futurology

I've blogged about the future of money and the possibility of virtualizing most of your monetary transactions before. With the current campaign against tax havens it's perhaps worth pointing this one out:

Online game gets banking licence Entropia has regularly mixed real and virtual finances. Online game Entropia Universe has been granted a licence to be a bank. Issued by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the licence means the game can be more closely tied to the real world finances of players. [From BBC NEWS | Technology | Online game gets banking licence]

Now the article goes on to say that the Swedish banking authorities will be regulating the system, able to inspect accounts to ensure it's not being used for money laundering and so on. And that accounts in the online system will be covered by the same depositors' insurance as "real world" banks. But with the technology now quite well established there seems no reason why such systems could not run as virtual financial centres without any regulation at all.

Indeed, in researching software for my own mutual partnership banking project I even discovered that there is an open source "central bank" management system out there. I believe these development are inevitable. Governments that seek to prevent them will have to become extremely intrusive into their citizens' affairs. They had better get used to the idea and find different things to tax (like land, that you can't very easily "disappear" into the ether) or risk becoming ever closer to totalitarian.

Earlier I spent a very pleasant, if slightly nerve-wracking, evening "chairing" the final "Meet the Author" session of my employer, Oxford Brookes University's, "Love and Justice Month". Our guest author, and an honorary graduate from the 2008 round of graduations, was Teresa Hayter, author of "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls".

Teresa is a long time campaigner against immigration controls and the asylum machismo that tabloid editors and leading politicians promulgate and revel in. She was a founder member of the Campaign to Close Campsfield (with which Lib Dem MP Evan Harris is often involved) way back in 1993 when I barely knew the place existed. Campsfield is one of the several Immigration Reception/Detention/Removal (whatever the phrase is this year) centers with which our government pursues its racist, authoritarian, violent and at times lethal "war on the foreign poor".

Towards the end of the discussion session after Teresa's inspiring talk one person asked what the practical political and social implications would be of a completely open borders policy. And it struck me; just what is a state without borders? After all, one view of the state is that it is the territorial monopoly of arbitration. And if you don't demarcate that territory somehow, beat the bounds, spray like a wandering dog-fox the limits of that monopoly, in what way are you a state at all?

Now, the free movement of people is one thing (and I agree, absolutely, with it), but it seems to me that it is just a visible and, to an extent, preventable - in the sense that you can turn people around; treat them like shit and send them home to God knows what - symptom of the new global world we live in.

As I have written many times before, the communication networks that now span the globe make our less visible borders much more porous. Whether it is forming alliances with like minded people in other countries (for good or ill), moving capital around the globe to take advantage of favourable tax regimes, trading with ever smaller units of production, gradually sidelining the mighty intermediary trans-national corporations in favour of dealing with individuals and smaller and medium sized enterprises in other countries.

And you know, it may sound obvious, but we need to remember, recognize for the first time for some, that the genie of globalization (whilst the definition of what that means might be in dispute) is well and truly out of the bottle. We no longer live in a world in which China is "over there somewhere" - a blob on a map that was never pink but about which we knew little - or in which someone in a shanty town in Mumbai cannot see live images of the once "mother country" and aspire to some different life. Or in which we can be oblivious to goings on in the "dark continent" between Dr Livingstone's occasional letters home. In which football competitions are between small towns and cities in one country or the players all from the local community.

Yet, for all our former national adventurous spirit, colonizing an empire on which the sun never set, here we sit, cowering on our rock off the edge of Europe besieged by the idea that everyone wants to come here and destroy our way of life or that our tax revenues are steadily going down the drain in some tax haven somewhere. Migration is a two way thing. For all that people do want to come here, we should be matching that with still pioneering people going out into the wider world. But our world seems to want to enforce some kind of permanence through its nation states - you belong to one or another, very occasionally a couple at the same time, which crystalizes both the desires and fears of migration.

