libertarian

The libertarian response to the BabyP case

Jock — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:51:25 +0000

Over at "Letters from a Tory", the question has been posed, how would libertarians have protected BabyP. It is something I thought about quite a lot when the story first broke and I've written a long response to LFAT in the comments there. But I thought it was worth posting in its own right:

I go further, in theory at least, than even LFAT's definition of libertarianism (as one who believes the state should enforce the law). I am more of an anarchist. Though people often misunderstand that as meaning absolutely no controls on what people do and no institutions to enforce them. That is wrong; anarchists would say that in doing away with government other structures, such as a “private law society ”, would emerge that are more consenual and explicitly contract and economic incentive driven. Also anarchism rests on the core belief in self-ownership and that everyone has the right to do as they please insofar as it does not affect another’s ability to do the same.

I did think quite long and hard about how the BabyP case ought to affect that perspective. The first thing I found is that there are at least another couple of dozen incidents of the death of a child (half under one and most by parents themselves) in “child cruelty” type incidents (rather than accident or bizarre whole family suicide type incidents I assume) every year in Britain. In other words, BabyP is not the unique case that the (quite justified) moral outrage it has generated seems to suggest. Maybe it’s mostly because Haringay is seen as having “form” on this issue after Climbie. It's a "good story" that "social services gets it wrong again". Not such a good story that at least another two dozen are going on every year around the country and nobody seems to care!

But the message is that whatever various social services and child protection agencies do know they “fail” a lot more than they’re telling us. My suspicion is that this is down to most other cases being completely under the radar of the state protection apparatus until it’s too late (and if so - what use are those state agencies if they are unable to prevent the most egregious abuse because they cannot see it coming?). Determined sadists are often quite good at covering their tracks. Just look at both Fritzl in Austria and our own version in Sheffield the other week. We can be shocked and say someone must have noticed that level of abuse even with the most determined concealing by the perps, but no. It happens and nobody managed to stop it or even recognize it.

Also, even in an anarchist worldview, the care of a child is something that is a joint trust between parents and the rest of society - society would have ended up paying for the effects of his tortured life, as Martin Narey (deliberately) controversially said, if he had grown up to become a “feral yob”. Indeed, as Guido says in the comments on LAFT's post, our welfare and benefits systems include some level of perverse incentive for people to have children who probably shouldn’t; or at least shouldn’t at a point in their lives when they can barely support themselves.

At the moment then we “contract out” to effectively disinterested parties (the state - who get paid in reality whatever the outcome and only get into any bother at all in the most egregious and publicly visible cases of failure) to carry out a function more properly suited to much more local, neighbourhood, and more importantly family, scrutiny. Where, in a “market anarchist” worldview, ought such oversight to lie? Can we imagine on whom there would be an economic incentive to ensure as far as is possible the safety of someone else’s child?

As others have mentioned, institutions such as the RSPCA (though I think they have been ceded too much power often) and the RNLI, already carry out an effective job in their respective fields. Something like the NSPCC would emerge as the champion of the most vulnerable in the last resort and would in a private law society be likely to take action to defend the “self-ownership” and freedom from aggression and coercion of a child, even against its parents (if it became apparent). Should a hospital say even allow a child born to someone who has not the means or willingness to make proper provision for bringing up a child (which could probably be evidenced from their pre-natal attitude or lack of attempt to make provision) to be taken home in the first place without much more scrutiny as to how good care they’re going to get?

Remember too, that we believe that in the absence of state-capitalism and the grossly distorted playing field that creates through privilege and patronage to the detriment of the poorest, even those poorest would be better equipped economically to make provision through friendly societies and such like for health care and so on. So I’m not suggesting that the poor should not be allowed to take their babies home. Just that in such an environment it would probably be more noticeable, not less, as to which parents had even made an honest attempt to make provision or establish a support network of family first, community second and paid for assistance third, and perhaps the economic incentive might fall on the delivering hospital at least to ensure that such prima facie support was available. They could then even at that early stage alert an organization such as NSPCC or find themselves on the receiving end of a negligence claim if anything bad happened.

