#We Are Rent Book 2
Rent seeking: the Crime against Humanity
By Fred Harrison
Western civilisation is threatened by the cannibalistic phase of what economists call free riding (or rent seeking), and which the author characterises as the culture of cheating. This culture was the source of the social pathologies that caused the collapse of the civilisations of antiquity, and the Fall of Rome. Fred Harrison explains that the global house price peak in 2026 will provoke the Great Convergence of four existential crises - social, economic, climatic and demographic. That convergence will overwhelm governments and result in the collapse of western civilisation, and may even threaten the viability of humanity itself. But there is just enough time to mobilise people's understanding of the driving force behind this cataclysm, and to institute the financial reforms that would rebuild social resilience. The democracies, however, will have to overcome the continuing threat from Donald Trump - the arch rent seeker - and the policy paralysis that afflicts governance today. The Westminster model is interrogated to reveal how the aristocracy of old, who grabbed the commons and turned the peasants into hostages, produced a political system that is not fit to meet the needs of the 21st century. The author deconstructs the history of the Mother of Parliaments to lay bare the character of the power that inflicts poverty and premature death on millions of people in the rich nations. That politics, he claims, is guilty of the greatest crime against humanity.

The Mason Gaffney Reader
On Solving the "Unsolvable"
Such dismal dilemmas economists pose for us these days! We're told that to attract business we must lower taxes, shut the libraries and starve the schools; to prevent inflation we must have millions of people unemployed; to make jobs we must chew up land and pollute the world; to motivate workers we must have unequal wealth; to raise productivity we must fire people. Mason Gaffney has devoted his career to demonstrating the viability of reconciliation and synthesis in economic policy. In these 21 wide-ranging essays, he shows how we can find "win-win-win" solutions to many of society's seemingly "unsolvable" problems. >>> more

Click HERE for reviews of his life work, along with his 2007 essay,
"Going My Way? Winding Through the Stumbling Blocks Between Georgism and Catholicism"

"The purpose of all the feudal land laws, derived from the fundamental principle of the feudal system was to prevent the population owning land. ... landownership in too few hands is probably the single greatest cause of poverty." – Kevin Cahill

And of economic collapse.
And of class.
And of oppression.

Who Owns the World -
The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership, 2006, Penguin Books
By Kevin Cahill

Who Owns the World is the first ever compilation of landowners and landownership structures in every single one of the world's 197 states and 66 territories. It covers the history of landownership as far as written history will allow and shows the division of landownership in every region of the globe.

Packed with revelatory information, the book:
* identifies the person who owns the largest proportion of the world's land and documents that person's landholdings;
* provides details of the next 25 top landowners;
* reveals that aristocratic families own over 60 per cent of Europe's land mass and receive most of the EC's agricultural subsidy allowance;
* documents the vast landholdings of the four largest religious groups: the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches, the Islamic trusts, and the temple possessions of the Hindus and Buddhists;
* details the landownership structure of all the countries of the British Commonwealth;
* contains a complete survey of the historic record of landownership, starting in Mesopotamia/Iraq in 8000 BC;
* lists many of the world's great Domesdays, going back to the earliest, in Ptolemaic Egypt;
* includes an analysis of the legal structures that have reduced 85 per cent of the earth's population to serfdom.

This is a breathtaking tome of huge political, economic and social importance. It will revolutionise our understanding of our planet, its history and its land.
Author's website HERE

Synopsis of Ch. 8: Ireland: serfs not citizens HERE

A Very Mutinous People
The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713,
Noeleen McIlvenna, (2009).
University of North Carolina Press

"These ideas, cherished by George Durant, John Culpeper, and all those very mutinous people, eventually became accepted as the quintessential American values." – Noeleen McIlvenna, Ph.D.

Historians have often glorified eighteenth-century Virginia planters' philosophical debates about the meaning of American liberty. But according to Noeleen McIlvenna, the true exemplars of egalitarian political values had fled Virginia's plantation society late in the seventeenth century to create the first successful European colony in the Albemarle, in present-day North Carolina.

They created a new community on the banks of Albemarle Sound, maintaining peace with neighboring Native Americans, upholding the egalitarian values of the English Revolution, and ignoring the laws of the mother country.

"An understanding of the English Revolution is crucial to understanding the formative years of the North Carolina colony, for the politics of the people from top to bottom had been formed in the crucible of "Oliver's Days." The mixture of politics, religion, economics, and military experience suffused the thinking of all who had come of age in the twenty years prior to 1660. The future colonists of North Carolina had been exposed to all these ideas....

"... At first glance, the ideas of the English Revolution appear to have evaporated from the North Carolina terrain in the eighteenth century. The colony joined America's "Gulag Archipelago" as South Carolinians spread the slave society north, just as they would later expand it south into Georgia."

See excerpts HERE

Nature's Gifts
The Australian Lectures of Henry George on the Ownership of Land and Other Natural Resources
By John Pullen
The Federation Press (2014)

In 1890, the famous American economist and social reformer, Henry George, arrived in Australia to begin a controversial 98-day public lecture tour. Following the international publicity generated by his book Progress and Poverty, with its challenges to conventional economics, he had made several lecture tours in Britain, attracting immense audiences. In Australia he visited 34 cities and towns and continued to promulgate vigorously and eloquently his radical program for the ownership, management and taxation of natural resources such as land, coal, and minerals.

Nature’s Gifts provides, for the first time, a detailed account of this important and progressive lecture series. Equal rights to land; land taxation; land prices; land rents; land nationalisation; and free trade and protection remain issues which are highly relevant today.

Engaging and insightful, this is a timely and critical study of the reforms proposed by Henry George and the possibility of establishing an efficient and equitable system for the ownership of natural resources.