Rather than people choosing to come here for a job for a few years and then heading off somewhere else, or even just "back home", our immigration controls make people choose between staying permanently or going permanently (unless, that is, you happen to come from a most favoured rich country). If we are truly in a globalized world we should be feeling a lot freer than, say, we were thirty years ago when my parents as ex-pats dragged me around various African countries, to do just that: a job here, a job there, a holiday somewhere else, some time back home; all the time maximizing the return from each of our skills.

And if we don't pick up that challenge, if we choose to turn our backs and pretend that old world of bi-monthly dispatches from the colonies is still how it is "out there", like a child hiding our eyes and believing that because we can't see others they can't see us, the alternative is very grim indeed; a war of all against all. And, like that child, it is a scary world out there - we don't know quite what would happen if we open up here, open up there.

I happened to be reading Hayek's postscript to the "Constitution of Liberty" too the other day in which he explains "Why I am not a conservative" and I probably for the first time realized the essential difference between liberal and conservative. Liberty demands a leap into the unknown. Authority, conservative or socialist, on the other hand demands a plan. Without that plan they cannot feel in control; without being damn sure, or as sure as they can be, about the outcome, they dare not proceed; true "progress" is stopped in its tracks. And it seems innate in our collective psyche - how many times have I been explaining what I think is a bright new idea to find the first question on everyone's lips is "where have they done this before" - and that's just amongst my "liberal" friends!

At an individual level, there is a vast industry in "life coaching"; trying to teach us to push our boundaries, leave our comfort zone, to trust that we can overcome whatever obstacles may fall into our path when we branch off into new experiences and journeys. We are told that's what makes us grow, to succeed; that without pain there is no gain, or that discomfort is what makes us stronger through dealing with it. But at the level of the state, of government, we do not heed that same advice.

Some, usually on what they call the "left", bleat on that libertarian policies would mean a "return" to a vicious, beggar everyone else "Victorian laissez-faire" world (which I keep reminding them in vain was precisely the system which prompted the early anarchists and libertarians to work against the state entrenched systemic inequity and monopolies they saw skewed the outcome of that laissez-faire) in which there would be no support for the poor and hapless. They need to learn to trust in humanity. We have been "schooled" for over a century now into a more or less consensus that we do need to help support some others who cannot help themselves. The authoritarian will say only the "state" can ensure that mutual assistance can be assured fairly. That if we take that state away, there would be no hospitals, no schools, or that they would be only exclusive, unavailable to many or even most of the population. But in doing so, that state is necessarily coercive, illiberal, and suffocating.

We need to free people up to care, not to subcontract caring to some state entity that at best has only a partial mandate. And we will choose, at times, not to care - or at least to prioritize caring for ourselves over others when we barely have enough for ourselves. We can only guess that, on balance, there will always be enough people choosing to care such that those who are less fortunate through no fault of their own are not left defenseless or destitute. It's not a plan and it's inherently difficult to manage, predict or measure but it is what liberty is about.

But the world is getting smaller all the time. If we do not free ourselves from that micro-managed planned outcome authority on our own, it may become inevitable anyway simply because the Cnut-like alternative is too horrible for even the statists to contemplate or when we peasants realize how horrible what they contemplate for us looks like. We may as well choose to trust in a positive vision of humanity rather than get more and more worked up about defending the status-quo until something gives, suddenly and explosively.

No wonder the Big Brother state is getting worried about all these pressures on it. Lots of powerful and wannabe powerful, or just self-important, people are threatened with being cut down to size; people who think they know better than the rest of us and want the opportunity to force their vision on the rest of us. Let us hope us serfs begin to get agitated!

When some of us heard David Friedman at the Libertarian Alliance Conference a few months ago talking about his new book "Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World" he wowed us with the possibility that nano-machines capable of fixing significant internal illnesses would be available within a few years. I wonder if this is quicker than even he expected:

Tiny submarines which can be injected into the blood to deliver cancer drugs straight to tumours have been developed by scientists. [From Tiny submarines 'can deliver cancer drugs straight to tumours' - Telegraph]

Apparently they use all natural materials that occur in the human body so that the immune system will not reject them and are a hundred times smaller than body cells themselves. Fantastic stuff. Presumably the possibility of things like routine cleaning out of the vascular system and so on come into play too.