Finally (I think), in such a more human scale society, I suggest it would be easier, not harder, for friends and neighbours to intervene earlier. It is in most of their economic interests often too not to be supporting or fostering in their midst the sort of home circumstances in which these sort of psychotic evil doers can function with impunity. Would the mother’s partner’s sadistic friend really only have been a problem for the child? Would not neighbours and other family members have an interest in ensuring they were driven from their midst? At the moment everyone is too tied up in making ends meet in an unfair world perhaps to care too much what happens next door until it spills over more obviously into their lives.

In summary, I’m not sure I can see how in an anarchist, private law type society, it could be any worse than relying on the economically disincentivised civil servants to whom we contract out our social and neighbourly awareness “duties”. And the altogether more humane, less oppressed society that ought to result from such freedoms may well be able to intervene earlier and more consensually in order to protect their own interests as well as those of the child. read more »

Libertarians: torch bearers for big business?

Jock — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:00:43 +0000

You know who you are. Those liberals (in particular) who always claim that "libertarian free markets" will result in a corporate plutocracy, or that the current turmoil in world financial markets (yes, it's still going on you know!) is a result of "libertarian free markets". Here, especially for you (but of interest to others I hope too), is a brilliant explanation of how this mutualist understands that free markets benefit people, not corporations.

CORPORATIONS VERSUS THE MARKET; OR, WHIP CONFLATION NOW

by RODERICK LONG - LEAD ESSAY - November 10th, 2008

Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge?

No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible.

Read the rest... read more »

Repent! For the end of the state is nigh!

Jock — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:44:27 +0000

The End is Nigh
Originally uploaded by Martin~

Or, why I am really a "geo-mutualist" and why I think you should be too!

The revolution has begun. In fact it's been building for at least twenty years. When history looks back it will not probably be able to identify a particular date, but it could do worse than choose Christmas Day 1990, the day a humble academic computing geek communicated with his server in something nobody had really heard of called "hyper text". Finally there was something useful to do with the "internet" that would eventually draw in users from well outside of the ivory towers and military research facilities that developed it. Users in every corner of the world; users of every age and race; users of every background.

And what will history say about this revolution? Will it be seen as a great leap in human freedoms, capable of finally fulfilling Cobden's vision that "peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less"? Or perhaps that it heralded an era of unprecedented interference in our lives by governments?

Actually, I think it is a one way bet; that eventually it will be a revolution in human freedoms, in co-operation and in innovation. Such are the players in this brave new world; hackers working to bust the Great Firewall of China and liberate a fifth of the world's population for example; Kenyans being the first to be able to make payments quickly and simply by mobile phone; privacy technologists working to keep us one level of information security ahead of the law; game players investing ever more realistic virtual worlds; their individuality and very lack of co-ordination in many cases makes it inevitable.

What politicians can do, however, is either to make the transition long and painful, or to smooth its passage for the "good of mankind" so to speak. We can choose to stick by the state and try and keep it working just as its citizens are less and less tied to it, which will inevitably lead to more and more monitoring and restrictions; or we can choose to look at how to build alternative civic institutions and mechanisms to fulfill our needs in an era when the state has much less power to intervene at least without the force that is endemic in state action becoming more and more obvious to the point of rebellion against it.

So what is the great weapon of mass destruction that is going to bring low the state as we know it? Why, tax, of course. I'll let you into a little secret: in order to function a state needs to be able to tax: in order to tax it needs to have the ability to track transactions or peoples' wealth and changes therein. And from the taxpayer's point of view, there is every incentive to try to minimize their tax liability. Up until now, or very recently, it has been only the global super-rich who have had the means and sufficient incentive to take advantage of loopholes and allowances that enable them to choose the lowest tax jurisdiction in which to crystalize out their tax liability.

But thanks to the global and interpersonal nature of this most recent communications revolution we are on the cusp of mechanisms being easily available to the big majority of people that will enable us to minimize our "financial footsteps". When most of us only ever relate to the majority of our money through pixels on a screen or numbers on a bank statement - a small minority of trade now relies on real metal or crinkly coloured paper currency - what does it matter what those pixels are called; pounds, dollars, euro, yen? What about a completely new, essentially fictitious currency perhaps, like the "Linden Dollars" of "Second Life"?

