Gilets Jaunes Manifesto

The real culprit here at the bottom of the wood pile is the rents and mortgages paid on land that was provided free by god or nature for all living things to share. I often say: “Land was created by god or nature, (depending on your way of thinking) for all living things to share.” If we think that we are living in an affluent nation, and the young cannot purchase land, then we are living under ‘false affluence’. There should be a share of land available to all persons that have a rightfully cultural inheritance within a nation — even if they have to pay a little for the land. But they should not be priced out of the ownership of land by a person of greater borrowing power.

Currently we have a situation where the young are priced out of purchasing of land because the tax laws are skewed in favour of the well-off that can get a taxpayer subsidy through the tax system when purchasing property for rental purposes. Not only do the well-off receive tax concessions whilst purchasing a property, when selling the property, the unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than the earned income of a factory worker. I was explaining Gillets Jaune to a young Frenchman today and he mentioned that he is buying three houses. He gets a tax deduction for the interest he pays but he does not have to state the increased value of the property. So he is falsely claiming an expense without listing the accompanying profit. He gets a tax deduction for his profiteering. He is paying tax on a calculated ‘income’ — not on his increase in wealth — nor on his wealth. He pays less tax than someone in a similar employment who is not buying his third house. A ‘Wealth Tax’ is essential but the well-off are too powerful and the less-well-off too politically disconnected. The well-off get wealthier and the workers have to work harder.

The tax advantages to the well-off do not end there. If one buys gold paint to paint one’s nails or to paint a car, one pays tax, but if one buys a minted gold bar, one pays no tax. If one buys shares in gold mine, one pays no tax. The well-off are simply far better at skewing the tax system in their favour in a manner that eludes the less-well-off. Corporations are the best at this and you will see many memes showing that corporations pay little tax.

But we are still talking about the smallest problems caused by the monied class. Our ten Euro note cost almost nothing to create. Yet we believe it to be worth ten Euro because it will buy ten Euro worth of the ‘gross national product’. It is the movement of the money that creates the economic transactions by which we get our hair cut and put pizza on the table. As our ten Euro moves from my pocket to the hairdresser who visits the butcher who visits the bakery who pays the apprentice who visits the farm shop who gets his haircut, we can assume that our ten Euro note has enabled around 100 Euro of work in one day. This amounts to €36 500 of financial activity from one ten Euro note in a year. This amounts to a note changing hands 3650 times in one year which is called a ‘Velocity of 3650’. But money is not moving this fast. If you give money to a beggar, he spends it immediately. He has a velocity of 365, because his money changes hands 365 times in a year. A worker receives money and it is all spent within a week. His velocity is 52. Have a guess what the velocity of money is in your country?

Most countries have a velocity below two and many are down to a velocity of one. This means that the typical unit of money is only changing hands once in a year. This means that our ten Euro note does not conduct €36 500 of financial activity in a year — it creates €10 of financial activity in one year simply because well-off people hoard money. The problem is not created by the poor people because they spend their money within a few days of receiving the money. The problem is caused by the well-off who store their money ‘for a rainy day’. It is the hoarding of money that is the prime culprit. It is a problem in most countries. The mathematics of the associated debt is facinating. Our ten Euro note has about €25 of debt associated with it and if we guess an interest rate of 10%, we get €2.50 of interest associated with each €10 note each year. The provision of the Money Supply is costing us around 25% per annum. We are renting money at approximately 25% and the bulk of it sits idle in bank accounts. That is why bank accounts should be taxed to cover the costs of provision of the Money Supply.

This cat escapes with this comment on the ECB website:

“we sought to deter a contraction in the stock of bank-created money and to compensate for a decline in its velocity of circulation, which could otherwise have provoked a more severe fall in spending, employment and prices than what was observed in reality.” [1]

This remarkeably simple comment is beyond the compreThe ECB clearly states that the banks create money. They create money when they make loans. They create money when they make loans by writing numbers in a register. The system is dodgy but works — until the debt owed to the money-lenders becomes so great that there is no possibility of paying interest — let alone the principal. Those that hoard for ‘rainy day’ cannot prepare themselves for the storm that will arrive when the debt based system collapses. The comment says more: They “sought to deter a contraction in the stock of bank-created money.” They tried (but failed) to prevent a collapse of the Money Supply. In other words they are entirely incapable of carrying out the task for which they were created. They simply act as a fancy-dancy organization cover for the fraudulent practices of the private banks when they create their ‘bank-created money’. Anybody else that creates money is called a counterfeiter. The private banks create an ECB currency ‘look-alike’ and lend it out.

