I caught in my logs the other day someone visiting my blog from Tristan's piece way back in October about his "Essential reads". He was very flattering about my blog, but I do remember now reading it first time and wanting to defend myself against his suggestion that I was possibly the "LibDem version of a gold bug, seeing LVT as a solution to many problems as a gold bug sees a gold standard".

I admit, occasionally (well maybe more than occasionally for some) LVT seems like a religious belief, and as such one can be very zealous about it and make claims that others feel unwarranted. I know that a much more vocal LVT campaigner (yes, there are some!), Labour Land Campaign's Dave Wetzel, managed to put off a member of their NEC who works in my office because she could not believe that something for which so many beneficial claims were made had not been properly tried before now. And it is also true that for many years, the Lib Dem's own campaign group on such subjects, ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform), of which I am secretary, has focussed more or less exclusively on LVT to the exclusion of other "Economic Reforms" - indeed it has been suggested that "Economic Reform" was only included in the name to make a better acronym!

I hope we will see in 2008 ALTER and with it hopefully the Lib Dems more generally, taking a bigger interest in other economic matters. Already there are suggestions about a book of essays, similar to the Orange Book or Reinventing the State, covering all sorts of aspects of what I like to call the "Liberal Economic Tradition" (I use such a phrase because "economic liberalism" or "neo-liberalism" have all but been hijacked as pejoratives for "beggar thy neighbour" economics which is an utter travesty of the rationale of economic liberalism). We are circulating a motion on seignorage reform in the light of the Northern Rock bailout for Spring conference. And so on.

Indeed my own journey to Georgism was sparked not by an interest in LVT originally, but by reading about the debt-based privatized credit system (I could just as easily be a real "gold bug" or at least a "hard money bug"), with forays into Social Credit and similar ideas. I have said and written many times that economic liberalism is about rooting out and preventing unearned privilege. If anything is key to this it is not land per se, but an aversion to monopoly, especially monopoly conferred by government which benefits one group but disadvantages others.

But as with the late nineteenth century libertarians, anarchists and mutualists, land, in the economic sense of everything in the natural world that's just there, existing without having to join one's labour or capital to it, often finite in extent and needed for survival by most creatures on the planet, is one of the four big monopolies that underpin entrenched privilege. And whilst the others, money and the cartel that creates (and limits) credit, tariffs on trade imposed usually by governments and intellectual property are also crucially important, a better understanding of the proper relationship between humanity and its one planet and its resources is a key way to break some of these others.

It's not necessarily an a priori solution - that LVT must go before reform of these other three - but it enables, especially, the breaking of the tariff and protectionist monopoly by providing a more healthy way of government raising money that has a smaller (and mostly positive) effect on trade and economic activity than taxes on incomes or sales. It also enables a wider discussion on money - if you take away, through LVT, the capital value of land against which so much of our broad money supply is secured you also need to think about how to replace that money supply via a fairer credit supply system. If one takes the Georgist paradigm to its fullest extent, as I do, it enables a new sort of social safety net in the form of the citizens dividend - the distribution of the value of land rents to all as a Citizen's Income as of right.

So, if I focus more on LVT than these others, it's partly because I believe LVT is more saleable at the moment than, say, a wholesale change in the way we allow money to be created, and partly because I understand it better than some of these other issues. But I regard all four as ultimately necessary to build a properly liberal economy and if I have one personal wish for 2008 it would be to more fully develop some ideas for solutions to the other three.