The Energy Shock Is Coming and Our Tax System Will Make It Worse

Why the Epstein Class Always Push for War & the One Way We Can Stop Them

The coming oil, gas and food shock will not arrive as a single dramatic event. It will unfold through conflict, disruption and human tragedy on a vast scale. Before it is an economic story, it is a moral one.

War is not an abstraction. It is the destruction of homes, the collapse of food systems and the loss of tens of thousands of innocent lives, many of them women and children. The current trajectory of escalating conflict risks dragging entire regions into prolonged instability. There is a profound stupidity to this. At a moment when the world faces shared pressures from climate, energy and food security, governments are choosing confrontation over cooperation, multiplying risks that will fall most heavily on those with the least protection.

The consequences will not remain confined to the battlefield. They will move through oil markets, fertiliser production, shipping routes and grain supplies. Prices will rise, not in a brief spike but in sustained waves. For millions of people, especially in poorer countries, this will mean hunger, displacement and avoidable death. For households closer to home, it will mean a steady erosion of living standards and security.

Yet even this framing does not go far enough. The real failure is that we enter this period of shock with an economic system already distorted by speculation and rent seeking.

Land is already overpriced, not because of its productive value, but because of expectations of future gain. Natural resources are treated as assets to be hoarded and traded, rather than foundations of shared prosperity. Housing costs reflect scarcity that is, in large part, artificially maintained. The result is that before a single additional shock hits, much of the population is already stretched.

At the heart of this distortion is a simple but often ignored reality. The value of land, natural resources and certain monopolies does not arise from the efforts of their owners alone. It is created collectively. It comes from the presence of communities, from public infrastructure, from legal systems, from technological progress and from the simple fact of shared human activity.

When a city grows, land values rise. When transport improves, locations become more valuable. When society becomes more productive, the worth of natural resources increases. None of this is the result of individual landowners acting in isolation. It is the product of all of us, together.

Yet the gains from this shared creation are largely captured privately.

This is the mechanism by which inequality is entrenched. Wealth flows not to those who produce, but to those who control access to what others need. Land, energy reserves and key monopolies absorb the value generated by the wider economy. Instead of circulating, it accumulates.

In such a system, rising prices for energy and food do not simply reflect scarcity. They become channels through which even more value is extracted.

This is not inevitable. It is a policy choice.

A different approach would recognise that these economic rents belong, in essence, to society as a whole. They should form the basis of government revenue and be shared in ways that benefit everyone. When this happens, the incentives of the system change fundamentally. Instead of rewarding passive ownership and speculation, it rewards productive activity and cooperation.

This is the core of a Georgist framework.

By taxing the unimproved value of land, we capture the value that society creates and return it to society. By taxing carbon and other natural resource rents, we ensure that the use of shared environmental assets contributes to the common good. These revenues can replace taxes on work, trade and investment, freeing the productive economy to grow and adapt.

The effect is not to suppress prosperity, but to unlock it.

There is another, darker dimension to the current system. The enormous profits available from controlling land and natural resources create powerful incentives for exploitation and conflict. When access to oil, gas, minerals or strategically valuable land can generate vast unearned gains, the temptation to secure that access by force or manipulation increases.

Speculation and appropriation are not side effects. They are central features.

This helps to explain why powerful interests so often align with policies that destabilise regions or prioritise control over cooperation. War, in this context, is not only a failure of diplomacy. It can also be a byproduct of a system in which the rewards for domination are extraordinarily high.

If the economic rents from land and natural resources were systematically taxed and returned to the public, much of this incentive would be reduced. The private gains from control would diminish. The ability of concentrated interests to leverage those gains into political influence would weaken.

In short, the economic foundations that make conflict profitable would be eroded.

This does not mean that war would disappear. Human conflict has many causes. But it would remove one of the most powerful financial drivers that currently sits beneath geopolitical tension.

At the same time, such a system would allow us to face rising energy and food prices without condemning large parts of the population to hardship.

Energy prices are likely to surge. The cost of food will follow, driven by both higher input costs and disrupted supply. In a rational system, these higher prices would encourage conservation, efficiency and innovation. In our current system, they will also intensify inequality.

Under a reformed system, the picture changes. Higher prices generate higher rents from land and resources, which are then captured for public use. This revenue can fund services and support that offset the impact on households. The signal to conserve remains, but the burden is shared.

Crucially, these taxes should replace, not add to, existing burdens. Income taxes that reduce take-home pay, taxes on trade that distort supply chains and taxes on real investment that slow adaptation should be reduced or removed. What cannot be hidden or offshored, land and resource rents, becomes the primary base.

This is how a society can absorb shock without descending into poverty or economic decline.

It is also how trust can be rebuilt. When people see that the wealth generated by collective activity is returned to them in the form of lower taxes, better services and greater security, the legitimacy of the system strengthens.

Without such reform, the outlook is bleak. Rising energy and food prices will collide with inflated land costs and entrenched inequality. The result will be deeper insecurity, political anger and further instability. Governments will reach for short term fixes that do little to address underlying causes.

We will remain trapped in a cycle where crisis enriches the few and weakens the many.

There is a way out. It requires recognising where value truly comes from, and ensuring that it is shared accordingly. It requires shifting the tax base from what we produce to what we collectively create. It requires removing the incentives that make speculation and conflict so profitable.

None of this will undo the suffering already unfolding. It will not bring back those who have been lost. But it can prevent the next wave of crisis from compounding that suffering.

The shocks are coming. Whether they lead to collapse or to renewal depends on whether we are willing to change the system at its root.