The next culprit is that this hoarded money is not taxed whilst money that moves is taxed. Our taxation is based on the inappropriate notion of taxing money when it changes hands — which means when it ‘enables’ a transaction. Thus we tax money when it is acting as money but we don’t tax it when it it is not doing the work of money — when it sits idle and is prevented from circulating. When the well-off receive more money, they have ‘more money than they can spend’ and so this also becomes hoarded and moves out of circulation. Money must circulate to be money. Idle money kills economic activity. So, our ten euro note, as it passes from hand to hand creating economic activity, is whittled away by taxation at each stage. Sales Tax reduces its ability to create economic activity by stifling the economic activity so essential to civilized life and Employment Taxes take money when it is transferred from employer to employee. Of note, Payroll Tax is only taken from people earning income. People with ‘unearned income’ avoid this despicable tax.

The first adjustment to the tax system is to replace the despicable taxes. Institute a general ‘Transaction Tax’ of extremely low value that is applied to all transactions. This would be at the rate of about €1 per €1000 which is 0.1%. This is all but invisible to ordinary working people as they are currently paying ten and twenty percent in taxation, but it would trap the big money transactions made by the wealthy as they shift their millions around in the stock market in a rapid manner. Making money from money is a sin.

Citizens often pay one or two percent when they remove money at ATMs or when they pay by credit cards. So one Euro in one thousand is all but invisible to the citizen.

The Sales Tax would all but be eliminated and only retained for items that were detrimental to health and environment. It was well worded by JFK before they put a bullet in his head. John F. Kennedy 1962:

“it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

The controvercial concept is that faster moving money provides more tax to the government because there is more economic activity. Those with intuition say: “Fuck Austerity”. As is indicated by this graph:

“Fuck Austerity” is actually good economics. The inventors of money intended it to enable trade. They did not intend it to sit idle. Retaining money is a problem. Receive and spend is the ideal way to deal with money. The government has the authority to create money but has conceded this privilege to private money-men through the deception behind revolution and war. The money men think they can control the government but it is also possible to do the opposite. If the government refuses to pay back on demand, the bankers cannot allow default as their dodgy money system will collapse so they have to bail out governments when they can’t or won’t pay. The banks had to bail out Greece or their banking system would have collapsed as the Venetian banks had collapsed in 1343 when King Richard of England refused to pay. At that time, the default of just one nation was enough to collapse the Venetian bank’s debt bubble. It caused the breakdown of civilized life in Europe.

The next tax is a tax on ‘hoarded money’. If we define ‘hoarded money’ as money that has been held for more than one month, we can tax the minimum monthly balance at between 0.1% and 1% per month on this minimum monthly balance. This would be somewhat equivalent to an annual tax of around 1.2% through to 12% — but it would replace Payroll Tax and allow a reduction in Income Tax.

The next tax is controversial. Land is in short supply in places where there is employment and it obtains a premium price in a bidding war of citizen against citizen. This allows banks to create money as register entries in a virtual manner and lend it at interest to citizens. Loans of millions are made simply by creating register entries. The solution is to use a land tax in one of its forms to bolster tax collection so that other damaging taxes can be reduced. Many great cities were built on the basis of Land Tax ensures that people only hold land if they can do something useful with it — so it tends to eliminate land speculation and tends to take the joy out of holding land for profit. Henry George wrote a fine book on the subject in 1879. [Progress and Poverty] The well-off are unlikely to follow the wisdom of Henry George. God or nature created land for all living things to share. A large portion of the population is now priced out of the possibility of land ownership in their nation of cultural existence due to the profiteering nature of the well-off. Poor land use arrangements carry a massive cost. Excessive land values add destructive economic inefficiencies to any activity by causing a dead-weight loss for the use of land that was created freely by god or nature. Thus usury of land causes production and living costs to rise until the factory activity becomes unprofitable because of the impost of rents or mortgages on something that was essentially freely provided by nature. We just have this peculiar habit as humans of driving up prices to the maximum a market will bear. In a competitive environment with limited land, even the reduction of other taxes would cause an increase in land rental values. In effect, the government ‘auctions off’ the rights to use land to the highest bidder. (Singapore does similar by auctioning the right to use motor cars.) [Pierre Lemieux]