Publications referred to in this story, which if you buy them via this link will earn me some money:

"Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World" (David D. Friedman)

Nick Clegg has a piece in the Independent this morning repeating his suggestion of last week that we should consider joining the Euro. Not, it has to be said, now and in a hurry - he does not see it as a way out of the mess the financial markets are in - but in recognition that the world after this crisis will be a different economic landscape in which ganging up together with Europe may outweigh the loss of credibility the City of London will have wrought on itself. He concludes:

But given the gravity of the economic crisis in Britain, and our unique exposure to international financial markets, silence about the euro must end. The future has never been more uncertain. People are increasingly desperate for stability in our economic affairs. We must be ready to think anew. [From Nick Clegg: We should consider joining the euro - Commentators, Opinion - The Independent]

Indeed, we must think anew, but alas the Euro is still part of the old world not the new. It is the system itself that is broken. It is true that one could argue that the Euro is slightly different from the rest of the system in that its central bank is not controlled by a single government with spending plans it would like to get that central bank to finance. At the moment that is; and God forbid that it ever should - we don't want these people to have any control over our lives, as liberals, do we?

If the Euro is able to survive the current crisis, with the pressures of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland at least threatening to break all the rules, it will be a stronger currency I am sure if it emerges out the other side, but how long would it take for it to be ready to absorb an economy the size of the UK's?

Then also I notice talk that the BRIC countries, and at least China and India, as global creditor nations, will hold a lot of sway when the G20 meets in a few weeks time, are resurrecting something similar to Keynes' idea of the Bancor as a sort of a supra-national reserve currency. I doubt that they will readily accept a switch from one "national" reserve currency to another. The very notion of a reserve currency linked to one particular geopolitical grouping skews the system against all the other nations by effectively ensuring they have to buy that reserve currency in order to trade. In the new world where these economies are nipping at our heels it is economic imperialism, and protectionist, to believe we have a right to be some global super-currency.

I really think we have to begin to look beyond the era of "central banking" - it's not like it's been around that long - less than a century in reality. It has proven time and again to be a hostage of markets owing to the moral hazard inherent in the private banking system knowing they will be baled out in a crisis and has been a constant source of inflation. Not even our most monetarist governments have been able to control the money supply. It is one of the great monopolies that our liberal predecessors knew were a great cause of inequity.

As well as establishing this group to look at the electoral use of technology, the party needs to establish a group of, if you like, futurologists, to look at how the technological advances, especially in communications, over the past couple of decades can facilitate even more wide ranging changes right down to the institutions we have accepted till now as the very life-blood of the economy. The genie is out of the bottle, we are in a new epoch, and it seems to me that the opportunity this financial crisis affords us to do away with some of the old and facilitate the new is unmissable.

For those of you highly skeptical of my prediction that the internet will cause the nation state as we know it to be unable to tax fairly incomes or transactions in goods and services and so cease to exist in its current form , here's a slightly different angle on it at Reason...

It seems to have finally dawned on the US government that whatever laws and regulations they pass, they will not be able to ban offshore internet gambling:

In other news this week about the internet and real life colliding, we also had Second Life being cited in a divorce case in the UK and a Japanese woman sued for murdering her husband's online persona.

Which are you going to be - more restrictions, ultimately futile; or building new mutual institutions to help deliver public goods in an era of a reduced ability to collect tax?

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!

I've just spent a fantastic weekend in the hallowed halls of the National Liberal Club at the annual Libertarian Alliance conference. If, like me, you see yourself as more of a theoretical policy wonk doing the background stuff of coming up with ideas, rather than the rather more practical work of debating actual proposals and then selling them on the doorstep, this was the perfect sort of a conference. A little like spending an entire party conference in the various fringe events where hand picked speakers with great ideas to sell challenge the little gray cells rather than in the sort of "win or lose" arguments over specific policy proposals of the main conference debates.

