Tax is the most powerful policy lever: tax natural monopolies not work and production. Policy is pointless without a body politic.
UK
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Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Incredible to have over a million young people unemployed, the worst graduate market in decades, AI hitting hiring across the board and,
- continue the graduate visa, which allows hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates to essentially work in any job for up-to 3 years
- increase employer national insurance and the minimum wage, slowing hiring to a crawl and causing many businesses to fold or offshore
- be on the precipice of mass boriswave settlement, which would allow hundreds of thousands of migrants to take up any position without sponsorship
- consider allowing tens of thousands of young EU nationals into the country each year, when EU unemployment remains high
Just the worst set of policy decisions you could implement for current conditions.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Landlords on X are triggered as fk at the moment.
Some of them seem to believe they are responsible for creating the land. Some even believe they are capitalists. They all seem to believe they are doing everyone they extract rent from a favour. I’ve yet to hear one admit their enrichment is derived from the hard work of others.
Landlords 🤦♂️
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Land taxes are legitimate for a state to collect.
The state defends the borders with a military.
The state operates the courts that protect land titles.
Access to any other public services depends on physical location (e.g. good school catchment areas).
The owners of land benefit from the above list in direct proportion to the value of their land.
This is a far more reasonable tax system than an arbitrary amount of a mans wage, or an arbitrary amount of a businesses profit.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
"Tax wealth" and "tax the rich" are ideal mantras for enabling "the rich" to escape paying for what they receive from the public sector. It should be: "Collect the revenue from UNEARNED wealth". That would free-up earned wealth to continue adding value...
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
The houses aren't getting more expensive. The land is. Ignoring the unique nature of land's significance within the economy is what causes periodic industrial depressions. But it's not like Henry George didn't explain this in detail 150 years ago.
🇨🇦 Canada's Real Estate Bubble: This Time Is NOT Different.
As I've said many times, I've studied and documented financial bubbles throughout history.
Canada's real estate bubble is a classic example of speculative excess, fueled by decades of expanding credit, falling interest rates, and the belief that property prices could rise indefinitely.
Nothing particularly different about it except, apparently, to Canadians.
I've updated my Investor Psychology Bubble Cycle model to illustrate where Canadian housing stands today: between denial and fear.
The 2022 peak is behind us.
The credit cycle has turned.
Valuations remain extreme.
Demographics are deteriorating.
History suggests the most painful phase of a bubble often arrives AFTER the initial decline, when confidence finally gives way to forced selling and deleveraging.
Economic Winter doesn't ask investors whether they believe in cycles.
And to those who insist, “It's different this time”
May the gods of credit spare you from the consequences of ignoring history.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Back in 2010, the minimum wage was £12,064 and the 'higher earner' band started at £43,875.
You only paid 40% tax once you were earning 3.6x the minimum wage.
There was clear incentive to progress, learn and aspire for more.
As things stand, you now start paying 40% tax once you earn £50,270 which is just 1.83x the minimum wage.
If it was the same multiple as 2010, the 'higher earning' band would be £98,841 and everyone below this amount would be paying 20%.
Someone on £98,841 is effectively losing out on £9714.20 net per year if the bandings had simply moved in line with previous multiples relative to minimum wage.
This is one of the reasons why the middle class is being eroded and why there's a cost of living crisis in the UK.
An increase to £13.20p/h equates to a minimum wage of £27,456, based on a 40 hour week.
Once you factor in employers NI and basic pension contributions, the MINIMUM cost to hire a 21 year old for a company would be £31,461.
This is before you factor in any overarching business costs like office space, laptops, phone, software, training, support staff, vehicles etc.
This is going to be devastating to SME's who cant put together a simple 12 month budget without the goalposts being moved & their margins squeezed.
It'll also be catastrophic to youngsters opportunities because businesses will simply not be able to afford to hire them.
What's also incredible is that anything above £50,270 is seen as 'high earnings' in the UK and is taxed at 40%!
We are governed by financially and economically illiterate morons.
This will not end well.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
A land value tax doesn't force development. What it does is give equal access to land to all, which means that it functionally opens the land to be developed by those who want to do so, unencumbered by a landowner/landlord demanding tribute and unhindered by taxes on production.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
One of the Founding Fathers of America, Thomas Paine, believed citizens should be paid dividends from the rent of land, which noone created.
Today, Alaska sends cheques to everyone from their natural resources. And many believe we shouldn't tax hard work, but land instead.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Monopolies in all sectors should be made to serve the public benefit. Henry George said its not labor vs capital its labor vs monopoly
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
It's been 5 years. Here's my retrospective on this whole Land Value Tax thing, ever since I wrote that first book review that hijacked my entire life.
astralcodexten.com/p/does-ge…
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Civilization literally cannot survive this degree of contractor rentseeking. Three years and a quarter-BILLION pounds for this construction is absolutely psychotic, a nation that can no longer build can only crumble.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
tying britain's wealth to property was one of the biggest mistakes we made. stop building homes and of course prices inflate. then we called the inflation "wealth" and spent 30 years protecting it.
so now we've got pensioners sitting in £600k semis on £12k a year, and 30 year olds on £80k who can't buy one. everyone's rich on paper and nobody's got any money.
the house you live in should never have been your primary investment asset. it's now people's inheritance, pension, wealth. but it was the easiest way for a country to feel rich without building anything.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
“I am aware of the academic economist’s reaction to any land question. Nevertheless, Henry George clearly enough showed us the simple basis of poverty in human society. And some organic solution of this land problem is not only needed, it is imperative.
