government interference

I see over on LDV that Mmes Swinson and Featherstone are getting quite excited about the prospects of some action on "airbrushing" images and the "sexualisation of children" since the psychologist they were working with, Ms (one assumes) Linda Papadopoulos has been called on by the Home Office to do some research that largely confirms their previous claim that airbrushed images should have warning labels on them and the like.  

The Tories have been all over this as well this week with David Cameron also worried about the "sexualisation" of children via their presumably completely involuntary exposure to imagery and language that apparently encourages them to become sexually aware and sexually active at ever younger ages.  Also there is the age old worry about "body image" - that some people are traumatised by the realisation that they do not conform precisely to some idealised shape or look propagated by a million different media outlets.

Now, as someone who has always had a bad self-image, I would not want to deny that it can be a very depressing thing to have.  And I am sure that perpetuating some kind of perfect image can have such effects on people.  I'm a little more concerned about this notion of "sexualising" children.  You see we are sexual beings, from the day we are conceived.  We engage in erotic play, as all animals do, from the earliest age, quite naturally.  I mean I remember "doctors and nurses" - or, in my case, it was more like "doctors and new recruits" I suppose - aged four or five.  The last, and only, time I had a girlfriend (and I had five of them if memory serves) was at infant school, and I even kissed them.

So let's not throw the baby, if you pardon the pun, out with the bath water.  Our culture has become, if anything, unnaturally concerned about protecting our children from all sorts of things, resulting in ridiculous situations such as parents being harassed by security guards for taking pictures of their own child having fun on a shopping centre play-ride.  And all of a sudden we look to the government, apparently, to "do something".

What the fuck?

What happened to personal responsibility?  What happened to parents being able to control what their children were exposed to?  About them complaining to broadcasters, not patronising advertisers' products and so on?  In other words, social action?

And how are such bans to work?  Papadoc suggests, apparently, labelling airbrushed images.  That assumes, of course, that there was a real photo of a real human to tinker with in the first place.  I'm quite sure that life will be much easier and cheaper for these magazines, fashion houses and advertisers if they no longer have to bother with the hassle of paying any number of ego-inflated, overpaid, skeletal "models" and suffering their famous tantrums and pecadillos, and heading straight for the CGI imagery.  

These images never involved a real human being other than the one at the computer keyboard.  Are we to ban creativity now?  Shall we go through the pre-Raphaelites and put public health warnings on slightly overweight beauties?  Or cautions on Mona Lisa that too much make-up might crack your face up?  Idealised beauty has been around since the dawn of (hu-)mankind.  Get over it already!

And what is it with such political types and so on that they reach for the heavy hand of the state as an automatic reaction to things that really ought to be the province of individual and family responsibility and consumer power and anarcho-feminist campaigners torching publishing houses?  Of one thing we can be sure.  All three parties have now been making noises about this in the past few weeks.  Something is bound to happen whoever wins the election.  Everyone will take credit for it.  And another little bit of someone's freedom will have been burned on the political bonfire of insanity.

Try exercising your freedoms some day.  Stop buying shit if you don't like it!  But for god's sake stop asking the state to tell everyone else they can't have it.  If you don't, one day there will be precious few freedoms left for you to exercise before you know it.

Stop the world, I want to get off.  Liberal Democrats?  Could have phuled me.

 Over at Lib Dem voice there's a guest post proffering an alternative response to the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament.  The "people's party" has expressly committed itself to attacking the people's rights in response to incessant bleating from the Intellectual Property Farming Industry by proposing some form of mandatory cutting off of people's internet connections if they are discovered downloading or sharing copyrighted material.

The guest author, Jim Killock of the "Open Rights Group", a body campaigning against these aspects of the bill, argues from the basis that ISPs will be forced into "collective punishment" by disconnecting people who may done nothing wrong, but whose accounts have been used by other people, perhaps without the knowledge of the account holder.  I think this is the wrong tack for supposed liberals to be taking.  We should instead be focussing on the whole basis of this bill's origin - the further protection of intellectual property by the state, against the interests of the people who elect them and in favour of the interests of the corporate megaliths with the sleekest lobbying operations.

Here's the comment I left on the discussion following the post:

Wrong tack I believe. And I disagree with the notion that when you contract a service from a private company they have not got the right to set whatever rules they like. Event the nationwide universities’ network has the same rule – you as account holder are responsible for any misconduct, based on the terms and conditions of service, carried out with the account, regardless of whether it was actually someone else using your account, unless you can prove your account was hacked. 