Yes, since going to Lib Dem conferences over the past few years, I have found the latter enjoyable, I don't think I've been on the winning side of a controversial debate yet, but this sort of event is where, I think, policies are incubated and born out of ideas presented by people with brains the size of several planets each or you gain the intellectual ammunition with which to turn that losing streak in policy debates into winning arguments.

I've come away from it with both many new acquaintances, a reading list that will probably take me till doomsday to get through and enough controversial ideas to keep my many sceptical Lib Dem friends arguing till, oh, next year's LA conference. I shall work up several ideas into blog posts of their own in the forthcoming weeks and months but to start with I thought I'd give a quick overview of the sessions and speakers. All the sessions were being filmed and will eventually appear on the LA website to refer to so if I fail miserably to pass the essential detail on, you'll be able to watch the originals should you wish...

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray
Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers
Session 3 - "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield
Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray

Aubrey is a fun, and at times controversial, biologist at Cambridge University working on the science of "fixing" the aging process. There are, apparently, two conventional approaches to dealing with the problems of aging. Basically, at the moment, from the moment we are created we start storing up the means of our own death. The very processes that keep us alive, metabolism, causes damage in our cells and throughout our bodies. That damage builds up until the body can no longer prevent it becoming one of the many illnesses associated with aging and that eventually, if we are not killed first by an external event, it will kill us. Globally, 100,000 out of the 150,000 people who die each day die of these conditions, which can be and usually are extremely unpleasant, often very painful and upsetting both for the sufferers and those who witness it - loved ones and carers.

One "school" of dealing with aging, "geriatrics" focuses on trying to prevent that damage becoming pathology ie developing the illnesses that will kill us. But it is ultimately futile. It is not repairing or removing the damage, just holding back the time it takes to become dangerous to us. And we cannot do that indefinitely.

The other traditional approach, "gerontology", focusses on trying to stop metabolism creating the damage in the first place. It sounds more promising, until you realise how little we actually know about metabolism. There is just so much that we cannot yet understand enough to prevent it causing damage, and therefore eventually pathology.

But there is a third, emerging approach that focuses on maintenance. De Gray made the analogy of a car - if you maintain it rigourously you can make it last more or less forever. And so this approach to aging focuses on repairing and eradicating the damage and maintaining cells. Repairing the damage means it does not build up enough to become pathology. As science, mostly microbiology, is constantly evolving, the types of damage we can repair increase. And because we are acting on the observable damage, there are a finite number of types of damage to focus on. We can see the damage metabolism creates much better than we understand the processes that lead to the damage.

De Gray and his team believe that at a very conservative estimate of the rate of development of the techniques required to repair various types of damage (some are easier, some still distant dreams of course) within 42 years we could have the ability to extend life by thirty years by repairing half of the types of damage we observe. So the current assumption is that the first person who will be able to live to 150 years old is already alive today and people currently in their thirties may be in time to have their lives extended by about thirty years over heir current life expectancy.

But as we move forward and discover mechanisms to deal with more types of damage, so we can repeat the "full body service" and begin to extend life out beyond the 150 years, indeed almost indefinitely. Again, given the rate of discovery, De Gray calculates that the first person to be able to live to 1,000 years will only be twenty years younger than the first person that will live to 150.

Such a prospect of course raises all sorts of issues, ethical, cost, policy and so on. But De Gray's conclusion was that given the amount of suffering that aging causes, and the costs to society of dealing with that suffering, we should not be put off from pursuing it. If, eventually, we have to answer some of the more difficult questions - what will the world's population look like if we can live effectively forever, and should we create ways in which someone can choose to end their otherwise perfectly healthy lives, that's something for the future.

