Use a land tax, and not a water cannon, to quell the riots
The riots and its causes are of course complex, but underneath the many social and individual issues lies a simple, yet subtle, economic truth. Because our economic system has no capacity to value our marginalised youth in the same fashion it has no method of valuing nature and our natural assets except in a way that exploits them for private advantage of the privileged few. In my view the problem is natural assets, namely access to land, natural resources and intellectual assets that are the essential bedrock of income creation and economic success for any young man or woman. We live in a society that has created an economic and legal system that allows a very few (mostly old people), both in this country and abroad, to own all the natural assets that people need. This system has subtly evolved over many years and been adopted across the world as it benefits those with the greatest power to effect legal and economic change, while at the same time being complex enough to obf...