Sure, the resulting sanction, suspension of your account, is usually temporary since we do regard it as an essential service, but, and particularly in halls of residence, it could be permanent and you could be forced to use the open computer labs instead.

That said, as I stated, this is the wrong tack for developing a new economy. It is purely based on the wishes and lobbying of the rights-holders. As usual, regulation is being captured by the industry with the biggest lobby (and no doubt the best entertainment budget) in preference to the rights of the people who elect these legislators.

We should be using the opportunity to present an alternative world view – of abolishing intellectual property rights as amounting to artificial state protection on unscarce resources that has resulted over the years in a flourishing commercial scene of IP “farming” by some of the biggest and most influential corporations in the world, certainly at the expense of the consumers (which makes it extortion and theft of our rights), and most probably also at the expense of many would be artists whose entry to the market is effectively controlled by these megaliths of corporate greed and control.

Then, if one or other ISP wants to control the download of some product or service produced by one of its corporate buddies, they can do so in their contracts, and see how they fare in competition with those who don’t. Problem solved.

Come on guys – we are Liberals, supposedly. Intellectual Property is inherently illiberal. A state enforced attack on one group by another who has the ear of government. It is a monopoly right. We don’t believe in monopolies and state created ones especially, and seek to eradicate them. Do we? There is clear water to be gained in this between the corporate cronyism of both Tories and Labour and a real Liberal marketplace. 

See, as I'm not interesting enough to do podcast thingies of my own opinions, and to try and get me out of the habit of dipping into a book rather than reading the whole work, I started reading to my computer whenever I picked up an interesting work on political-economy.  I don't know what the computer thinks of it all, but judging by the reaction from one author whose book I gave the treatment to recently, others seem to like it, and so I have today knocked off an audiobook version of Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy The State" (a .pdf file of the complete work).

Nock was a friend and follower of Henry George and quite a libertarian heavyweight in his day (he died in 1945); even Rothbard cited him as a big influence on him.  He and his friend Frank Chodorov were probably the last major libertarians who, in common with many libertarians and anarchists of the preceding nineteenth century (as well as the British Liberals till somewhat later), had viewed the special privileges attached to land ownership as one of the major nuts to crack in moving toward a fairer, freer society.

In "Our Enemy..." Nock distinguishes first "social power" from "State power", where "social power" is, as described by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the last sections of "What is Property?", all the (good, voluntary) associations and obligations that bind us to each other, and is constantly being predated upon by "State power".  The book is essentially a warning, somewhat in the same vein as Spencer's "The Man Versus the State" and Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", that this "State power" will take over so much of what had previously been the purview of "social power" to the extent that people will no longer have the will to do anything for themselves and will always look to the State to "do something" in any eventuality.

And he distinguishes also between "government" and "the State" after the fashion of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, in which he sees "government" as something set up by mutual consent and only to secure the negative rights of "freedom and security" when the social power proves inadequate.  This leads him to an interesting "take" on the American Revolution.  The Declaration of Independence, upon which Paine's influence was clear and formalised by Thomas Jefferson, for whom Nock has a soft spot as more or less the one person in the revolutionary band who did understand the dangers of allowing "government" to become "State", was essentially ditched just as soon as it came into being. 

Whilst the ideals of "natural rights" and "individual sovereignty" were useful for galvanising everyone, of whatever class, against the British "common enemy", just as soon as the United States was founded, these groups naturally fractured and battled with each other for access to the exploitative power of the State.  The winners were those who had been top of the pile before the revolution, the land speculators and exploiters of others' labour who deliberately framed the Constitution to be as protectionist as possible as against Jefferson's idea of widely distributed individual sovereignty where the "highest" level of political organisation was to be the township level (not entirely dissimilar to the idea of "Cellular Democracy" about which I have blogged previously).

And it is this, he says, that has marked out the State as far back as history records: that the State is founded by conquest and confiscation; that it is always a vehicle of economic exploitation by one class over another.  Man will always seek to meet his needs with the least possible effort.  There are only two ways of meeting those needs: either by work and trade - the "Economic Means" and naturally involving the most effort; or by conquest and confiscation, and economic exploitation of others, in a word, robbery - the "Political Means" which, if you happen to have influence over the people who administer that State, is the easiest way, since it does not involve work for yourself, but feeding off the work of others through State granted privilege and protection.

The catalyst for the book is Franklin D. Roosevelt's accession to power in 1932 which accelerated the progress of the State power's predation over social power, in much the same way as Nock had observed had happened for forty years or more in Europe, and, by implication at least, had led to the great global threats of Fascism, "Hitlerism" as he called it, and state Communism, each of which had promised to be different from what had gone before in their respective countries, but which were just as centred on conquest of the access to the "Political Means" as any other State before them.

