The fundamental mechanism which is posited as the failsafe of the modern economic equation is supposed to be the adjustment of the inflationary index through government changes in interest rates. That Gordon Brown made it the first major change of his appointment at the Treasury to hand over this mechanism to the Bank of England is further complicated by his condition that mortgage repayments would be excluded from the inflationary index. Such a move, suggests Harrison, entrenches an already debt-burdened middle class with a multi-faceted paradox which requires a deep analysis of the real cause of inflation and recession as the speculative interests of property developers.

Through an exhaustive debate as to the historical and contemporary causes of speculative gains he outlines the case for a split in understanding between the creation of wealth through productive labour and the manipulation of the national product by investors who use the exclusion of land values from the economic equation as their tool. On this count it is perhaps indicative of the nature of this dilemma that he says on the one hand that the experts not only differ but actually admit to their confusion, and on the other that there is nevertheless a logic to the phenomenon of Boom Bust which can be derived from the historical process of mortgage borrowing through the creation of Building Societies, and the more obscure facts of social demography such as industrial displacement and longevity.

Turning to America and the Dot Com bubble his analysis takes on a more global perspective in light of the inability of Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve to alleviate soaring speculation-fuelled inflation of not only the futures market on the internet, but more interestingly, it’s effect on the property market in Silicon Valley. Although he shows that it is again the process of monopolisation of the scarce commodity of development land which spikes the market, and that therefore the fluctuation of interest rates created by restrictions on money supply merely squeezes an over-extended demand, this is exacerbated by the existence, or even non-existence, of electronic currency, especially in relation to companies which had yet to produce anything at all.

The book takes Australia as a case study for an evaluation of the possibility of preventive action in the form of a tax on speculative investment in the property market. This, as he demonstrates, has taken various forms in the modern context, but none as far-reaching, as his figures suggest, as a total shift in emphasis such as the Single Tax advocated by Henry George would have if applied to the examples he quotes. Given the relative ease by which Australia’s property market can be statistically analysed, he proposes that a full-scale implementation of a land value tax would entirely fund the public purse based on the unearned gains which have been made by private investors. More relevant perhaps is the surprising observation that a comparison between Australia and Japan yields some interesting facts about the density of population in relation to the land mass and therefore the relative availability of development land.

This last fact somewhat prefigures a rather weak advocacy of a return to a more holistic philosophy of land use and it is surprising to find that he champions the unrewarded labourer, not as a means to restoring social equality, but as a spur to greater productive efficiency. Perhaps the two are the same, but in the context of his passing remark that LVT could facilitate a future where private ownership could become more equitable, I feel that Fred is veering more towards a ’free-market’ paradigm than his otherwise neo-romantic evocation of traditional agriculture might imply.