If you buy a square kilometre of land in the middle of the desert, it has no value. If the government decides to build roads, schools, and hospitals to encourage businesses to the region, the value of the land increases massively — but not due to any effort on your part no due to any change in the nature of the land. Thus land only has value due to the proximity of transport links, customers, suppliers, businesses and government infrastructure. Thus the rightful place for the gain in value is the government and not the purchaser of the land. Land makes rich people rich by giving them vast amounts of unearned income that under-taxed, and generally un-taxed until future sale when it gets massive tax discounts in a clever system called ‘Capital Gains Tax’. This ‘Capital Gains Tax’ enables people to pay massively discounted tax rates compared to people earning income from labour.

Henry George proposed to tax away the rent on the unimproved value of land, and to replace all other taxes by that single one. The result would be that the proceeds of the rental of land would tend to accrue to the government rather than the rentier class. This would enable a huge reduction or elimination of more harmful taxes.  In 1978, Milton Friedman said that “the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago” [3]. Land Tax is a tricky issue and there is a beautiful article here.

Irrespective, Land Tax needs to be considered as a partial replacement for economy damaging taxes. Taxes that remove money whilst it is circulating are economy damaging taxes. Land ownership is justified as a means of creating a stable society where persons keep good stewardship over the land provided that no person is dis-empowered by such ownership.  John Locke, in the 17th century, argued that because people add their own labour, toiling on the land confers ownership rights over the resulting product. This applies in a farm example. Yet even Locke said this only works as long as there was “enough, and as good, left in common for others”. But we can add to that the realization that most increase in the value of land has nothing to do with any effort on behalf of the titleholder, but everything to do with ‘location’ which means that increase in value is due to the facilities built in the local environment.

Hoarded Money is the first to be tackled. Money simply does not function as money if it is hoarded. The prevention of hoarding in bank accounts where money can stagnate for many years needs to be prevented. Even the moderately well off are guilty of this. Even the Quran mentions this: “If you hoard money, when you die, it will be heated and burnt onto your forehead.” By forcing money to move, wealth is created for all. Never forget that money costs nothing to create and that economic activity only occurs when money moves. Hoarding is an abominable activity. Money was always a problem since its invention. This is a massive dilemma for many because there is a desire to ‘save for a rainy day’. But the rainy day needs to be catered for by other means. Here is the classic Koran statement:

“They who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah, unto them give tidings (O Muhammad) of a painful doom: On the Day when it will (all) be heated in the fire of hell, and their foreheads and their flanks and their backs will be branded there with (and it will be said unto them): Here is that which ye hoarded for yourselves. Now taste of what ye used to hoard.”

and

“Woe unto every slandering traducer. Who hath gathered wealth (of this world) and arranged it: He thinketh that his wealth will render him immortal. Nay, but verily he will be flung to the Consuming One.”

It is not acceptable to hoard the means of exchange because is stifles exchange. The topic of wealth is a separate issue. The means of exchange should not be held for more than a reasonable time. My belief is that one month is a starting point. When wheat, or other perishables, were used as a means of exchange, they had limited shelf life. So we are talking about money with a limited shelf life and a good example is in the Austrian Town of Wörgl where they created limited life local money which made an impoverished town affluent right in the middle of the Weimar hyperinflation.

The next elephant in the room is the issue of the source of the Money Supply. The ECB claims:

“The ECB has the exclusive right to authorize the issuance of banknotes within the euro area.”

