There are not enough decent jobs that enable people to afford housing and cars! Why are governments not making any serious attempts to solve the problem? Why do people leave the economy completely up to the "free market" ? Even in the USA, impoverished people are dying from exposure, for lack of a place to sleep at night. Millions more a slaving away in minimum wage jobs, struggling to keep their "heads above the water", only a single personal emergency away from homelessness. I understand, and mostly agree with, the argument that the skilled and hard working should not have to take care of the incompetent and those that do not wish to work as hard. But the fact is that many skilled hard working people are unable to find decent paying work. So something is clearly wrong. If people in a society cannot afford to buy basic things (cars, houses), but wages for all occupations are low, then this suggests that the cost of such things is mostly due to non-labor expenses, which I suggest are mainly land and natural resources. For example, if people cannot afford medical treatment, but at the same time physicians are only have modest net incomes (which is now happening), then we need to look at other factors that could be hindering the sick from obtaining medical treatment, besides the "lazy" not being willing to care for themselves. Tax the value of land and natural resources. Then use this money to give every citizen an allowance. This allowance is to compensate them for not being able to use the privitised land. Everyone should have an equal right to the land, but actually dividing up ownership of the land would not be practical. This is the "Geolibertarian" ideology. In this way, all the people will have a source of money in addition to their wages. "When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness dos not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the orginal inheritance of the whole species.. It is no hardship to any one to be excluded from what others have produced ... But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer ... To me it seems almost an axiom that property in land should be interpreted strictly, and that the balance in all cases of doubt should incline against the properitor." John Stuart Mill "Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." Thomas Jefferson "In my opinion, the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument." Milton Friedman "A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent." Adam Smith Although there is plenty of open land in the USA, most of this land is indirectly owned by wealthy people in the cities, through ownership in agriculture corporations, or bank mortgages. In order to buy the land, one needs to work for the wealthy, who live in the cities. Unfortunately, the price of rent and housing is frequently unaffordable in these cities. There is only a limited area of land within commuting distance of the economic centers in the country. One would have to work and save for several decades living in the city before they would be able to buy less expensive land further away. Land ownership is still very relevant to the current economic system. I was actually told by an American doctor that the typical doctors in a shared office have to see ten patients per day just to cover the cost of rent! The commercial property owners are clearly getting a BIG share of the money, making it more difficult for low income people to afford care. In many suburban regions, the land underneath a house is several times as expensive as the cost of constructing a new house.