Add e-Bay and Tesco to Second Life for example and one could imagine a world in which most of your financial transactions are conducted entirely in cyberspace, in virtual worlds that know no territorial boundaries or tax regimes (or at least that could be relocated into a sympathetic tax jurisdiction quickly if necessary), but with delivery of goods and services in the physical world. That's not to say giants like Tesco and e-Bay would necessarily be best, or would necessarily even survive the upheaval.

Those widespread international (and local) interpersonal (and business-to-business) mechanisms for sophisticated modern-day barter are now within reach and threaten the very raison d'etre of many of our longest standing institutions - banking and currency, transnational corporations built in an era when intermediaries were necessary to trade with far off lands, and ultimately the basis on which the state is founded - its monopoly of taxation. At the same time we can form non-geographic communities of genuinely voluntary co-operation in which we can build trust relationships, quasi-legal ways of dealing with disputes and so on that make trade possible with people a few short years ago we would have never had a hope of even communicating with.

So, which side are you going to be on - freedom and co-operation or ever more intrusion, regulation and restriction? And how long have we got?

Some of these technologies fall into the category of "overestimated penetration at 2 years, underestimated at 10 years." I think the state will be lucky if it has another decade of relatively easily collected taxes based on productivity, sales and incomes. If people want the state to be able to function beyond that, without increasingly authoritarian intrusion into our economic lives, we need to be looking now at how to make it pay its way through user fees for any value for money services we want it to provide. And as soon as it does of course it must also open itself to competition - else it's a monopoly again whose only rationale is to use its discretionary power to rip off the very people who both fund and use its services.

Unsurprisingly any of the various forms of land value tax will do to start with and would be especially beneficial implemented soon, near the bottom of the crash in land values currently underway. The present situation in financial markets offers an ideal opportunity for new means of trading without the sort of money so invidiously inflated and deflated by the banking cartels. Again, these alternatives could operate either on a local scale or in an international, or non-geographic trading community. Land has the singular benefit of being immoveable. You can't virtualize land as easily as you can income - for we all still need to have a base somewhere.

There's another major reason for helping this process away from the power of and dependency on nation states rather than fighting it - the state is expensive. The sort of redistributive measures required to ensure that everyone gets a fair crack at opportunity - the level playing field - are getting more and more expensive. Our interventions into the affordable housing market for example, in the form of subsidy, will continue to rise when land values rise, subsidizing the already-haves in the name of assisting the have-nots. Far better to try to ensure the fairest of level playing fields for all than trying to play uphill on a steepening playing field.

So, when you find me criticizing the state and its acolytes, it's less about what has gone on in times past - I would say times of missed opportunity for sure - but more on how we will be able to live in future, a future I think is pretty inevitable, in which the very idea of a state with the power to tax fairly will be severely compromised. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with, and dealt with soon. Will it be freedom, or more desperate attempts to maintain the ailing state structures? You choose! read more »

geo-libertarian, internet, monetary reform, mutualism, surveillance state, tax

Libertarian Alliance Conference, 2008 (Part II)

Jock — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:01:20 +0000

If there were a few comments after dinner on Saturday night at the NLC with new acquaintances, maybe even friends, about how little of the days' talks actually helped some of them understand Libertarianism as an idea (after all, the links between aging and nano-technology and Libertarianism could have been obscure without a primer in Libertarian philosophy first) Sunday began with something that more people would recognize as a Libertarian issue...

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft
Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID
Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft

Meadowcroft lectures on Public Policy at King's College London and has recently edited a book called "Prohibitions" for the Institute of Economic Affairs examining the effects of the outlawing in various parts of the world of a variety of what may be regarded as "victimless" or "consensual" goods, services and activities such as recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, pornography, prostitution, alcohol and others.

He showed how in every case the outcome for the users, consumers or participants as well as the wider community is almost always worse than the effects of that which is outlawed. These arguments should be familiar to most of my readers, for I have rehearsed them, at least in respect of recreational drugs, often enough. The handing of lucrative markets to organized crime, the lack of knowledge, information and harm minimization facilities to users, the side effects of this crime on others in the community, the corruption of public officials and so on.

It was interesting in particular to see how murder rates seem, possibly coincidentally of course, to have risen and show consistent continuing rises after the banning of guns in most countries including the UK, since this is an area I know even some Libertarians (including myself until recently) find quite difficult to argue.