And, as we are in an election year here, it is worth noting Nock's view that essentially it doesn't matter who you vote for, at each stage in the State's advance over social power, the politicians tend to accept what has already been done (after all, it gives them, as actual or putative administrators of the State, all the more power) and will never truly roll back that State.  They are the State, or want to be; they are the very people who desire most to have access to the "Political Means"; how could they do otherwise?  That every appearance of the State's receding is actually in itself an exercise in State power - temporarily offering concessions in order to maintain a semblance of actually having the interests of the people at heart.

The book ends on a depressing note: Nock says he didn't write it in the hope of changing minds, or of fomenting any kind of change in direction; the State will only change when it collapses, having taken all power to itself and still found itself insatiable with no more to confiscate.

Feel free to download my Audiobook reading of "Our Enemy, The State" if you think you can bear my dulcet tones for the best part of four hours.

Powered by Qumana

Now lots of people baulk at a perceived notion that libertarianism is fixated on private property.  They feel that it is indicative of an incessant right wing-ish obsession with accumulation of wealth and devil take the hind-most (who will, obviously, they assume, have no such private property: wrongly of course - for we want everyone to be able to accumulate enough property to enable them to gain financial security and so on).

In fact of course the statement in the title, "property is freedom", comes from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom most people associate a. anarchism (which many seem to think of as somehow not "right wing-ish" - if libertarianism is "right wing-ish" - which it is not but never mind; I don't want to get into a left-right debate here), and b. the more famous dictum that "property is theft".

And it struck me the other day, while listening again to Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" (of which you can listen to an excellent free audiobook version in individual chapters at the Mises Institute), that actually the really important thing about property and why it occupies such an important place in libertarian is little to do with material wealth accumulation.

Actually it's two big reasons, the first of which I don't really want to get into here - that private property, as opposed to communal property in particular, creates the right sort of economic incentives for individuals to want to work to support themselves and keep their property in good order - if they get to keep the product of their efforts, the property which results, they are incentivised to do well. 

But it is the second big reason that I want to highlight now in the context of "property is freedom":  respect for private property rights and the voluntary contracts that give rise to them is key to eradicating the state's (often contradictory) interference through legislation.

Take, for example, the right to free speech.  A right in theory at least at the very root of liberalism - for if you cannot be free with your thoughts, and with expressing them in speech or publication, is not the state constraining your very being?  But we've all heard, and many accept, the idea that there must be some kind of "limit" on free speech, such as not being allowed to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre because of the harm that may cause to panicking patrons.  Well, libertarians do not need such a contradictory limitation; because of our respect for property and contract.

To yell "Fire!" in that crowded theatre is a breach of contract of the basis and conditions on which you and the other patrons are permitted in that theatre by the owner - to watch a performance.  Any harm caused by your actions will either be breaches of their contracts, or damage to their property, and properly actionable through private actions on their behalf.

By the way, you can hear more about the "Person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theatre" from Walter Block's book, "Defending the Undefendable", also at the Mises Institute.

Many think that anarchy means a complete lack of order, or a lawless world in which the vulnerable for whatever reason will be preyed upon by all those vicious racists, homophobes or whomever that we have created many dubious restrictions on free speech to curtail.  But let's say I own a particular street, I charge my customers for using the street, and they, in turn expect me to provide a safe environment for them to traverse.  So I get to set the rules; the protection agency contracted by my insurance firm makes sure everyone feels safe, ,is not intimidated by racist thugs or whatever.  After all, I may be liable to my customers if they are hurt while in my care, on my property.

Proudhon called all these associations developing civil society "spontaneous order", driven not by what a few people who solicit your votes every so often want, but by you and everyone else going about the myriad of transactions of your every day lives.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd probably want to make sure my street was gritted and safe for my customers in the snow too, maybe even get a few more customers if other street owners didn't bother so much.  I can't say my local authority is a "customer focused street owner" at the moment, can you?  It is because of respect for property and contract that all this can happen and, just as important when compared with the state's way of doing things, that the money flows to the services that people actually need, because, well, they're paying for it and can demand what they've paid for.

Powered by Qumana

Thanks to Stephen Glenn for pointing me to this lovely new descriptive word for the supermarket giants, and to the Lib Dem media release website for highlighting this issue via Tim Farron.  But I'm afraid unlike Stephen or Tim I cannot actually see just in what way the Lib Dems have any better policies than the other two vacuous parties on the issue of how to protect our farmers from exploitation by the supermarket oligrarchy, or, as the title says, the "trolleygarchy".

