear violation of the libertarian non-aggression principle. Universal Basic Income would render this form of theft by the state totally unworkable, because the state would have no right to revoke the unconditional incomes of those that won't comply with their unpaid labour extraction schemes.

How a freer labour market could benefit society and the economy

I've explained a how UBI could benefit society and the economy in the primer article on the subject, so I'll try to be concise here.

The free labour market that UBI would create if administered correctly, would benefit society by alleviating extreme poverty, which would lead to a fall in poverty related social problems such as crime and poverty related ill-health.

Another benefit to society would be that the existence of UBI would push up the cost of employing people to do undesirable jobs (disgusting, dangerous or debilitating work), meaning that in turn there would be much greater financial incentives for companies to invest in technology to automate such work. The development of technology to eliminate undesirable jobs would benefit society and the economy (fewer people working in undesirable jobs, greater demand for high-tech solutions).

UBI trials have shown that people generally don't stop working and laze about once their basic necessities are provided, in fact UBI works as an economic stimulus, because people have more time to invest in starting their own businesses, and the public has more money to spend on consumption. The only demographics to substantially reduce the hours they work are mothers with young children and young people in education, it is arguable that these reductions are actually beneficial in socio-economic terms.

Why is controlling inflation so important?

Controlling price inflation would be absolutely crucial to the success of any Universal Basic Income project because without measures to stop the inflation of basic necessities (rent, utilities, food ...) the gains that UBI would provide would soon be eroded away as price rises diminish the value of the basic income payment so that it is no longer sufficient to cover the basic costs of subsistence.

If inflation is allowed to run rampant, the benefits of Universal Basic Income would soon be transferred from the ordinary citizen that receives it, to the rentiers that take advantage by hiking the prices they charge for the provision of basic commodities and services.

Controlling Rentierism

If the rentiers are allowed free rein to profiteer from basic income provision, they will simply inflate their prices in order to soak up the entire value of basic income to cover the cost of some necessity of life (rent, transport, childcare, energy consumption). If the parasitic behaviour of rentiers is not controlled, all of the socio-economic benefits would soon be siphoned off as into the bank accounts of the most ruthlessly self-interested rent seekers. Essentially Universal Basic Income would turn into a government subsidisation scheme for the most ruthlessly self-interested, which is precisely the kind of system we have now, which is one of the main reasons people have been proposing the introduction of UBI in the first place.

The only practical way to stop this kind of rent seeking behaviour from destroying UBI would be to introduce some form of market regulation to prevent landlords, utilities companies, childcare providers and the like from massively inflating their prices in order to soak up the economic benefit of UBI for themselves.

There's no such thing as a perfectly free-market economy

Anyone that believes that there is such a thing as a perfectly free market is living in the same cloud-cuckoo land as those that believe a totally state controlled economy is a possibility.

What is up for debate is how more market freedom can be created. The orthodox neoliberal would argue that greater market freedom is produced through deregulation, but the huge growth in inequality, the ever increasing size of economic crises and the rise of vast "too big to fail" oligopolies since the neoliberal craze of privatisation and deregulation became the economic orthodoxy in 1980s, suggests that they are wrong. Deregulation and privatisation have increased the freedoms of corporations and the super-rich at the expense of the majority, who have seen their share of national incomes eroded away dramatically since the late 1970s despite rising productivity.

Others might argue that the best way to stimulate market freedom is through the creation of a "fair market", through carefully planned market regulation. Rules to prevent (and properly punish) anti-competitive practices such as price rigging, formation of oligopolies, monopolies and cartels, financial doping, insider trading, political patronage, front running, information asymmetry, dividing territories, corruption and outright fraud, would create a freer and safer market for individuals and small businesses, which would increase competition and efficiency, but at the cost of the freedoms of those that currently profit from the use of anti-competitive practices.

The same kind of debate can be had over the introduction of rules (rent caps, inflation controls on basic commodities and services ... ) to prevent the rentier class form extracting the benefit of Universal Basic Income for themselves. The infringement of their "right" to gouge as much profit as possible out of basic commodities and services, would have to be weighed against the greater economic freedoms afforded to the majority.

Essentially it boils down to the question of which is the most important; freeing up the currently unfree labour market or the continuation of free market in the provision of fundamental commodities and services?

Providing more freedom in which of these markets would create the biggest increase in aggregate freedom, and which would be most compliant with the libertarian non-aggression principle? In my view the answer is obvious. The freedom of the majority outweighs the freedom of the minority.

Other libertarian arguments for UBI aside from the labour market analysis

Before I conclude I'd like to state that this labour market analysis  is far from the only libertarian argument for the introduction of Universal Basic Income.

Other arguments include the most common "small state" argument because universal welfare would reduce the size of the state by reducing the number of functions of the state. Another argument can be made that since there would be no means testing, UBI would provide greater freedom from intrusion by the state into the private lives of the individual.

Perhaps the most compelling libertarian argument in favour of Universal Basic Income is that perhaps freedom from destitution in itself is the most important liberty, because without freedom from destitution the individual is often left facing either the suffering of destitution, or the suffering of wage slavery.

Conclusion

Labour is a fundamental element of any economy (be it capitalist, state socialist or anywhere in between). and an unfree market in labour is fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.

If the deliberate economic policies of the political establishment in your country mean that your labour can be coerced from you at a lower rate than you would be willing to sell, simply because of the threat of absolute destitution, this is clearly an act of aggression on the part of the establishment.

If your government acts as if it believes that your labour is a commodity which actually belongs to the state, and can be extracted from you for no recompense at all, this is an even more vile example of state aggression.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would put an end to both of these forms of labour market aggression, but in order for it to work measures to prevent rentiers from profiteering by inflating the prices they charge for basic human necessities would need to be introduced. Thus the debate is not over whether UBI is compatible with libertarianism (it clearly is) but whether the benefits from the greater freedoms in the labour market would outweigh the necessary losses in freedom of rentiers to profiteer from the provision of basic human needs, which would be necessary in order to prevent the whole project collapsing into inflationary chaos.

In my view the freedoms of the majority should outweigh the freedoms of the minority, and in any case, the current freedom to profiteer from the provision of basic human necessities that the rentier class enjoy can actually be viewed as a form of aggression in its own right. Why should the profits of the minority take precedence over the basic human needs of the majority?

 

Read more articles in the "What is...." series

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