Consequently, he argues, prohibition is bad public policy. Rather than assisting in preventing harm it always increases harm from things that are essentially, in the classical Liberal sense, none of the state's business - what you do with your own bodies and lives which by and large do not affect others, except with consent.

I notice that, as they apparently do with all their publications, the IEA has sent a copy of "Prohibitions" to every Member of Parliament. I am sure their mailbags are full of this somewhat higher quality of "junk mail" as no doubt some of them see it and one wonders how many of them have read it, or even passed it onto their staff to read it and brief them on it. I shall be asking Lib Dem MP Tom Brake in particular, currently embroiled in an illiberal attempt to further curtail the availability of cannabis seeds against party policy, what he thought of the book and how it affected his decision to press ahead with his ill-advised private member's bill or whatever device he used.

Over the summer, in the run up to party conference in September, a number of us noted that, for a supposedly liberal party in which one might expect prohibitions to be roundly condemned as a matter of course, that we do not have a party group, association, "ginger group" whatever you want to call it, dedicated to fighting the seeming increasing tendency by our own policy makers to join in with orgies of "bansturbation". One thing I am hoping to do is to start a group "Lib Dems Against Prohibition" and perhaps try and get a motion into Harrogate conference on the issue. Watch this space. Maybe we can get Meadowcroft up to speak at a launch event.

Following Meadoowcroft came an eagerly anticipated session by someone regarded by many, it seemed, as something of a high priest of Libertarianism, and judging by the little informal gatherings in coffee afterwards, he certainly had some new acolytes in the room...

Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I had long understood that there was a school of thought, anarchist to the core, that you don't even need to have "law enforcement" handled by the state - for many, particularly the Classical Liberals, the idea of a "minimal state" includes, more or less, only law and order and perhaps national defence as legitimate functions of that state.

Hoppe disagrees. And disagrees compellingly with answers to what might seem the most convincingly argued objections. I will definitely want to blog further about this, so I'll keep it quite brief here. Basically he argues that this Classical Liberal vision of a minimal state is a logical impossibility. Since by its very definition the state has the "territorial monopoly on arbitration" it has no incentive to minimize itself. Since it is enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, it has every incentive to increase the number of things it criminalizes to justify its own existence.

Instead, he posits the idea of a "Private Law" society in which individuals insure themselves against the aggression of others (in the widest possible sense - from breaches of contract to physical violence) in a free market of insurance providers (remember that we will have, effectively, abolished the state and certainly its ability to grant monopoly and protection to such providers). In the purest free market they will always have the incentive to pursue violators of the core maxim of non-aggression on behalf of their clients. And when disputes arise between insurers, counter-claims and the like, competing providers of arbitration (appeal) services also have an incentive to produce objectively fair outcomes. Their clients also have the greatest incentives to be themselves non-aggressors - to abuse a familiar phrase you would lose your no claims bonus if you biffed someone!

It probably needs more explanation than can be given here and as I say I want to blog about this more, because he certainly convinced me. I do, of course, have a certain disagreement with him about rights in landed property in particular that I need to think on and try and reconcile, but it a compelling vision of how a truly free society unencumbered by a monopolistic state could be considerably fairer and lead to much less rather than more confrontation and aggression simply because of the financial incentives involved.

I think it probably leaves me with one area of policy to explore further and understand better before I can call myself an individualist-anarchist - welfare, but this one is a significant step towards that! If I remember this conference for just one thing, it will have been Hoppe's contribution, I am sure. And inspired choice of speaker whom we were extremely lucky to get hold of who explained what will for many be one of the far outer reaches of Libertarianism that even many "hard core" Libertarians will have been challenged by I suspect.

And so, from the most theoretical talk of the weekend to what must be one of the most pressing issues for anyone concerned about our liberty in a very practical sense here in the UK...

Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID

Again, this session deserves a blog post of its own, and so I will keep this brief. Most of us in the room were I am sure already pretty united in our opposition to the National ID card program being prosecuted by the Labour government. But for me, however strong that opposition, it has largely been from the heart - the "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing" of Clarence Henry Wilcock in 1950 quoted by Nick Clegg in his leadership campaign and since.