What hope for stimulating a great architecture while land holds the improvements instead of the improvements holding the land? For an organic economic structure this is wrong end around, and all architecture is only for the landlord.” — architect Frank Lloyd Wright
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Rent seeking is more alive today than ever making Georgism more necessary than ever. Georgism is the complete opposite of monopoly rent seeking and its time we bring it back. This transcends capitalism and socialism
What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock operate less like investors and more like modern feudal landlords.
They buy essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities, often using vast amounts of borrowed money and paying prices that ordinary market participants cannot match.
Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is pushed onto the acquired company itself.
The result is simple: the public start paying.
Consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and declining service quality.
The infrastructure becomes a real cash-extraction machine.
Profits flow upward to the shareholders and executives, while the financial burden flows downward to ordinary households.
When the model inevitably breaks down, the consequences are socialised. Communities are left with crumbling infrastructure, polluted rivers, and failing services.
Thames Water in the United Kingdom with a £14 billion debt mountain and repeated sewage scandals is a stark example of what happens when financial engineering takes precedence over public stewardship.
The executives who loaded the company with debt have already collected their bonuses.
The investors have already taken their returns.
And when the system finally reaches breaking point, taxpayers are expected to pick up the bill.
🔴Privatise the gains.
🔴Socialise the losses.
That is the business model......
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Today (Sept. 2) is the 187th anniversary of the birth of the economist and social philosopher Henry George.
To mark it, I’m reposting this thread which shows just how famous and influential this “quintessential forgotten man” once was.
🧵2/16
“As every historian of economic thought knows,” writes Mark Blaug, distinguished historian of economic thought,
“the most widely read book on economics in the nineteenth century was not … John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy nor Karl Marx’s Das Kapital but Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879). Even allowing for the growth of population over the last century, it may well be the greatest economics best-seller of all times. Certainly, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was George who was the talking point of all the debates among fiery young intellectuals.”
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Thirty years of portraying rising house prices as a good news story must rank among the most protracted misinformation campaigns ever conducted - you don't actually need conspiracy theories when the media does it without anyone else's bidding.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
The very notion of asking the descendants of the white working class who were worked to death in mines, mills and factories for a subsistence existence to pay slavery reparations is fucking disgusting.
Thomas Hall 🔰 retweeted
Good morning PAYE PIGS, Happy Wednesday!
Part II on British Husbandry, as promised.
Monday I asked whether you voted for the rot.
Today: did you vote to sell any of this?
- 395 tonnes of gold at $276 an ounce
- DeepMind for £400m
- ARM for £24.3bn
- Cobham. Meggitt. Ultra Electronics
- Water, ports, the largest airport
Every deal was legal. Every auction was properly run. Every board was doing its fiduciary duty. Every receipt was banked.
Except on the gold, where we announced the sale before we held it. Told the market the tonnage and the timetable in a written parliamentary answer, then watched the price fall 10% before the first auction.
And not one of these items appears anywhere as a reduction in the national estate, because there is no such account.
A sale of stock records as income in the year it happens, and as a reduction in the estate every year afterwards.
The Treasury has never kept the second half of that ledger.
On DeepMind: it sold for £400m in 2014. Its two closest peers are currently marked at $852bn and $965bn. Make of that what you will.
So here is the rule. Flow is welcome. Stock is not for sale.
Foreign money that builds new capacity, a reactor, a fab, a port that didn't exist before, adds to the estate and it doesn't matter a jot whose money it is.
Buying up what already exists is a different transaction entirely. A pipe has no competitor. Its owner isn't a market participant, it's a private tax authority.
You were never asked about any of it. You should be.
The Knot: anglofuturismcapitallp.subst…
Good morning PAYE PIGS and Happy Monday!
You work hard, you pay for a lot, and you have increasingly less each month as a result of 30 years of compounding bad policy - but did you vote for it - the noticeable and visceral enshittification all around you?
Did you, for instance, vote for any of this...?
- HMRC tax gap: £32.8bn → £59.2bn
- Tax evasion prosecutions: 691 → 300
- Benefit fraud prosecutions: 5,117 → 639
- Weapon possession charge rate: 54% → 31%
Remember: possession is the offence where you already know who did it, as they're holding the weapon. It's not hard.
No law was repealed here. No minister announced it as policy. The statute book is untouched. Execution just… slowed down and new laws got ushered in by well meaning but incompetent people of a certain political persusasion.
This is not random failure. It is entirely systemic. It is the system working as intended, it is what happens when a country stops practising 'Husbandry' - the long horizon that treats 'The Estate' as something you maintain for people who aren’t born yet.
Britain is not broke. Britain is badly allocated.
The full argument is here, part 1 of 2 (2nd half released on Weds):
anglofuturismcapitallp.subst…