| Subject: | [socialcredit] Forwarded from Kevin Cahill | | Date: | Tuesday, June 6, 2006 12:56:47 (-0700) | | From: | William B. Ryan <w_b_ryan @.....com>
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From: "Globalnet mail uk" <ros@globalnet.co.uk>
To: "William B. Ryan" <w_b_ryan@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Neo-Georgism--Replying to Chris Cook
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006
Bill,
Good to see this because home ownership is not falling
in the UK, or anywhere else that I know of. The NZ
figure is bizzare. I shall check that.
What your correspondent 'Bill McGunnigle' asks you to
do is get out of your entrenched positions. The person
in the trenches is him, and his position is like
finding an old WW1 trench with a rifle man still in
it. He needs to read De Soto about home 'ownership' in
the third world too. The Mystery of Capital.
But the key thing is this. In all the major western
economies, the USA, UK, Japan and so on, home
ownership is at roughly 70% and growing. In short,
this is the choice made by the majority of the
population.
In practice, the desire to own one's own home is
universal, and is most prevelant amongst those who
have not got a home. The argument put to you, by
implication, that people prefer to rent, is
contradicted by every factual trend, and every
preference statement, everywhere.
But there is a more pernicious underpinning to the
attack on home ownership. The argument is that because
30% of the population don't have a home, the 70% who
do have one should have their rights, liberties and
assets confsicated or curbed, and replaced by
bureacracies acting as social landlords.
The problem for many of the parties arguing thus, is
that people who own their own homes are much more
independent than those subject to the tyranny of
landlords and much less likley to put up with
bureaucratic control systems, invented to put power in
the hands of those who talk but never do anything
practical or productive.
I personally find this antipathy to private home/land
ownership bizzare, given the evidence of the
catastrophic failure of all socialist systems during
the 20th century, China included. China now of
course, is the economy with the largest trend towards
home ownership on the planet.
The Georgist argument has another terrible flaw. It is
based on an unstated assumption that land is scarce.
It isn't. There are 6,500 million persons on the
planet right now. There are 36,000 million acres of
land on the planet. At a strict notional distribution,
everyone has about 5.5 acres apiece. In practice only
about 16,000 million acres are arable/fertile etc.
That reduces the notional distribution to about 2.5
acres each.
But in reality, 50% of the planetary population live
in urban areas, an absolute maximum of 2% of the land
surface, about 720 million acres out of 36,000 million
acres (or 16,000 million arable). This leaves a total
of 3,250 million people with about 4.7 acres each. And
that's being generous with the babies! (In the UK
there are 60 million people and 60 million acres, an
acre apiece).
In the USA there are 295 million people and about
2,200 million acres. That is 7.4 acres per person. The
USA has a long way to go to get to the UK level of
'crowding.'
The issue isn't scarcity, its distriution. But that is
too hard for those still in the trenches. Arguing from
alleged land scarcity, allows them to pretend to be on
the side of Franz Fanon's wretched of the earth, when
in fact they are on the side of landowners who want us
all back as tenants so they can restart the rentier
system, or, as an alternative, paying too much for our
housing lot, on the grounds that land is scarce.
Yours
Kevin Cahill
Anyone interested I will be presenting the main
elements of Who Owns the World at the RSA 'House' off
the Strand in London on 28th June at 1800pm. Look up
the website and book, as 75% of the 200 seats are gone
already.
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Forwarded from Kev
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