And the cost of developing these techniques would appear to be minimal compared with even the cost of health care currently just in the UK. You can find out more, and importantly about how to help, financially and otherwise, at the "Methuselah Foundation" website.

Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers

I'm rather afraid that my relying on memory rather than taking copious notes will not do this session justice and it will be best to get the full picture from the recording of the session when it comes online. The speakers focussed on the many new ways in which our freedoms are being attacked and compromised, but more importantly on our apparent willingness to allow it to happen and unwillingness to protest against it. Even though theoretically, in a democracy, we are, sheep like in most cases, simply obeying and finding reasons to excuse the actions of those who would curtail our freedoms.

As I say, watch the video when it comes out.

After a very pleasant lunch with Tristan in the fascinating Ship & Shovell Pub just up the road in Craven Passage I'm afraid I was a few minutes late for the start of the session after lunch, "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield , and decided to sit it out rather than disturb the room clattering in late, so both you and I will need to wait for the video! Or, there's a very good synopsis courtesy of the Oxford Libertarian Society blog .

Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Then came one of the great highlights of the whole weekend, a hugely entertaining session of futurology and technological ideas by David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, and professor of Law at Santa Clara University. I just cannot do this fast paced entertaining session the justice it deserves in a few lines. It was based on the ideas in his new book, Future Imperfect, which you can get at Amazon, or if you are too mean, or just plain penurious, he has put it all online.

He covered areas I will probably blog about individually (when I have read the book), including privacy technology, law enforcement technology and how to get around it, reproductive technology (think Gattaca) and, most indelibly etched in my mind, nano technology. The main thought I came away with out of a myriad of interesting possibilities was "should we actually be worried about climate change if, within a few decades, we will have produced nanobots and artificial intelligence such that we will have obsoleted the human race!" - as Friedman put it, turned us into gerbils in the laboratories or even the Matrix, of self-aware super intelligent 'droids.

I chose to miss out the final, additional session of the day to meet up with Lib Dem activist from Ealing Toran Shaw for a drink before we all went into the dinner, but I will definately want to watch the video of the session and the Libertarian Alliance DVD on the subject of "The Great British Road Pricing Debate: Free Market Incrementalism or Just More State Control?" which is obviously currently a hugely important policy issue that has caused a lot of debate within the Lib Dems.

And so ended the main business of day one. I shall return to cover the very sociable dinner and day two, including such controversial issues as Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the idea of the "Private Law society" and Guy Herbert from NO2ID soon.

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!

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.

Again, I'm starting a new post to respond to some very interesting comments by Tim Carpenter. My inept attempt at a Drupal template means it's almost possible to follow a thread of comments and especially given this is going to be another long response I think it deserves an airing on its own.

For anyone coming new to this debate, it follows on from my original "three point plan" for equity and economic justice and some clarifications and responses I gave yesterday to comments on that original by Tim Carpenter, Head of Policy at the Libertarian Party UK.

Tim, thanks for taking the time to respond. However I think we are, as a colleague used to say to me "talking past each one another". Paul Lockett has put it all a deal more eloquently than myself , and for that, and if I have caused any confusion, apologies.

I am a geo-libertarian (of the "geo-mutualist" variety if you will). The main thing you seem not to have appreciated is that in calling for the "Single Tax" I mean just that - the community/state can only take economic rent on the land resources within its jurisdiction and has no call on incomes or trade. As I understand it this is the "purist Georgist" position.

The ideal 'state' would be limited to collecting the rent and distributing it all as a dividend to citizens for the reasons Paul outlined. "Commonwealth" - you are right, it's lazy, I should put a space between "common" and "wealth"! Economic rent from the finite natural resources we all require to share is "common wealth" and should be collected as such and distributed as fully as possible whilst every other tax is a tariff.

Tim: "1. When I say who defines the value of your land, you say "why does anyone need to decide", yet immediately go on to talk about collecting the tax! Someone DOES decide the taxable value and that affects the actual value. Can you not see that?"

