Four Horsemen Page #10

on the free lunch of land value

and on what John Stewart Mill called

the unearned increment

The income that landlords made

in their sleep as he put it.

Who made oil in the ground? Coal or iron ore?

These are things which are not

the product of human effort

Of course extracting them is,

but their existence is not

and so the rents from natural resources

are a wonderful source of taxation

nobody made them so,

and when you do tax them,

you cause all of us to use them more efficiently

so this seems like to be an excellent thing to tax

Rather than labour and capital

If the governments used this land site value

that is supplied by nature,

not by human labour.

not by a personal enterprise

then the government would not have to tax

wages in the form of income tax

it wouldn't have to imply sales tax

that add to the price of doing bussiness

and it wouldn't have to add the

proliferation of business taxes

This tax system advocated by all of

the classical economists

would begin to address global poverty

as it would allow citicens in developing countries

to keep their resource wealth

In developed countries it would begin to address

our housing and debt crisis

and unleash the kind of entrepeneurship

needed to refloat our economies

perhaps we should also resurrect

another timeless principle for workers

that was promoted during the industrial revolution

The idea that people who work in a plant

ought to own it

is just deeply built in to working class culture

so right around here at the early industrial revolution

in the late 19'th century the working people

simply took for granted

that yes of course the workers

should own the mills in which they work

anything else is an

attack on their fundamental rights as free citizens

They also took for granted

that wage labour is hardly different from slavery

it's different only because it's temporary

then you can be free

one of the ways to be free is

by owning your own plant

That was not an exotic view,

that was Abraham Lincolns view

In fact,

it was a principle of the republican party

in the late 19'th century

It has taken a lot of effort

to drive these ideas out of peoples heads

but they're still there and they are very relevant

It was the greek philosopher Plato

who said the ratio of earnings

between the highest and the lowest payed

employee in any organisation

should be no more than 6 to 1

In 1923 banker J.P. Morgan declared

no more than 20 to 1 was optimum

Yet todays salary differences between

the top and bottom earners in global corporations

can be higher than 500 or a 1000 to 1

When you're up in the range of 500 to 1 inequality

the rich and the poor almost become

different species

no longer members of the same community

Commonality of interrest is lost

and so it's difficult to form community

and to have good friendly relationships across

class differences that are that large

When the public do vent their outrage

at inappropriate earnings

the common defence is to move the debate to

the psychological realm

and quote Mecurial Brittish economist

Herbert Spencer

He coined the phrase; survival of the fittest.

And his words are now used to justify excess

competition in business is a good thing

but the playingfield must be level.

Monopolists have to much because

the system they game is rigged

Under the current economic setup

the fittnes of the vast majority of

the worlds population

is irrellevant.

Those that are made to pay for this crisis

are not those that have caused it

But those who caused it for survival

will no doubt try to marginalise

this film as socialist

or even marxist

I'm a capitalist, I am a businessperson

I believe in the basic principles

that's why I am completely appalled by seeing

these principles destroyed by monarchs,

monopolists

who are totally destroying the system

from within on Wall Street

And this is completely unacceptable

I'm a capitalist, I think capitalism can do it

It's not a question of getting rid of the capitalism

It's a question of getting rid of this terrible

form of capitalism

Capitalism, more broadly understood as

market economy

not only has a future

I can't see any other future in the world without it

But the question is; what kind of capitalism?

What kind of market economy?

A system of reformed capitalism,

built on independent money

a tax system based on consumtion, not income

and employee owned businesses

would begin to build an economy

that's not dependent on

constant growth to service it's debt

We've endured the so called free market

for centuries

but far from being free,

it has led us to destroy nature and

eachother in a vain attempt to progress.

It's absolutely ludicrus to suggest

that some of these scientifically

defined boundaries of the market

that we should never change

and then scientists of the free market economy

wants you to believe

Once that they convince you of that

and claim that they have the truth

because they are PHD's in economics,

then they can tell you whatever they want

And then you'll have to accept it

But that's the way that we have to take

these guys on

Politics is about drawing the boundary

of the market

When you think about it

all other things have been taken

out of the market over the last 2 or 3 centuries

2 or 3 centuries ago you could

buy yourself a human being

child labour

a lot of things that you

couldn't imagine to buy and sell today

So over time we have redrawn this boundary

and there's nothing wrong in

redrawing the boundaries again

Things that we're concidered

absolutely reasonable in the 1850's like

selling any chemical on the streetcorner

telling you it's a pharmaceutical drug

and it would be good for you

things like that we're absolutely

common place then

are now serious criminal offences

The same thing would be true of

active money management in a hundred years

The breakdown we saw in the great depression

and wittnessed again at the

beginning of the 21st century

occured because; in the name of growth

much was taken out of the system

by those who contribute very little

Multinational corporates and banks

will always want to grow without

having to compensate

those people who actually

do the work to produce the surplus

In the past, everytime to much was taken

by those who contributed little

People rose up to halt

the violent practices enacted by

a tangible enemy

Today the question is

with such a formless enemy pervading

every element of

our economic and democratic process,

can it be done again?

Of course it can be done again, it's a cycle

I mean we're not debt pions

we're maybe rats running around in a little wheel

in somebodys big cage somwhere

Finance rises, finance becomes organised,

you make a lot of money in banking,

it's easy to go out and buy politicians

but the essence of democracy,

the essence of american democracy,

is this repeated confrontation

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