Henry George: The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Your Sex Life

I am sorry to say, that while in Japan, one inherantly Japanese cultural experience escaped me. Love Hotels. Despite Miki often pointing out love hotels and saying 'It's a love hotel, yeah let's fuck!' one of the things about Miki is that she is actually pretty hard to read.
But Love Hotels kind of offend me. Not in any prudish way, but just that I believe that if you are suave and confident enough to find someone willing to sleep with you no third party should profit.
I mean I realise that profit is a good incentive to put condoms on the market and so fourth, but Love hotels charging couples roughly $80AU a night to fuck. How sorry I felt for the Japanese. Some third party providing a space for you. The Japanese are too polite to fuck in public parks, and too traditional to fuck at home in their parents house.
Thus some big hotel developer can poket $80AU a night just because a tristing couple needs somewhere to trist at.
And I was thinking how great it was that in a country like Australia...well then I realised that I paid rent for my room in Australia, and whilst being cheaper than a love hotel, didn't have a spa bath and fruity soaps, nor got cleaned every day (or to be honest every month) and my landlord pocketed money just so I had a roof and some walls and some see-through sliding doors postered up to achieve a space private enough to fuck in.
I hope never to be in the situation where I have sex under the same roof as my parents do. But even then, its kind of like your parents own your sex. You'd have to buy your own home before you could say that nobody was profiting from your ability to pull.
And then again, there's the bank loans, and I noticed a lot of house adds were marketing their pre-fab houses for delfin estates with attractive models walking through a display home, with a subtext of them looking lustily at all the new areas of a home they could have sex in.
I must admit, the prospect of such unbridled freedom, to have keys to a place where you and your partner can draw the blinds, take of your clothes, and have carnel relations wherever you happen to cross paths as you go about fixing dinner, looking for a CD case, or tying up newspaper stacks, this freedom is highly appealing to me.
But it seems inescapable that someone profits, from the human compulsion to totally do it.
And I remembered my introductory reading of Georgism, which said how Land was unique in that everybody needed at list enough to lie down on.
And I thought, that's it.
People profit from the joy of sex, aswell as reducing the opportunities for Japanese teenagers to have it, by depriving others of land. Property speculation.
In Japan it is merely extreme. Infact Japan is on the whole, consumerism carried to it's logical conclusion. Although China is a fierce contender for 100% brand oriented life.
Everywhere else that has private land ownership is the same. As far as I am concerned there are two excuses to have to engage a hotel for sex. A good one or a bad one.
good = you want to be romantic, and a fancy hotel sweet or bed & breakfast makes for a positive change.
bad = your wife is at home.
Apart from that, while sex should not be a gaurunteed human right, the right to have sex for free should be. And not that I mean if you need prostitutes, you shouldn't have to pay for them. But that there shouldn't be some middle man providing less service than a pimp profiteering.
But if land tax was applied, and land lost its unproductive speculative value, then the land we so desperately need to have sex on becomes available. As a further plus Chian demonstrated to me, that things like Georgism, as in simple solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, can be easily repressed and quashed by vested interests. This lends the fact that most people have never heard of 'Progress and Poverty' as creedence that it may actually work and not be some quack theory.
I'm sure the 'Australian dream' of owning your own home, shows up on statistics as averaging out to ownership at about .5 per person, that appears to be mostly couples owning a house shared.
But that would surprise me, because I'm sure that it's more like, a few people own 2-3 homes, a very very small number own 0-100 properties in 1 year, and the rest own nothing, and rent homes despite high vacancies and record home loan defaults.
The net effect is that when a land tax is introduced. Investing in property becomes less attractive. Which seems mind blowingly stupid at first.
But you have to look at why property investment is so attractive first. Here it is in a nutshell:
1. You can make money out of land, without engaging in any productive activity. Demand always exceeds supply, therefore capital appreciation.
2. If you happen to make a loss on the interest on your loan, you can deduct it from your tax in your economically productive activities. Hence even a bad investment in the traditional sense, is a good investment in the real estate sense.
3. You can buy a house or dwelling you don't need yourself, and get someone to pay off the loan who does need, albeit maybe for a temporary time, or simply cannot get loan approval.
So what happens? you remove private ownership, suddenly everyone has to pay rent, but as a tax, based on the value of the land. But the speculative value drops, the land is only as valuable as the money you can make out of it afterall. If you have to pay rent, you need it to make money. That's why unemployed people live with their parents more often than not, because they don't make money, they can't pay rent.

Simalarly, if you own a site that if you built a factory could generate $100,000 a year, you should pay rent that reflects the best use of the land. So build a fucking factory or sell it to someone who will.
Likewise same with rental properties. If there are properties whose best use is as a living abode, the land rent should reflect this, or roughly the proximaty to productive wages. then if you tried to rent land, and then on rent it for 10% you will fail, because unlike where you can provide value to a renter in a private ownership economy, you aren't contrbuting any special capital, so you should just fuck right off.
This means a house that is valued at $200k because it is in an area close to good services thus always in demand. Drops down to the value offered by those services and no more, no 'I don't mind paying a premium because I'll make it up in capital appreciation' value.
Because you can no longer afford to own a $200k property and pay 20k in tax because of it, if that house is empty. Thus the house remains for people who can use it productively.
And that extends to sex too.
Look the mechanism of Resource Rentals is simple, but takes time to appreciate it. If you are interested in how you too, can have a just and fair place to have sex, check out www.earthsharing.org.au and ask them to 'play the earthsharing game with you'
And let's end the Tyranny of Love Hotels forever.