En Passant

If Labor were serious about addressing the high price of housing and the impact this is having on both first home buyers and renters it would begin a program of state housing that addressed the needs of working class Australians. Such a program could be funded by taxing the rich capitalist class who benefit from having a well housed, rested working class. Labor won’t do that since it is wedded to the market and market ‘solutions’. That marriage explains its mickey mouse negative gearing proposals.

In this paper I use Marx’s analysis of rent to try to understand the complexities associated with the attempts to tax resource rents in Australia. To read this draft work in progress on SSRN click here.

This is a first rough draft on taxing economic rent. Feel free and very welcome to comment. I have my own ideas bubbling away for it.

Comments close very soon. For access and to log on to comment click here. Taxing resource rents in Australia: what a capital idea

I wonder first if Mandel’s analysis of Marx’s views on rent is correct and second whether it is useful for example in understanding super profits in the mining industry in Australia and their collapse in the last year or so, presumably because with increased mechanisation mining companies have broken down the barriers that are the ‘eternal’ monopoly of for example land, state ownership of minerals and their non-renewable nature, and ensured surplus value in the mining industry ‘enters the general process of (re)distribution of profit throughout the economy as a whole thrown their profits into the surplus value production.’