Do not pass go

I spent 7 weeks camped at the Occupy London protest speaking to a thousand people. They asked why we were there and what were we going to do about it.

My approach was not to give them a solution, but to ask what exactly the problem is and to give people the space to move into and confidence to make up their own minds.

Root cause of housing problems is hard to grasp even for Occupiers let alone banks who effectively own most of the land through mortgage assets.

The founding social organisations today are privatisation of the commons: virtually tax free private property in land. And socialisation of private property: taxation of wages, salaries and investment. Is this the right way around?

We’ve been taught this is economically sustainable so never question it. Yet everyone wants property because it always rises in value for free.

So through each business cycle, property prices are bid upwards by expected future selling price, fuelled by limitless credit and a speculative bubble develops.

The ability of people to pay the rising price for a home to live in diminishes. So too for an enterprise for a location to produce on, and for higher wages to cover taxation.

Eventually both are overwhelmed. Production stops and we enter another recession.

But is it just banks that are parasitical? There are 23 million home owners all wanting to keep the income from the rising value of their property. Homeowners are speculating as much as they want property to live in. Try getting a politician to stand up and propose ending this. They would be unelectable for 20 years.

So we do not need any more homes. There are a million empty homes, mostly ready to move into, largely unoccupied for more than 6 months.

People cannot get homes because they cannot afford them. Homes are priced speculatively high in this giant pyramid selling scheme we call an economy.

A giant game of Monopoly where nearly everyone loses in the end. The banks are merely using the housing market as yet another giant ponzi scheme.

The entire system compels everyone to reap where they have not sown. Is it sustainable? Is this sanity?

We mean to fix this by restoring the land to the commons by collecting its community created value for public revenue instead of paying it to banks. We also propose to restore private property to the individual by abolishing tax on work and enterprise.

Yes this is political dynamite too. Show me a better alternative.

Robin Smith is a London Occupier and co-founder of the economics think tank The SFR Group