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Andy Burnham Superman - can he defeat the super villains he has released?

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The Land That Nobody Wants to Tax: Andy Burnham, LVT, and the War Against Rent-Seekers There is an idea so economically sound, so empirically vindicated, and so politically radioactive that it surfaces reliably only when politicians have nothing left to lose. Andy Burnham, launching his tilt at the Labour leadership from a Makerfield campaign event, has reached for it again: a land value tax. He first proposed it during his failed 2010 leadership bid, calling it “an idea so old Labour it can be traced back to Thomas Paine.” Now, fifteen years on, he is back. The question is not whether Burnham is right about LVT. He almost certainly is. The question is whether he understands the forces that will be mobilised against him, and whether the British political system is structurally capable of implementing the one tax reform that could genuinely transform the country’s economic prospects. The Simplest Idea in Economics A land value tax is, at its core, disarmingly simple. Unlike in...
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THE ‘WOKE’ RENT COLLECTORS

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How Green and Rainbow Capitalism Betrays the Poor, Corrupts Progressive Politics, and Leaves a Dispossessed Generation Angry at the Movement That Was Supposed to Be on Their Side This essay advances a single, uncomfortable proposition: that the progressive social movements of the last century (women’s liberation, gay rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism and biodiversity protection) have been systematically co-opted by those whose primary interest is not human flourishing but the extraction of economic rent. Reforms that would return economic rent to the people who create it are blocked, diluted, or reversed. Reforms that redistribute nothing but the language of progress and the symbols of diverse identity sail through. The result is not a ‘progressivism’ that liberates all, but one that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, and a population that feels the injustice without yet having a name for its cause. In poor communities, progressivism is no longer associated with wage...
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Can You See the Cat? A children's story about how we need to see the cat to make the world right

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 There was once a small black cat who nobody could see. He was not a ghost. He was not magic. He was just the sort of thing that busy people walk straight past, the way they walk past a crack in a wall or a sparrow on a fence post. He had soft green eyes, white paws, and a tail that curled at the tip like a question mark. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Nobody saw him. Not the man in the big coat. Not the woman with the pram. Not the children running for the school gate. Nobody at all. This made the cat very curious, and more than a little sad.   The Street He Loved The cat lived on Croft Lane. It was a long grey street with rows of small houses pressed together like books on a shelf. The chimneys smoked in the mornings. The cobblestones were always a little damp. There was a bakery at one end that smelled wonderful, and a pub at the other end that smelled of old boots a...
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