The Highland Clearances. The Lowland Enclosures. And Today, the Global Exodus to Wealthy Cities Across the World
You need look no further than the latest policy for pretending to tax land, while tacitly supporting taxation of earned incomes, for a perfect case history of incoherence.
But is it evil wealth and power making these mistakes as is so tempting to alledge?
Or is it the armies of normal people, activists and campaigners trying to save the world, saying "every little counts" and "save the world, slowly but surely"?
"Yes, we know this failed last time. That was because we did not do it hard enough. And the pain must be dished out slowly so that people cannot feel it as the policy proceeds".
They even accept this is the approach in plain sight when you ask them. It is most curious.
Obviously this policy approach is a trump card - the proposers cannot be held accountable when the excess death toll rises and the people are looking for accountability.
"We were just doing as we were told - looking for a fancy new language to help people escape from reality. It's not our fault".
Curiously this new policy proposal is supported widely, among other usual suspects, by the Georgist movement, listed in number on their website, who must surely have a hidden agenda too - George would never have supported such a weak and historically failing kind of proposal.
Having buried myself deep on the inside of that movement for many years, knowing all the big players very well, getting invited to the secret meetings, this much is clear from primary evidence - I saw hidden it happening in front of my face, the hidden agendas repeating everywhere I went at the deepest levels of that religion.
For most the unconscious bias was jealousy of those with more land than them not surprisingly. Jealousy of wealth is a serious social disease. For others more cynically it was an effort to undermine the credibility of economic reform - through policy which would cause widespread highly visible failure, to protect landed interests, the biggest of course being equally homeownersand finance. And for others it was simply the plain old Marxism, socialism and libertarianism cults. I was close to one fella who used to have private meetings with the now King. Another whose family were Hollywood royalty. What a huge disappointment for Henry George, who was certainly serious and gave his life for it.
None of the biggest Georgists I met, except for one, were genuinely serious about justice when push came to shove and the hidden agenda was brought into the light. It's not that they were bad or good people. It is that I saw it happening and accepted it happening instead of being yet another lost soul trying to hide it.
Our think tank work developed a policy we used to employ each time we came across the pathology to test if they were truly serious about justice or promoting an agenda under a veil. The test was passed when our Trojan horse policy was rejected out of hand, in spite of having identical goals to theirs, without them having bothered to read, understand it or ask for clarifications. A clear signal psychologically. A useful tool politically - the Location Value Covenant. I still use it today fairly regularly and the test was passed again yesterday by the man marketing this new planet saving policy.
Why are this new agency inadvertantly proposing a policy which will set back - through it's own systemic failure once again, the advent of economic justice for the world I wonder? All we can say is that the real agenda is concealed. And then that concealment is concealed. This concealment tactic is where most of the work and funding gets soaked up.
Such is the collective unconscious and its overwhelming power. Such is the plight of anxious souls in exile from their true home.