Guy Herbert provided the intellectual ammunition for me argue from the head and not just the heart, to understand the sinister machinations in government, and especially the bureaucracy that have attempted to foist this controlling policy on us for most of the last century. Indeed, I came away with the distinct impression that the Leviathan has been trying this for decades and all that is new is that they have finally found a government stupid or naive enough to swallow its arguments and agree to it!

At its heart, the National Identity Register (the database) is the most important issue (this much I knew, but perhaps not why). The state seeks to create the "single source of truth about the citizen", to fundamentally revolutionize the very definition of personhood, from independent individual, who is known through the various connections and activities they do to one in which it is only possible legitimately to exist with the permission of the state and the possession of its membership card.

The superficially beneficial arguments for having ID cards; that they will make your dealings with the state from which you benefit - welfare, health and so on, more efficient; that you will be better able to prove who you are in a whole range of circumstances; and, the worst, that it will help in the "War on Terror" - we've all heard them, and they do give the idea of a policy intended to help us - are not only superficial, but that the real agenda is not actually understood by most of the politicians charged with selling the idea to us.

That real agenda is about control and knowledge, the most intricate web of knowledge about every one of us. It seems likely, for example, that we will need to present our ID to rent hotel rooms, to buy mobile phones, to get bank accounts, insurance, perhaps even to rent your home, and that every time your ID is checked in one of these situations that will be logged against your entry in the National Identity Register. It will so fundamentally alter the balance between the state and the individual that it can be properly termed totalitarian. And even if implemented y people with benign motives is hugely open to abuse, both now in the sense of incompetence as the government has shown in data loss scandals over the past year and in the future in the hands of who knows what flavour of government with more sinister agendas.

Forget the politicians' assurances that safeguards will be implemented. Even since it was announced the functions the database will fulfill have ballooned more than most of us appreciate, can be extended without reference to parliament and are almost entirely in the hands of bureaucrats who do want to know every last thing about you in their area of responsibility. It is truly scary, sinister stuff, and as I say I will return to it again no doubt. And the worst part of it of course is that many, even most people accept the platitudes of politicians that this will be good for us.

I believe it is no longer acceptable for those political parties and individuals who say they oppose ID Cards and the ID Register to have little blog buttons or mere "oppositional" press releases, or "stunts" like saying we will go to jail rather than register for one, we have to up our arguments and explain more precisely the menacing revolution that the whole project threatens. If you only watch one video from the conference, I urge you to watch this one and like me, hopefully learn about the real agenda in more depth, and be appalled!

And so to the final session....

Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

No disrespect to Marc-Henri Glendinning but I confess after all the excitement of Hoppe and the surge of anger generated by Herbert, it seemed a little surreal to end the day with post-modernist philosophy and, whilst I certainly wasn't switched off by this stage I will need to watch this session again to understand it and be able to comment on it more fully!

I did pick up on the general idea that (at least the vanguard and leadership of) the statist left have metamorphosized from what was at least an intellectually honest and fundamentally well-meaning promotion of socialist redistribution with an image of a fairer society, to one which is superficially much more "cuddly", that seems to provide succour and answers to everyone in a supposedly more free mixed economy and society but which masks a more insidious creeping totalitarianism that is anything but benign, putting the state at the centre and subjugate the individual. Beyond that, though, I will need to revisit the session to tell you any more.

And so ended one of the most intellectually stimulating and varied weekends I have ever had I think. I will need, as I said, one of David Friedman's nano-bot enhanced brains I think to be able to really thoroughly cogitate on the many ideas, some new to me, some just newly explained, I got out of the whole event. And I have material enough to keep my blogging controversial enough till next year's conference!

Everyone who helped arrange the weekend and all the speakers are to be commended, and the rest of the audience helped make it a convivial weekend in all sorts of ways in the formal sessions and in the more informal breaks and dinner. The "broad church" of Libertarianism was there for all to see, and I only wish that we could have had more Lib Dems there, perhaps ones skeptical about Libertarianism, for I am sure they would have had many of their misconceptions - in particular that Libertarianism is some selfish right wing "beggar thy neighbour" creed dispelled. read more »

drugs laws, surveillance state

For those of you who think you know all there is to know about libertarianism because neo-liberal Ronald Reagan said...

