And you're paying for all of this. Twice over...

You'll be paying for all this once because all these subsidies come out of the taxes you pay, and twice because you'll end up paying more in rent or taking out a larger mortgage:

- council house right to buy discount increased? Check
- council house right to buy discount increased a bit more in London, so that MPs will have places to snap up in a few years? Check
- Bedroom Tax for snivelling ingrates in social housing? Check
- Council Tax increases kept to well below inflation for severalth year running? Check
- £1 billion in soft loans to residential landlords? Check
- income tax breaks for wealthy middle aged businessmen to build up a BTL portfolio? Check
- schemes to help First Time Buyers extended to Second Steppers? Check
- extension of NewBuy to "second hand" homes? Check
- increase limit for these schemes to houses costing £600,000? Check
- government to underwrite up to £130 billion in new mortgages? Check (see previous link)
- builders' share prices up five or ten per cent? Check
- extend the Funding for Lending Scheme? Check
- abandon the inflation target and print more money? Check
- new construction figures kept at the 100,000 mark, the lowest since the 1920s? Check
- £290 million subsidies to sell government owned land at undervalue to private developers? Check (emailed in by BobE)
- £225 million Danegeld to persuade developers to finally finish off half-finished stuff? Check

Responding to a network colleague today on simple explanation, hitler(oh dear), and root cause denial

Hitler really believed he was doing the right thing. The issue was that he *believed* it by what he had been taught be others. He didn't know it was right from inside himself. He had no knowledge of what is right, only a belief. He was dead right on the economy: " we are being fleeced by outside powers and we must stop that somehow". His policy was appalling of course, this is exactly why its extremely dangerous to lead a reform with a policy, no one knows for what its a remedy yet particularly those forcing it onto the people. Hitler didn't know, he just believed he knew. 

You cannot change people without force and even then that is only a superficial change because people will still be rebelling if they do not want it no matter how much you force them.

This is the problem with beliefs. Both the secular religious kind and the religious political kind. Both encompass the vast majority of people. All believers. No one bothering to know anything. Nothing happens.

But a child knows, people have to improve themselves first before asking others to, else you must use force, there is no escaping this, except by denying it. No one in the world agrees with this even the best. This is root cause.

Yes, I started out trying to explain the simple economic version, of course and boy is it simple or what! Trouble with that is that people just get to a point of certainty more quickly and deny it that much sooner as per my blog side bar:

"There is a strategy so radical that it will not be considered if we believe less drastic measures might work. Yet it is so simple that its effectiveness will be discounted until more elaborate measures are evaluated"

So nothing ever happens. No one is bold. No one wants to commit, to themselves before "helping" others. Denial. Helping others is the purest form of denial. Charity and welfare is a chronic manifestation of this.

The simple economic version is this, see if you can overcome the need for complexity and anything less drastic:

• We are talking about going to the root of it, what else could it be but simple? We are talking about reforming the foundation of society, what else could the solution be but radical? You see!
• The founding mechanism in all society encourages all people to try to get the work of others, without giving their own work back in a fair exchange. This is unanswerable. Yet everyone denies it and tries to find a way out of it. Just look around
• The ever increasing value of land, created by the surrounding community, is collected by the land owner as rent or higher selling price. But it belongs to the community because they worked to create its increased value. The title holder did nothing except follow the law. What do we call that activity? Theft? Robbery? What is this primary law but fundamentally unjust?
• Don't complain that you paid a fair price for it, you only paid the rental value up to that point, not the increasing community created value since. To call this increase "inflation" or "the free market" is the quickest way to lose all mental credibility, though the denial often makes people do so anyway. they are claiming that money grows on trees! The purchase price you paid was all the increases appropriated by prior owners, during their ownership, all the way back to the time the land was empty and had zero rental value... when no community was there yet.
• To mitigate this robbery and pay for the community, instead we tax at a very high rate people's work and enterprise as if creating real wealth where harming the community, when the reality if affirmed instead of blatantly denied by all classes, is that the landowner is so clearly the perpetrator... in the end. There are other robbers in between, but remove these alone and just leave more left over for the 'lord'. Duh!
• Yet this is The Game of life we all play. All of us. No exception. The trouble is even the poorest tenant wants to get land and its rental value. Bankers are no worse than a street walker in terms of root cause. We are all in denial of this fundamental observation.
• If we could just affirm that we are all "at it", then maybe, just maybe, we could finally start to make progress.

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County council elections 2 May: Stand up and be counted

There are going to be elections for county councils etc on 2 May 2013 and the clock is ticking.

If you live or work in an constituency or ward which is having an election, I hope you'll seriously consider standing. All you have to do is get the nomination forms from the local town hall and get ten people who are entitled to vote in that constituency or ward to sign it, get the form submitted in time and ask our nominating officer Joe Momberg to confirm you are an official YPP candidate and that's it.

How much actual campaigning or canvassing or leafletting you want to do is entirely up to you, we don't need to agree a common national manifesto for this, it's the same old same old wherever you are, high rents and high house prices etc. For those that haven't officially joined YPP, if you officially join first, then so much the better.

Remember: if we're not on the ballot paper then people will never vote for us!

It's a market, Jim, but not as we know it

From The Telegraph:

House prices posted their biggest year-on-year growth in more than two years in February as the market continued to improve, Halifax reported today... Various studies have reported improvements to the housing market since the Government started a scheme last August to boost lending.

I was always taught that the purpose or benefit of "markets' was to ensure the largest supply of everything at the lowest possible cost/price. Under perfect competition, it is impossible to make a return above and beyond the value of your own skill and efforts; if people are earning super-profits or monopoly profits, that is a sign that competition is being restricted, to the detriment of consumers and people prevented from supplying at the higher price.

But the purpose of the housing market appears to be to ensure the smallest supply of a very basic human need at the highest possible price. And if that doesn't happen of its own accord, the government will always jump in to help with "schemes" like the Funding for Lending Scheme or FirstBuy or NewBuy.

That's me told, I suppose.

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