The citizens of Europe believe that they have conceded the money creation to the European Central Bank. Interestingly, nowhere on their website does it say that they have the ‘exclusive right to create the money of Europe’. It is touted as the most powerful economic institution in Europe. They are beyond the ‘interference’ of politicians as illustrated by “The political independence of the ECB is instrumental to its primary objective …” Who then ‘interferes’ — not any entity that is influenced by voters. It is powerful and above government and beyond democracy. Their skills at actually achieving their mission is doubted with the following: “we sought to deter a contraction in the stock of bank-created money” Let us hit the facts:

To date, the ECB has created €967 billion cash currency. This is sitting in people’s wallets and elsewhere. The M3 Money Supply for Europe was listed as €11 371 billion. Clearly this did not come from the ECB as the ECB has only created €967 billion cash currency. The remainder is digits in bank accounts. It is money you cannot touch. It is as elusive as the fairies. It is as difficult to find as the ‘end of a rainbow’. It is money that you cannot touch or feel. The numbers in the accounts are the amounts that the bank promises to pay you in ECB notes if you so wish. It is credit for ECB notes that do not exist.

If the banks lend, there is more money. European banks have not been lending well since 2008.

This leads to this erratic Money Supply in Europe reflected by the ECB website words: “a disorderly contraction of the stock of broad money” [1] — meaning uncontrolled ‘collapse’ of the Money Supply.

This is rather strange considering the ECB is supposedly there to help the nations and that the ECB can create any quantity of Euro money at no cost. There has been a general slowdown in the economy in Europe due to a lack of credit in the Money Supply and because the money is becoming hoarded. Both items that the ECB has demonstrated that it is incapable of influencing. They add a veneer of legitimacy to the debt creating private banks. Let the banks go on wild debt bubble creation and claim that the Central Bank is in charge. Let the banks dry up the Money Supply and blame the Central Bank’s incompetence.

In the following graph, the orange is the cash currency created by the ECB. The green is the virtual credit created by the private banks. The red is the private debt and the government debt created by this debt based banking system.

What is interesting is that we can live under this level of debt provided the Money Supply keeps rising. During the years following the 2008 banking debacle, the ECB gradually reduced the rate at which it lent to banks down to 1% to encourage privately owned banks to increase lending to keep the Money Supply at adequate levels, then to .5% to .25% and down to 0%, yet a government like that of Greece had to borrow at 29%. It is easy to see that the ECB is a puppet of the private banks and in no way looks after the interests of the nations, peoples, and governments of Europe. To show their mighty position, one only needs to ponder the statement:

“The ECB has the power to apply, if deemed necessary, more stringent measures than adopted nationally to address risks to financial stability.”

Thus they can overrule national governments whilst at the same time they are incapable of maintaining the Money Supply at acceptable growth and also incapable of keeping money moving as demonstrated by the appalling Velocity statistics. It at least needs to be reformed in line with the proposals of www.positivemoney.eu .

“In addition, since 2009 the ECB has implemented several non-standard monetary policy measures, i.e. asset purchase programmes, to complement the regular operations of the Eurosystem.” [2]

Meaning that they bought government debt that nobody wanted to keep the debt based banks whom they serve afloat. Their total weakness as a controller of the Money Supply is admitted in this ECB comment:

“The central bank is concerned with preserving price stability and supporting the economy, but it can do so only very indirectly and imprecisely by controlling base money, i.e. the sum of currency and bank reserves… The ultimate objective is to prevent the possibility of a collapse in broad money…”

The Bank of England worded it a different way:

“Is it difficult to believe that the Central Bank with the blunt instrument of interest rate control can control private corporation lending habits. As inflation continues to flourish, their control appears to be a carefully controlled myth. …” [6]

One large investment bank collapsed and it nearly brought the Euro money system down. Thus we need what is commonly called “Glass Steagall”, but otherwise known as “Separation of Commercial Banking from Investment Banking.”

The next elephant in the room is the method by which land an property is purchased. I tell the story this way:

“You want to buy a house from Mr Bucket. You go to the bank and ask for a one million Euro loan. The bank looks at you and says ‘You have a job so we can garnish your wages.’ and ‘Yes’. On the appointed day, the bank writes one million Euro with a plus sign in Mr Bucket’s account and in your account they write one million Euro with a minus sign. They did not need to call the Central Bank. They did not need to look in their vault, they simply wrote numbers in a ledger. From that moment, there is one million Euro money in the nation and one million Euro more debt. Money and debt are created in equal amounts with a zero sum result. Unfortunately, at the end of the first year, you owe one million Euro plus ten percent. Then the next year you owe one million Euro plus ten percent plus ten percent and the next year you owe one million Euro plus ten percent plus ten percent plus ten percent. The result is unpayable debt as in the graph above.”

