generational equity

Money is not wealth. Wealth only exists in real things that people produce and you consume, or more properly take pleasure in owning. Unless you are a very sad person whose pleasure is in counting and admiring a pile of bits of crinkly notes, money is only valuable insofar as it allows the person who has it to buy things, goods or services that add to their store of wealth.

For most people, money is just a unit of accounting that tells them they have sold their labour (or something else) for a certain amount of wealth’s worth that they can use later to buy some real wealth. It gets over the problem of so called “coincidence of demand” – that at the time you sell your labour or goods you may not in that instant want something the person buying it from you has to offer.

In a world of uncertainty, it is prudent, if we are able to, most of the time at least, to hold a little bit of money in reserve so that we can eke it out and survive if for some reason we are unable to get more of it before we need to pay our bills, buy more food and otherwise fulfil the basic needs of life. That’s just what prudent companies do to ensure they can pay you every month and buy things to sell before you come along to buy them.

But really “saving”, putting something away for that ever-looming “rainy day”, is where money (“cash”) falls down as an asset class. And in doing so it does immense damage to us all – our financial fortunes, our environment, our society.

In the context of establishing our idea of a “Community Finance Partnership” a friend and I have been reading up on various community finance networks that sprung up at the time of the Great Depression. And I believe I have finally had an epiphany in my understanding of “usury”.

Many of the groups and systems I have been looking at, formed during the Depression to help make up for the lack of circulating currency which was making a bad situation worse, worked on the understanding that charging or paying interest was itself the major problem that had led to the “credit crunch” of the time.

Interest bearing cash tries to turn money from being a means of exchange and unit of account into something fundamentally different – a store of value. It encourages the hoarding of cash balances, which are then not available to be spent in the real productive economy.

The charging of interest on loans means that the borrower has to acquire more money than they borrowed in order to pay off the principal and the interest. We have a tiny amount of non-interest bearing “money” in our system. In the UK, prior at least to the recent troubles, this amounted to only about £50bn – in the form of issued notes and coins. All the other purchasing power in our accounts was created as interest bearing debt and so over 97% of our purchasing power needs repaying at some point, with interest.

The JAK bank in Sweden, which has its origins in a similar Depression-era Danish venture, calculates that up to between 30% and 40% of everything we spend goes on paying this embedded interest committed to by all the borrowers in the supply chain of the goods and services we are purchasing and have been created in the past. This represents a huge transfer of wealth from those who have little, to those who own the financial institutions that create this debt-based purchasing power.

In such a system also, inflation is virtually guaranteed, as it helps those in debt (most often governments telling us they are acting in our name) reduce the value of their debt by reducing the purchasing power of those who hold current purchasing power unencumbered by debt. This is a transfer of wealth from those prudent enough to operate within their means to those who don’t.

It is a vicious cycle at the centre of our economic lives that allows the rich and powerful, including states and bankers, to manipulate our purchasing power for their ends rather than ours. If we did not have to finance this 30-40% embedded interest then, not only would our purchasing power hold its value better, but we’d have 30-40% more of it, for the same amount of labour sold, with which to purchase real wealth and get closer to financial independence.

Money is a human creation, and the way it operates can be changed by human intervention. If we do not change it now, in the process of rebuilding the financial system that has just crashed, we are doomed, absolutely inevitably, to repeat this crisis in the future. And we should not be afraid to demand such change. After all, it affects the vast majority of us negatively at the moment and only benefits a tiny minority. It is a test of our democracy if you like that we must rebuild the system in a way that works for the majority rather than against the majoroity.

Last week David Cameron unveiled the Tories' latest wheeze - the idea that those able to work but not doing so and claiming benefits should be forced into some form of "community work" to justify their benefits after a period. Two years on Job Seeker's Allowance is enough to prove someone either unemployable or simply lazy goes the line. In some quarters it was hailed, not doubt with the help of the party spin machine, as an end to the "something for nothing culture" that pervades the benefits system.

Now, set aside for the moment the debate about whether this is some form of slave labour, or a way of quietly abolishing the minimum wage (although this latter begs the question as to whether it is right that only the unemployed should be allowed to opt for jobs below the minimum wage or whether only community groups should be allowed to pay below the minimum wage). We do in fact already have a deep rooted "something for nothing culture" in this country and seventy per cent of us, those who live in houses they actually own, believe that they have an absolute right to this "something for nothing" and over the past decade or so of rising land values, pushing house prices through the roof, they have benefitted massively.

Indeed, most of us can probably point to people who, over the past few years, have seen their wealth in the form of property, the value of their home, increase by more than their annual income from working. Equally in the same measure, we can probably point to people who, because they weren't lucky enough to have got in on this rat race of home ownership, have seen their chances of ever doing so fade as the multiple of income they now have to pay increases beyond any prudent lender would allow them to borrow.

Of course there are many who would point out that this wealth only really exists on paper; that for as long as we need a place to live the current value of the spot we own is of little meaning, as everywhere else is rising or falling in similar proportions and if we want to move we'll still need to cash in what we have and perhaps pay even more for our next home. And that this paper value is only of any use to us when we reach our final resting place or, if we are sensible about it, when we decide we no longer need the property we bought when we wanted to get the kids into a good local school or be close to the fast rail line into work or whatever and "downsize" or "escape to the country", hopefully giving us a pot of cash in the process to make our final years more comfortable.

Some may even suggest that it has been an unquestionable benefit to the economy as people have cashed in through equity release schemes and re-mortgaging to supply them with cash which has kept the consumer demand in the economy going when other countries' economies may have suffered recession and stagnation. As we face a possible slide in property values of course some of these people may find out to their cost that funding their lifestyles from the value of their home was a bad idea and that the only people, longer term, to benefit, are the bankers who they will be paying for their profligacy for years to come.