Reviews

1. By John Holmes
Excerpt from geography professorJohn Holmes(2015) review: the first critical study of reforms proposed by Henry George: "Equal rights to land; land taxation; land prices; land rents; land nationalisation; and free trade and protection."

Pullen's day-to-day chronicle and thoughtful appraisal of Henry George's fourteen-week Australian tour in 1890 provides much-needed further insight into a formative period in Australian political history. ...
Pullen observes that this tour was actively supported by nonconformist ministers but hardly ever by Anglican or Catholic clergy. 
–John Holmes, Australian Journal of Politics and History: Vol 61/3, 2015, pp. 450-483

2. By Rick DiMare
"My opinion is that John Pullen’s book is the most authoritative analysis of Henry George’s intentions to date." >>> more

See complete reviews HERE.

THE TRAUMATISED SOCIETY
How to Outlaw Cheating and Save our Civilisation
by Fred Harrison
Shepheard-Walwyn UK (2012)

"This thesis is not only a restatement of the social price of inequality (such as Joseph Stiglitz The Price of Inequality, or Richard Wilkinson The Spirit Level). There is something deeper: humanity has lost touch with its spiritual roots, and with the ‘covenant’ which ancient wisdom saw in the triangle of relationships between humanity, the earth and God."
– Bishop David Atkinson, CHURCH TIMES

"... Harrison provides a sophisticated and engaging new theory of social trauma developing the idea that when whole societies or nations are dislocated from their land, traditional roots and cultural reference points, whole populations are then at the mercy of what he refers to as "the predator class". This predator class of social parasites then seeks to legalise a form of institutionalised "cheating" whereby whole peoples are robbed of their birthright to the social "commons" (the commons being one’s right to enjoy the full benefits of nature’s resources through a socialisation of rent on land values).

"This ’rent’ should serve as a public community resource to encourage genuine wealth creation and authentic culture. Thus land should never be owned or monopolised by private individuals to the exclusion of social need. The concept of the resulting social trauma that happens when land is divorced from social justice serves then as a basis to construct a form of political and economic activism that creates a kind of collective psychosocial therapy. But the predator class or "rent seekers" will need new markets to exploit through further land grabbing and taxation and because of this expansionism will sow the seeds of future global warfare."
– Wayne Sturgeon, Fourth World Review

THE SCIENCE OF ECONOMICS:
The Economic Teaching of Leon MacLaren
By Raymond Makewell
Shepheard-Walwyn UK (2013)

Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) was a barrister, politician, philosopher and the founder of the School of Economic Science. He considered the true goal of Economics to be the discovery of the conditions which allow every individual to find a fulfilling life. In his view, science was a study of laws that exist in nature, whilst economics was a study of the humanities, with the interaction of human nature and the natural universe at its heart. MacLaren defined economics as ‘the study of the natural laws which govern the relationships between people in society’.

This book is based on a three-year course prepared by MacLaren for the School of Economic Science in London in the late 1960s. The editor, Raymond Makewell, presents the original subject matter revised with more recent examples and statistics from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA.

Instead of making supply and demand the starting point, it begins with the simple observation that all material wealth is ultimately derived from land, and, where goods are exchanged the first requirement is trust, or a system of credit. From this starting point the major characteristics of the modern economy such as banking, companies or corporations, international trade, taxation and trade cycles are examined in terms of the conditions that govern how and why they evolved and how they operate today.

The framework in which the economy operates is examined in terms of how the system of land tenure and the concepts of property evolved in the English-speaking world, the role of government in economic affairs, and the degree of economic freedom. This reveals how the current economic situation denies people access to all that they need to work and produce wealth for themselves.

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Obituary
Andro Linklater (1944-2013) chronicled the enormous impact on civilisation of private property.
By George Gibson
The Guardian
Friday 22 November 2013 

A Philosophers Take on Economics
by Dr. John Tippett
Delphian Books (2012)

Science explains and understands the world of matter, philosophy explains and understands the world of spirit. Economics is the meeting place of these two worlds. Whilst the immediate concern of economics is policy in the “world of matter”, the key participant in economic life is the human being, whose ultimate purpose of participation is to do with the “world of spirit”. Hence economics meets these two realms, stands at their interface. Its task is to ensure the rule of justice.

This book is aimed at presenting a common-sense, first-principles, philosophical perspective on a vital subject that seems to have lost its way. There is such a thing as justice, there is such a thing as truth; and these two need not be lost forever.

Review by Bryan Kavanagh: How satisfying to read a book which explains simply, logically and coherently why economies are currently failing: economic justice no longer exists. Civil freedom may have been granted to us, but we are denied economic freedom by distributional systems which pay obeisance to greed. >>> more

Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World
by Martin Adams
North Atlantic Books 2015 
Summary
Many of us already sense that our current economic system creates inequality and also engenders the ecological destruction of our planet. What we don’t seem to understand is why: For example, why does it lead to financial insecurity for many, even for those who, by all accounts, shouldn’t have to worry about money? And why exactly are we destroying our planet in our frantic conversion of nature into digits and little bits of paper we call money?

One of the main reasons our current economic system doesn’t work for everyone is because the revenue flow from the commons—which include all gifts of nature—has been privatized. For example, when an oil company makes money, it not only charges money for its effort and for the machinery it uses to extract oil from the ground, it also makes money from the value of the oil itself. The same can be said of the money that people make through their private ownership of land—and what banks make through their financing of private landownership via the mortgage. This privatization of the revenue flow from nature is one of the root causes of economic recessions, ecological destruction, as well as social and cultural decline.

All of nature is community wealth, including—and especially—land. >>> more

Read the blog to learn more.