Tax is the most powerful policy lever: tax natural monopolies not work and production. Policy is pointless without a body politic.
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How do all the "increasing supply will bring house prices down" crowd square their views with the policy of "build and they will come"?
I mean, do they think Dubai builds more to bring prices down?
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.
It feels to me that we are in a new AI goldrush- with the AI companies all positioning themselves as the purveyors of shovels, rather than the miners of gold.
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.
Every £1 paid into a workers pocket costs a company between £1.37-£1.53 when taking taxes into account- vs. £1 in compute- so AI compute is cheaper even if it isn't as good as the human.
Tax incentives matter a lot.
⚡️Microsoft is beginning to convert payroll into compute.
The company is spending enormous amounts on AI infrastructure while simultaneously discovering that AI lets the remaining organization produce more with fewer people. Once those two things happen together, labor and compute start competing for the same capital allocation dollar.
That changes the corporate equation.
Historically, growth meant hiring more people. AI creates a path where growth can mean more GPUs, more software, more automation, and fewer humans per dollar of revenue.
The 60,000-person eligibility pool for its voluntary exit program is what makes this significant. That is roughly 27% of the company, and it reaches high enough to include vice presidents.
This goes well beyond a cleanup of weak performers. Microsoft is effectively opening a large section of the organization and asking:
How much human organizational mass can leave without damaging output?
That is an experiment with enormous consequences.
And the voluntary structure is clever because Microsoft does not need to know the exact answer beforehand.
• Offer the exit broadly.
• Watch who takes it.
• Protect teams where talent is scarce.
• Measure what breaks.
• Automate whatever survives.
• Then reorganize around the smaller system.
The company learns its true minimum human footprint by letting the organization partially self-liquidate.
There is another clue in the details: some marketing, sales and engineering teams are opting out of participation entirely.
That means Microsoft is already distinguishing between labor it still considers strategically scarce and labor whose scarcity has fallen.
That is the beginning of a new corporate hierarchy:
• People AI amplifies.
• People AI reduces the need for.
• People whose work AI eventually absorbs almost entirely.
And this connects directly to what we have been tracking about the professional middle.
AI does not need to replace a worker one-for-one to destroy labor demand. It only needs to make ten people capable of producing what previously required thirteen.
Do that across every department, every year, while revenue continues growing, and you get something historically unusual: a company becomes more valuable while needing progressively fewer humans relative to its scale.
That is how white-collar displacement actually arrives. No robot walks into an office and takes somebody's chair.
• Productivity per retained worker rises.
• Backfills disappear.
• Teams merge.
• Management layers compress.
• Voluntary exits become layoffs later if necessary.
• Hiring stays below prior norms.
And eventually the company realizes it permanently requires fewer people.
The capital expenditure side makes this even more consequential.
Microsoft is effectively moving resources from human cognition rented through salaries toward machine cognition owned through infrastructure. Payroll disappears every year. Data centers become productive capital assets. That preference becomes stronger as machine cognition improves.
Which leads to the deeper shift:
The corporation of the AI era will increasingly maximize intelligence per employee rather than employees per unit of growth.
That is a completely different economic organism.
And when one of the richest, most technically sophisticated companies on Earth starts testing how far that model can go across 60,000 workers, this stops being a theory about the future of work.
The experiment is already running.
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
This scheme is definitely designed to help first time buyers, and isn’t another taxpayer funded subsidy to the housing industry
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
I see Inheritance Tax is back in the news today. People need to understand that these arguments will not be resolved without addressing the elephant in the room: land.
Landed property is the biggest part of most estates, and the one that tugs at the heartstrings hardest. However, a house is not just the building that someone paid to put up, but additionally- a monopoly claim on a site whose value is created by everyone else (the nearby station, the good school, the planning system- and ultimately the fact that the state will defend the title). We treat those as one family heirloom, yet they are in different moral categories.
Leave people free to pass on what they made, but not the claim on the national commons. Even if the only asset involved is the house that looks, to many families, like their children’s last way onto the ladder- over time this will create a hereditary landed class at the expense of the wider nation.
The decent settlement is to collect the land’s publicly created value as it accrues, and stop using death as the moment we finally notice the problem.
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.”