But I do not want to focus on whether housing is a good or bad investment: clearly in many cases it is a good one as the market is currently structured, albeit an unorthodox sort of investment - you don't usually get to consume something that continues to rise in value. I want to show you that it is an inequitable investment, that it is "something for nothing" and that the least well off pay for home owners' prosperity in a very real way even if that prosperity is mostly "on paper" for most of the time.

LAND: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy, and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognised. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.
Devil's Dictionary, 1911, Ambrose Bierce

If we go back to first principles, to what philosophy seems to call the "state of nature", some of the most fundamental assumptions are still as valid today as they ever were. We only have one planet. So every living soul born on that planet has to share it with everyone else - there is, as yet, no escape from that. The corollary of that is that everyone born on this planet has a right to a share of the planet - an absolute right, a "birthright". Some things we are completely dependent on the planet to provide for life...we need a place to live; humans cannot wander all the time, we need to sleep and to sleep we need to stop wandering. Similarly we need air, water, sustenance and again, we know ultimately of no way of producing these artificially without involving the natural resources of the planet.

Now, in that state of nature, if there's nothing else, like society, to hold us dependent on one place for any of these requirements of life, we would all be able to spread out, and appropriate as much land as we need to sustain our own lives, as individuals or families without negatively affecting anyone else. This "free land" gives us freedom, independence and life. Even today, in "overcrowded" England, as many would have us believe, there's enough land area for us all, every man, woman and child of us, to have just over a half an acre each - globally there's about 5.5 acres each of land mass. Naturally, not all these acres are fertile and even if they were, subsistence farming does not create wealth. Human growth and ingenuity requires that we specialize and socialize, which will usually mean also urbanize. Until we invent Scotty's instant transporter we have to make do by fitting many more people into urban land simply so they can be close enough to the facilities they need, and we need them to have - such as workplaces, to make working there viable.

But why should any of this mean that we give up our birthright, our common and individual birthright, to share equitably in the wealth of the planet itself? After all, you, the home owner, need me, the tenant, to work at whatever it is I do to provide you and everyone else with goods and services the economy demands. I, to fulfill my potential and contribute to the fullest to society, am better off working at what I do than ever I would be tending half an acre of small-holding (especially if you have seen my attempts to grow a window box of herbs!). But where is that birthright? Well, it is in the value of the location on which your home, office, factory or whatever stands, and it is created by and belongs to all of us!

You see, even John Locke, arch-defender of private property, recognized that there were limits to the right to appropriate land - the stuff of nature that exists in a finite amount yet which we all need to survive. Robert Nozick coined the phrase the "Lockean Proviso" for the principle that however much you take and occupy for yourself equity demands that you leave "enough, and as good, in common...to others". A hundred and thirty years after Locke wrote his Second Treatise of Government, David Ricardo formulated his Law of Rent, and a few years later Johann Heinrich von Thunen demonstrated the practicalities of this using data from his family estates.

It would be too much here to explain all of these ideas in any detail, but what they all amount to is that as you get closer to the social, employment, commercial facilities that more people need access to the land value surrounding those facilities absorbs some of the wages of all who need to access those facilities and is reflected in higher land values. So you see, this is not a fight just between the thirty per cent who don't own their home and the seventy that do. Many of that seventy per cent are also affected by this accretion of wages to land values. Think of it this way - you may have to settle (and you may enjoy it!) for buying a property several miles away from your work place or the nearest high quality commercial centre because all the property closer is too expensive. All those land owners that you pass on the way to work are gaining from your and the many other people in the same situation unfulfilled need.

Even more galling is that if we all happen to have the same incomes - you having managed to grab your slice of land at some earlier stage when it was less popular and therefore cheaper - we are taxed at the same level on those incomes. In turn both of our sets of taxes are used to invest in even more facilities that contribute to those land values. The person owning property closer to the "action" is gaining from all of our taxes disproportionately from those living further away. Similarly, the person owning property closer to the action has no incentive at all to release that location for others who may need it more at different stages in their lives, because they are continuing to gain from it and from those for whom it may now be a more appropriate place to settle. They are, quite literally, getting something for nothing, on their part at least. Something from the needs and activities of all of us that could make as good or better use of that location.

Harrison concludes, as I do, that the entire tax system should therefore be based on the values created by all of us but currently "enclosed" by land owners. A hundred and more years ago the American self-educated economist, Henry George, encapsulated this into his idea of a "single tax" - that all the rental value of unimproved land in any jurisdiction should be collected by the state, whose fiscal program should be strictly limited to the amount that can be collected this way. He preferred, as again do I, that the state would do very little but turn that money around and dole it out to everyone, equally, in the form of a Citizen's Income; if you like, a dividend from what we all invest by creating that land value in the first place - our common birthright. At the same time, our average tax bill per individual would be halved, our economy would grow by around a third and we'd have a much more equitable society.

Patrick Collinson
Tuesday March 28, 2006
The Guardian

An official government study into Britain's personal finances reveals a lost generation of 18- to 40-year-olds unable to cope with debts and soaring house prices, with alarmingly low levels of savings and little hope of building a decent pension.

The study, by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Bristol University, published today, is the biggest of its kind undertaken in Britain. It paints a picture of a generational divide fuelled by higher education costs and the collapse of company pension schemes - with 42% of adults now with no pension and 70% with no meaningful savings.

The FSA will call today for a new national strategy to improve Britain's financial capability, including workplace-based financial seminars targeted at 4 million employees; making personal finance more prominent in the national curriculum from 2008; and "money doctor" packs which will be sent to 1.5 million new and prospective parents each year.

Making a billion just isn't what it used to be. In our inaugural ranking of the world’s richest people 20 years ago, we uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March. Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.