This unpayable debt was always called “Usury” — the creation of debt that is unpayable. Moses wrote on the subject. Jesus had words on the impoverishment caused by money. Mohamed was a trader and understood the nature of money. He realized that businesses needed money before they could make money, so he created a strict set of rules that effectively allowed the creation of credit for business purposes but not for consumption and the impoverishment of the poor.

The word usury has been softened in recent years to mean ‘excessive’ interest, but its true meaning is ‘the lending of money with the expectation of receiving more in return.’ Usury creates unpayable debt. Even Jesus said to us: “See to it that no one deceives you.” along with: “Watch out and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”

In the modern world, man has drawn lines on maps for apportionment of land. Buyers purchase in a competitive marketplace and houses go to the highest bidder. The modern highest bidder is the one that gets a taxpayer subsidy to pay the mortgage interest. These people are the well-off that purchase rental properties. Those with more modest incomes rent from those with higher incomes who have outbid them in the housing market. A house price becomes the amount that a bank is prepared to lend. In a competitive market place, this rises to the amount a young couple can manage to pay without starving. The bank system is run entirely for the benefit of the banks and not for the benefit of the nation or its people.

There is jubilation in homeowners ears when they hear that house prices have risen in their area. But this is most unsatisfactory climate for the young. If the young cannot buy houses in their desired district, we have false affluence. We cannot claim to live in an affluent nation when the young cannot buy houses.

Margrit Kennedy writes that:

“We don’t only pay interest when we take up a loan. Because in every product we buy, 30-50% of the price goes actually into paying back the loans the producer took up for production. If he didn’t have to take out a loan, his products would be that much cheaper.” [5]

You can use a simple calculation to get a similar result for France and other nations. OECD figures in € Billion:

Money Supply M3 = €2304 billion
Money Supply M1 = €998 billion
Population 2014 = 64.8 million
Interest Payments (Government) €54.5 billion [Debt Clock]
GDP has fallen by 1.2%
GDP €2,340 billion [Debt Clock]
Private Debt to GDP 234% [Trading Economics]
Private Debt [calculated] €2,340 billionx234/100 = €5474 billion
If we guess an average interest rate of 8%, we get = €438 billion
Interest on Private Debt = €438 billion
Add Government interest = Total interest to money lenders = €492 billion
Total interest to GDP = 492 billion / 2340 billion = 21%

Thus a rough estimate of the percentage of each purchase that goes to bank interest is 21%.

The banks are like a taxation agency for their own benefit. They garish twenty to thirty percent of all transactions which means that twenty to thirty percent of the GDP is ‘their’ share for the privilege they granted themselves for creating the money of the nation. Their power is immense. If they lend — we prosper. If they cease to lend we go into recession. They create money in digital form that is impossible to repay. They impose a central bank populated by their ilk and ‘independent’ of political interference to give a veneer of legitimacy to their money lending activities. Their many lobbyists (briberists) influence and have more power than all the voters put together. That violent revolutionary known a Jesus fiercely threw the money manipulators out of the temple for similar reason. Unfortunately, a collapse of a money system is worse than the debt. Any intransigence of the banking sector to maintain our Money Supply must immediately be met by a government creating and moving money into society by spending money generated by a government owned bank called a “Public Bank”, popularly known as a “People’s Bank”. China’s rise to prominence is largely due to its implementation of a networked set of Public Banks offering loans to government for infrastructure projects through to businesses and micro-businesses.

The big worry about going against the banks and their lobbyists is that they will collapse the Money Supply accidentally or purposely to ‘punish’ those that go against them. The result of a revolution is often not what the ‘do gooders’ expect. The bad guys or another set of bad guys take over and implement an even worse system. We can live with debt — we can’t live without a Money Supply.

[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2016/html/sp160210.en.html

[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/html/index.en.html

[3] quoted by Fred Foldvary of San Jose State University, a proponent of the Georgist tax.

[4] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2016/html/sp160210.en.html

[5] Margrit Kennedy’s Interest and Inflation Free Money.

[6] Bank of England. Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1. Money creation in the modern economy.