Jock — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:29:32 +0000

...that "government is the problem", or because anti-regulator Alan Greenspan named Ayn Rand as his biggest political influence, it's time you did some reading.

Each year the Libertarian Alliance awards the Chris R Tame Memorial Prize (named for the late founder of the Libertarian Alliance) for the best essay on a title chosen by its Director, Dr Sean Gabb, and this year's winner was announced this weekend at the Libertarian Alliance annual conference at the National Liberal Club - more on which in upcoming posts.

The Libertarian Alliance is the biggest grouping of the broad church known as Libertarianism in the UK, and this year's essay title was set just ahead of the main round of recent financial market troubles but focussing on the common idea that Libertarians would demolish the state, leaving what we currently know as big corporate capitalism to run amok. The full brief for contestants ran as follows:

Essay Title: "Can a Libertarian Society be Described as 'Tesco minus the State'?"

Explanatory Note

Many socialists and conservatives regard libertarians as cheerleaders for big business. Our belief in free enterprise is understood as support for the bigger, and therefore the more successful, corporations - General Motors, Microsoft, HSBC, Tesco, and so forth - and for an international financial system centred on the City of London.

Some libertarians are happy to be so regarded. They dislike the way in which big government provides opportunities for big business to acquire privileges that shelter it from competition. Even so, they believe that a world without government, or a world with much less government, would be broadly similar in its patterns of enterprise to the world that we now have. It would be much improved, but not fundamentally dissimilar.

Other libertarians disagree. They regard big business as fundamentally a creation of big government. Incorporation laws free entrepreneurs from personal risk and personal responsibility, and allow the growth of large business organisations that are bureaucratically managed. These organisations then cartellise their markets and externalise many of their costs. The result is systematic distortion of market behaviour from the forms it would take without government intervention. These libertarians often go further in their analysis by denying the legitimacy of intellectual property rights and ownership rights in land beyond what any individual can directly use.

Where do you stand in this debate? Are you broadly comfortable with a global capitalism that is raising billions of people from starvation towards affluence. Or are you a radical with a vision of a society that has never yet been tried and is as alien and even frightening to most people as anything promised by the Marxists.

You tell us.

No go and read the winning essay. Congratulations go to Keith Preston, for his entry entitled "Free enterprise: the antidote to corporate plutocracy"

But if you are too lazy to read the whole lot (c 3000 words - so no more than one of my usual posts!), it concludes...

"An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries,peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy. "

Now, you may still not be convinced that "government is the problem", but do us the decency of not conflating "deregulation" with "evil right wing global corporatism" and blaming "libertarianism" for the great big pile of dog-doo the state and economy is in right now. Especially those of you who claim to be Liberals, fellow travelers of Libertarianism for the past 150 years. read more »

Private charity, voluntary co-operation or state welfare

Jock — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:56:26 +0000

One of the most common points of disagreement between, let's call them "state-interventionists" and "non-interventionists", is the claim that "non-interventionism" would leave the poorest in society on the scrap heap with no welfare, no support. That the much vaunted idea of "non-interventionists" that "private charity" or "voluntary co-operation" would take the place of state welfare is just an impossible pipe dream. So determinedly do "state-interventionists" believe their own claims that they frequently castigate "non-interventionists" as heartless uncaring selfish individualists who would rather see others die than pay taxes. One quote from a Lib Dem Voice "discussion" just today will give you the general idea:

"Well none of them [Libertarians] are serious, because it an incoherent philosophy....send the kids back down the mines, it’s only a lifestyle choice."

And to an extent, I used to believe that propaganda. As a geo-libertarian of course I do have an answer of sorts - the basic income derived from land user fees (which would on their own create an almost unimaginably more equitable society in any case) would cover the basics of life for everyone, and give everyone an incentive to top it up with as much or as little work as they can manage.

But a recent discussion on a "non-interventionist" mailing list I've been frequenting recently has challenged the basic assumption of this debate for me. Would people really not contribute voluntarily to the upkeep of others if you don't have a government apparatus threatening them with the confiscation of their property and ultimately the loss of their freedom unless they pay their taxes?