No, the market sets a location's value. It does it all the time at the moment. And it will continue to do so in an LVT system. Even in a "100% LVT" system. If a location is appreciating in value, buyers will be prepared to pay a premium over last year's rent bill and vice versa, in a falling market sellers will effectively have to be prepared to pay someone to take the rent bill off them. The following year's rent bill will reflect that premium or discount by going up or down respectively.

Tim: "2. As you should know, we aim to eradicate income tax., so the comparison does not hold."

See above - I'm a single taxer. No income tax here either. It is a tariff on employment and trade. Though I would say that if a local community decided mutually to have a local tax on incomes or sales to finance some mutually agreed local project it would be doing so in competition with neighbouring communities that perhaps were not or were charging a different rate or a different tax. Tax competition is good, in itself, isn't it? Also I am aware of some "single" taxers who would justify retaining some income tax at least temporarily in order to try to address the "embedded" historical advantages of monopoly ownership. I don't.

Tim: "The problem comes when some local area under the influence of whomsoever, adjusts taxation on land they wish to gain access to because a new development is coming. So, building a road, whack up the value of land next to it. Farmer has no CAPITAL to develop it, so has to sell it for a knock-down price because he HAS to sell to meet the tax bill. If this does not concentrate land into a few hands, I do no know what would. This is just one example of the potential risks."

This appears to be Churchill's "market gardener" bogey, or, to others, the "poor widow" bogey. If you look at it under the current system, that same farmer, in similar circumstances is perfectly able, regardless of the squalor growing around, to sit on that land, not paying anything and watch its value "ripen" until the value, created merely by excluding others from what they need to use, is so great it becomes irrational not to sell. That process is outright extortion.

In fact, under an LVT system, land values at the margin would tend to move much more incrementally in any case. In the absence of other restrictions - zoning, green belts etc (it is your policy to remove those restrictions once an LVT system proves practical isn't it?) - you would not get these large leaps in hope value. I would actually retain green belts and such like for a while after LVT was implemented so that it can have its greatest effect in turning existing urban land to its most efficient use before going for sprawl. But I am prepared to be convinced on that. After all, we know that at relatively low densities compared with what planning guidance seeks nowadays, it would take up less than three quarters of one per cent of the non urbanized land in England to build the three million new homes predicted to be necessary over the next twenty years.

But once a point of equilibrium was reached between supply and demand rents at the margins of production would move slowly and via the democratic influence of the market. If that market and the community that makes up its participants eventually get as far as that farmer's land and all that remains to bring it in from the margin to profitable development is to develop a road, the farmer will have had plenty of opportunity to see it coming long before the tax bill becomes an issue for him.

Tim: "3. Living costs - if you have CBI as described you would still keep the most expensive parts of the Welfare bureaucracy - the entire means-testing apparatus. Housing benefit would probably remain in all but name."

I disagree. But I don't think what you understand me to have described is what I think I have! ie, in particular, that I am not paying for CBI out of income taxes, but out of the community collected rent on economic land. Land at the margins tends as I said towards a nil value. More people will be able to own their home because they will not be borrowing twice as much as the value of the capital good (the building) in order to pay the land value in up front capital. Renting a basic home at the margins ought to be achievable out of the Citizens Income.

With so many pulled out of poverty anyway by not having punitive benefits withdrawal regimes that reduce the marginal value of doing even the smallest amount of paid work and by the reduced costs of living owing to tariff eradication and the better off keeping more of their own money, the capacity of private charity or local mutualism to assist the much smaller number of people that would be needing top up hand outs above their CBI would be much increased.

Tim: "4. Income. You need to clarify here - are you saying that COMPANIES have 40% more or that wage earners do? Be under no illusions, if you have CBI, income tax will be enormous. I worked out once that if we went for CBI with no other tax changes but a cull of QANGOs, income tax would need to be about 64% flat from the very first penny (IT is currently £140bln, 7k x 50m = £350bln pa). A HUGE disincentive to working especially at the lower end. Result: black economy, unproductive citizens, more companies shutting down and a growth in imports (and do not say "cheap imports make us richer" because that only holds if we are simultaneously exporting a greater amount of higher value exports)."

