Wishing you all a happy New Year. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2023 brings!
One thing’s for sure, you’ll get all the inside information on the land cycle, and how it’s playing out in Australia right here at Land Cycle Investor.
But before we wave goodbye to 2022 completely, I want to pay tribute to Dame Vivienne Westwood, who passed away at the age of 81 on 29 December.
Her passing received wide media coverage.
The global icon was responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashion into the mainstream, helping launch and clothe the Sex Pistols, and having a tremendous influence on how thousands of men and women dressed throughout the years.
However, Westwood was, at heart, an activist.
In her autobiography, Vivienne Westwood, written with Ian Kelly, she said:
‘The way I thought about “punk” politics was this: at the time, we were just becoming aware of these terrible politicians torturing people…
‘I’m thinking of Pinochet, for instance …
‘The idea was that kids would try to put a spoke in the wheel of this terrible killing machine. I wanted to confront the rotten status quo through the way I dressed and dressed others…
‘I just use my fashion as an excuse, to say what I think about politically and culturally.’
So why mention her here?
Well, despite global media coverage of her passing, there’s not been one mention that Vivienne Westwood was, in fact, a Georgist.
Yes, Westwood supported the ideas of Henry George, the 19th century political economist who electrified the world when he published his magnum opus Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth in 1879.
The book started as a potential magazine article written to address the paradox of why poverty rises in tandem with progress.
When it was published 17 months later — during an industrial depression — George not only identified the underlying cause of the boom-and-bust cycle, he also provided a practical remedy.
Put simply, tax land — not man.
The book was an international bestseller.
It was translated into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
At its epoch, it was rumoured to have outsold even the Bible.
Seven years later, Henry George beat Theodore Roosevelt to almost get elected as mayor of New York City — the financial capital of the nation.
‘George ran for mayor of New York again in 1897 but died four days before election day. He was given a statesman’s send-off — his coffin lay in state at Grand Central Station, where more than 100,000 people came to pay their respects. It was the largest crowd of mourners since Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865.’
Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Liberal member of parliament
Vivienne was introduced to George’s ideas through Fred Harrison.
Fred is one of the most successful economic forecasters of our time.
He predicted the recession of 1991 — eight years before it happened.
He predicted the crash of 2008 in 1997 — 11 years before it happened!
He wrote in his book The Chaos Makers (1997):
‘By 2007 Britain and most of the other industrially advanced economies will be in the throes of frenzied activity in the land market…land prices will be near their 18-year peak…on the verge of the collapse that will presage the global depression of 2010.’
In 2015, on his website, he forecast a ‘mid-cycle crash’ for 2019–20.
Fred’s track record is unsurpassed.
In addition, he has conducted a vast amount of research into economic cycles to highlight the cause and, therefore, the ultimate cure to the boom/bust pattern. He continues to work tirelessly in his own advocacy for a better economic system.
Note that this is the information you need to master if you really want to take advantage of the knowledge I share here. And this is exactly what Vivienne did.
So influenced was she by Fred’s work, she even had him present on the catwalk at one of her recent fashion shows!
You can watch it here. Fred appears around 24 minutes into the show.
Indeed, Westwood not only understood the timing of the land cycle, but actively campaigned for the cure to the boom/bust destruction through her final campaign entitled ‘One World Rent’.
The Georgist philosophy being that we should remove taxes on income and productivity and instead collect the economic rent of land.
In Vivienne’s own words, in 2019:
‘…I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, I forgot to ask someone to come into the house and water the plants.
‘In the same thought Crash Dollar! No Food!
‘The financial crash is going to be in 10 years.
‘This is global therefore nobody will be able to help anybody else. Money is worthless. There is no water left. Just to make a pair of jeans and a t-shirt costs 13 years of drinking water for one person.
‘Climate change is just part of it.
‘The financial crash is going to happen before we know the tipping point.
‘The solution is: change the economy to One World Rent.
‘There is only one way to save the world and that is a rent on land.
‘I always write land with an asterix, it includes air and the electromagnetic spectrum, ocean from which we get 1/2 of our breath (1/4 from the rainforest), the treasure underneath the ground, and the biosphere which includes humans and their cleverness.
‘The Duke of Westminster owns half of London. He owns the land; whatever is built on it or what happens on it, adds value to that land.
‘Westminster Abbey: tourists, business.
‘This value is what we mean by human cleverness.
‘Nobody can own land, land cannot be owned by everyone, that’s communism – land belongs to no-one.
‘The only payment into the public purse is rent for the use of land, no tax whatsoever, you keep what you earn.
‘Money exchange will be man to man.
‘It will give us a fair distribution of wealth, it’ll be a fair economy because it’s based on real wealth not ephemeral paper money, the world is bankrupt, financial figures are false because debt is accounted an asset.
‘The value of land will be reckoned according to nature’s own law: what’s good for the planet is good for the economy — no corruption. Change the economy — One World Rent…
‘One World Rent has been discredited through the centuries by the vested interest of landowners. Financial pundits know the system is going to crash yet they still try to tinker with it. Maybe because they’ve forgotten the solution that real wealth is land…’
Hopefully, Westwood’s words and advocacy will continue to influence her followers in more than their choice of clothing. However, until such policies are enacted, the land cycle and our climb to a peak in 2026 continues.
Best wishes,
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Catherine Cashmore,
Editor, Land Cycle Investor
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