It is a strange proposition. Governments for at least the last sixty years have been supporters at some level or another of some form of state welfare. They may argue about how much is appropriate but the fact is, people have overwhelmingly voted for a state that takes money from you in order to give some of what's yours to someone deemed "less fortunate". We even have a cliche about the inevitability of death, and taxes.

We have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who do voluntarily give up their time to care for another. Most people are someone's relative, someone's friend, someone's colleague. And whilst I recognize that some do not have such support networks and would still require some form of collective support, most people do not want to see their friends and relatives on skid row or worse.

One has to wonder whether the interventionist route actually makes things worse. And in how many ways. When we look at our pay packets do we not think often that we've given quite enough for the support of others through our taxes thank you very much. National Insurance and Income Tax between them effectively make the worker near forty per cent worse off. I know what I would do with an extra forty per cent each month. It would pay the interest bill on the piece of land we have just acquired for our first Community Land Trust for a start.

Other taxes and protectionist policies keep the prices we pay for basics artificially high and create incentives for companies to produce cash cows rather than exciting developments. I'll bet if we didn't guarantee one pharmaceutical company a contract for however many millions of doses of Metformin diabetes pills every year a dozen others would have put the effort in to find a cure, not a chronic treatment regime.

The attempt to do welfare as a "universal" system, with the same rules for everyone, means a bloated bureaucracy enforcing inflexible regulations. If welfare were, say, to be dealt with at the parish level, and the barriers to job creation caused by taxes eradicated, I'll bet you more people would be found some work, appropriate to their abilities, even if it didn't give them everything they need and then people would feel much better about helping them out with the rest - because they were trying to help themselves as best they could. We have no way of measuring that at a national level really.

We have a Professor here at Brookes, a chap called Steven King. His area is the History of Welfare mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries - probably the period which received wisdom says was the harshest environment if you were poor or hapless. But I was fascinated by a lecture he gave a couple of years ago on being elevated to the professoriate (you are elevated to that aren't you?). Apparently when parishes were responsible for pensions, those who actually got a pension - those whom their own peers and neighbours if you like knew had simply tried and been unable to support themselves (in common parlance I guess the "deserving poor") would get on average 75% of the average working wage for their area. For others there were varying levels of support down to a pretty basic safety net that was intended to be subsistence rather than comfortable for those they felt were "swinging the lead".

And then there's the problem of administrative costs. If I had an extra 40% in my pay packet and was going to give it away, I'd know that the people or organizations I was giving it to would get all of my donation. I'll bet for the 40% the state apparatus take off me in taxes, probably half actually gets to someone who needs it, to direct service delivery, if that.

So, given all those disadvantages of, and the singular advantage that people actually vote for, this tax based welfare system at some level or another, is it not just possible that by doing away with all that coercion, all that centralization, all that unproductive bureaucracy, the people who get to keep what they earn would be quite proud to "do the right thing" by their neighbours and communities? If they vote at the ballot box to have money taken off them by the state for things they obviously believe are necessary, would they suddenly feel they were not necessary or that they should not contribute towards those same things without the threats of the state? Isn't that a totally illogical position? You'd vote for it but not do it if the people you vote for didn't force you to do it?

And so, at the very least, would it not be at least a courtesy to accept that Libertarianism is an optimistic creed; that it is positive about humanity's innate ability and even need to help each other. You may call that a naive optimism. But I'd rather be a glass half full freedom lover than the glass half empty authoritarian approach that says humanity will not help itself unless it is forced to do so by the agents of a state apparatus that may, just may, cause more problems than it actually solves. Libertarian is not a "devil may care/beggar thy neighbour" philosophy but one that places the utmost faith in people, as individuals, to know and do what is right.

And as to whether it is a "coherent philosophy" or not, I submit that "non-interventionism" is the only truly coherent philosophy in the game. For once you admit the state can do one thing better than we can through voluntary co-operation, you inevitably end up in endless arguments between factions about just how much the state can do better, and the ultimate end of that arms race is totalitarianism - that the state can do everything better than voluntary co-operation. Which is manifestly not true. read more »

Politicians: masters, or servants? And of whom?

Jock — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:21:43 +0000

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead! read more »

The Greenpeace Defense

Jock — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 12:08:43 +0000

Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat. One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born. If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation. read more »

Why should the state validate your existence?