I hope you'll agree that that objection is moot given I am not talking about income taxes at all. My calculation of the CBI cost at £5200 pa for adults and a decreasing proportion for under-18s to 20% for 2 year olds is around £285bn. £245bn if only the adults. I reckon there was about £200bn a year's worth of economic rent in residential land alone at the recent peak of the market. I don't think it is beyond belief that there's another £85bn in commercial, industrial, retail and, possibly, agricultural economic rents.

Tim: "5. Movement to low tax areas: A company will consider workforce supply as a prime consideration, not just rental costs. If that were not the case, expensive London would be empty. People pay top dollar for London rents because of a massive pool of labour - they can gain access to many cheap or more chance of snaring the best. To think LVT would make a company move out to a depressed area? Those places are already cheap. Why doesn't it happen now? Limited skilled labour pool. As you say the Government does it now and did it in the past (remember the Hillman Imp?) and it creates quasi-soviets. If LVT has an influence, it might IMHO move a few companies, deter some from even setting up where they need to and the rest of the companies will be bled paying higher rates just to keep near the labour pool they require. In the case of London, the move will be to New York or Hong Kong and we all lose out."

There are so many issues in this paragraph I can only assume again that I have failed adequately to have explained my position. At the moment businesses pay rents, yes? In an LVT system they will still pay rents. The only difference is that whereas currently the entire rent, that which accrues to both the building and the site or location goes to the current landowner, ie it is enclosed, privatized. Under an LVT system, the same rent is due (assuming they were paying the market rent originally), only the portion of it that accrues to the location goes to the community and that attributable to the building to the building owner. There's no corporation taxes, no more employee taxes. There's no increasing of rent or rates; there's no bleeding anyone. Except those, as landowners, who have bled the rest of us for centuries.

Areas of low land value will also be areas in which it is cheaper for employees to live (lower LVT for them too). For a business operating at the edge of profit it would seem to me to be quite an attractive move. But one that remains in London because their key skills are there is not penalised by that. Indeed, if sufficient other businesses do it who do not need to be in London for optimal profitability do move, costs will also likely fall for those left behind, increasing their profit, distributable to capital and labour.

I think there is, in particular, one form of LVT that could have a significant effect in this regard...the auctioning of air-space, via "landing slots" at airports. Making more efficient use of regional airports would draw business into those areas. I'm likely to propose this to our regional conference this autumn as part of an "anti third runway at Heathrow" motion. Interesting choices of examples though - Hong Kong of course is famous for having state owned land - everything except the Anglican Cathedral is leasehold and that has been used to raise revenue in a form of LVT and keep income taxes low. Modern valuation tracking and billing systems would make that far more efficient and not prone to some of the problems Hong Kong suffered by having too infrequent valuations.

In China before Mao took over, I understand that Chiang Kai Chek's regime looked into LVT as a way of staving off the rise of Mao's totalitarian collectivism. And in the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev I believe looked into LVT as a way of capturing the value of natural resources and in not implementing it allowed the so called "oligarchs" (really "kleptocrats" in my opinion) to enclose the revenue from that vast pool of common wealth.

I'm getting a bit tired here! I'm going to call it quite at this point and maybe think some more about the issue of mutualism. I think Paul answered the point about the "state as landlord" objections quite satisfactorily and there's no need for me to repeat it. But for fairness, other readers can read Tim's further points in the comments on the previous post.

Tim: "p.s. your page has a script that my browser asks me to kill due to risk of resource hogging."

Yes - I only notice this on older machines or slower network connections - I never experience the problem at home or at work. I think it must have been an advertising panel I have just removed, but if others still experience the problem let me know and I'll have another look.