Micro Apartment

January 24, 2013

(from)

This has an amazing amount of really smart ideas packed into a really small space… but it has (by the looks) had a fair bit of money thrown at it.

Normally I find “how to live in a shoe-box” type things a bit annoying – basically because the living-space prices are stupidly high because we’ve been partially enslaved by banks and landlords. The once rare, and soon to be very famous speech by Winston Churchill puts it fairly well:

No matter where you look or what examples you select, you will see every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream for himself, and everywhere today the man or the public body that wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior one, and in some cases to no use at all.

All comes back to land value, and its owner is able to levy toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of every benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community increases the land value and finds its way automatically into the landlord’s pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able to move forward, because the workers can afford to pay a little more. If the opening of a new railway or new tramway, or the institution of improved services of a lowering of fares, or of a new invention, or any other public convenience affords a benefit to workers in any particular district, it becomes easier for them to live, and therefore the ground landlord is able to charge them more for the privilege of living there. – Winston Churchill

He’s right – and this is wrong. If we’re going to move into an era of abundance, then we need to tax land value – we need to stop this situation where landlords and banks “charge us for the privilege of living”.

We ain’t going nowhere without land reform.

Meantime I guess, it’s shoeboxes. It shouldn’t be shoeboxes though.

The only reason we have to live in shoe-boxes is that we’ve allowed a situation where our elected politicians look after the interests of the rich, while fobbing the rest of us off with spin – and the MSM goes along with it.

But don’t mind me. I live in New Zealand – and we have the highest housing-costs in the world. It averages out at 30% of income – and unless I’m much mistaken, that is exactly the situation that Europeans came to New Zealand to get away from.


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