Jock — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:27:02 +0000

Following on the theme from my post this morning about how we could protect data about us held by agencies of the state by using a sort of a personal key and PIN like your bank's call centre has to validate with you before they can access your data, my mind wandered onto other uses for such a key.

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that the internet in particular and modern communications in general represent a great threat to the balance of power between states (and incidentally also global "intermediary" corporations) and their citizens. I say threat, but it's only a threat if you are in a position of power in a state or corporation seeking to continue to exert control over your citizens. Indeed, for the individual, it is the greatest potential opportunity, and the vehicle by which Richard Cobden's quote at the top of this blog's front page may become reality: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."

Many of our institutions - governments, trans-national corporations, even currency - evolved to deal with issues of trust between people who would likely never have personal contact with each other in ever more remote markets. When trading, you've got to be able to trust that you will be paid for example - one person's "IOU" is not as good a guarantee as piece of paper endorsed collectively by an entire state - a national currency.

But we have an ever increasing range of other innovations to help us trust each other; developments that are increasing quickly with the advance of the internet. We can access our credit files, we can buy digital certificates that help give others confidence to trade with us over the web because they guarantee we are who we say we are and so on. So why not shift these into the "real world".

Why do we actually need, say, a passport to travel across borders, issued by a nation state, when we could have just as secure a guarantee of who we are through some kind of personal digital certificate from an organization bearing the risk, with strong encryption embedded in it? The British government keeps trying to sweeten its totalitarian ID card scheme by telling us, amongst other things, that it will make proving our identity to others in all sorts of transactions much easier. But in fact the history of government involvement in protecting the source data of those identities is appalling, and, as the technology gets more pervasive it seems to be getting worse.

How much confidence can you have in a government issued identity mechanism when so much data has gone missing already? Those identities are, thanks to state incompetence, all but worthless. Of course that's why, partly at least, they want to take biometric data. But in computer security it is generally accepted that being able to produce "something you have" (say a credit card or internet digital certificate) and "something you know" - a password, PIN, or private digital encryption key is far better than ony one or other of these pieces of information on its own. So far as I can see the ID card system, or the passport, with or without a national identity register, does not fulfill both of these - only the former. It is inherently weaker than the commercially available alternatives.

So, why not replace the need for passports issued by a state with identity mechanisms authenticated by trusted corporate or social organizations for whom financial success or failure rests on people being able to trust the people they certify. So you could have a personal account with Thawte as the primary guarantor, for example, and that certificate could be counter-signed by a certificate from other organizations, such as governments, who want to "mark your card" as one of their citizens, granting you the protections normally written on a passport.

It's not easy to get some of these certification authorities to guarantee your bona fides. You need often as much verification as you do to get a passport with other trusted people verifying who you are and so on. But you would not need to give these data to the poroous security mechanisms of the state which has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they cannot keep the information secure, nor does it offer the other benefit of a private contract - the ability to sue the ass off them if they damage your reputation or security by losing your data - or the corporate incentive of only being able to make a profit if you actually deliver on what people expect of you.

And you also get a choice of how strong you want the certification to be. If it's only guaranteeing small personal trades for example, you may only need to spend a few pounds and fill in a quick web form, validate your address and you're in business. If you want to travel overseas, or deal in bigger sums, or trade with distant counterparties, you may want stronger levels of guarantee and pay accordingly. It's a global standard pretty well too. So you'd have no problems using it to prove your identity in all sorts of applications - travel, trade, opening a bank account, starting a company, getting insurance, benefits, accessing what little data about you the state actually needs and so on - none of which would need to be on any single central database owned by a bunch of data-incontinents like the government is proving to be with the attendant dangers of losing all your data at once.

So, you see, we no longer even need governments to help us prove who we are. And in fact they appear to be singularly bad at doing so. The threat inherent in this is that the currently all powerful state needs to be able to do this, or it loses control of its citizens. And they are shit scared of that. If we are not mindful, in their lust to maintain that power they will get immensely more authoritarian and intrusive. The time is coming when we will no longer need them. We must do all we can to hasten that day before they get their claws in too deep into these emerging trust mechanisms. read more »

Hari's Game: not even in the right ballpark

Jock — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:07:50 +0000

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever. read more »

localism, mutualism