What I do see is all three parties falling over themselves to think of new things for the state to do to address some perceived problem that even the Competition Commission seems to have suggested was not such a big issue.  But I suppose it was a farming conference so they're bound to have been wanting to promise these potential voters that they would each do something to defend their interests in return for their earth salted votes - such is what politicians do.

But it provides a useful example as to what the real, liberal, process should be to such issues.  Why on earth are we, or anyone else, calling for more regulation, more bureaucracy, more costs?  Why don't we look at how this market got to this position?  At the state's role previously and now, in disadvantaging one group and protecting the other.  And see whether there are things the state should stop doing to make this a fairer market rather than creating another state bureaucracy to try and fix problems still being created by state action?

For on both the demand and the supply side of the market for this most basic of commodities, the food that keeps us all alive, we find a trail of evidence leading back to state action that has made it ever more likely that these giant retailers would emerge in the first place and dominate from then.  Not that I am saying that big is necessarily bad of course - if they are delivering what consumers want at the right price and quality, they could have a monopoly for all I care, so long as there are no barriers for others to enter the market should they see that efficiency slip and see a way of doing better for the consumer. 

But they have had help in achieving that dominance.  There's a huge amount of food regulation that, inevitably, the bigger firm is better placed to meet, and not just to meet, but to lobby regulators to suit them too.  On the demand side, state mismanagement of everything from money supply to housing markets has resulted in a vanishingly small number of households now being able to house themselves on one income, and so hard pressed home-makers juggling jobs and home life demand more convenience foods.  No longer is a leisurely trip to a local market for raw ingredients, freshness and quality decided by eye, nose and trust in the local man or woman behind the counter, followed by an hour by the stove and time to feed the family all at once the familiar way of doing things.  So there is more demand for, and thence regulation of, more conveniently packaged and ready-prepared food - ever more ranges to stock; ever larger stores to accommodate them.

On the supply side, we caved into the EU some years ago now in losing most of our local abattoirs, so farmers are more likely to have to sell into a mass market with smaller margins than be able to sell more locally with fewer middle-men taking a cut.  The fact that we do not charge for road use means that there are benefits of scale in moving food in huge quantities around the country, again meaning you are less likely to sell direct to local retailers, but through buying groups that aggregate whole regional and even national production and put pressure on prices.  This same factor means we are happier jumping in the car and traveling ten miles to a superstore than patronising local stores in a local supply chain - and those out of town stores are not fairly taxed on their land use, as they can offer massive free car parks with no rates on them.

As premium produce tends to be more labour intensive, our tax system, based on employment, creates big disincentives in an already narrow margin industry to employing those extra people and getting better prices for premium goods.  And on the retail side, low skill jobs that sometimes probably would not be worth the minimum wage to smaller retailers can be better afforded by big operators offering shift work and annualised hours to enable them to operate when family owned retailers would all want to be in bed because their overheads for waiting up for one romantic couple in aisle three at three in the morning are just too high.

So, whilst it is obvious that this is all a lot more complicated that merely being about defending the farmer against the trolleygarchy, it should also be quite clear that the trail of blame as often as not lies in earlier and ongoing state action that helps protect the big retailers and squeeze the farmers - we have not even looked at the history of land subsidy (how do farmers expect to make money out of things that only a few years ago, relatively speaking, we kept lakes and mountains of across Europe?).  Instead of having yet more bureaucracy and regulation, the liberal response should be to look at where the market is already heavily skewed by state action and stop doing it!

Employment regulation, food laws and "consumer protection" (once it was enough to ensure that the meat wasn't green and smelly when you bought it, now it all expires days or weeks before it would actually be unfit and so in thrown out), transport policy, taxation policy, the openness of our political system to lobbying for favours - always benefiting the bigger players, all these need looking at before another layer of regulatory bollocks is imposed.

But has anyone spotted the little irony - that one of the biggest retailers the farmers are complaining about, ASDA, was once a farmers' collective, and their last Chief Executive was also a Tory MP!

Powered by Qumana

You can access a registration form for the event at the ACMD's website at the Home Office. Closing date for applications for a ticket (free) is 5th November so you only have a few days to get your dibs on a seat at what promises to be an interesting meeting.

I suggest that you go along and call for all of the remaining 30 members of the Council to step down en masse. They cannot have confidence that the Home Office respects their views or pays them any more than the lip service they are statutorily bound to pay them under the Misuse of Drugs Act which obliges the Home Secretary to consult, but not to heed the advice of this statutory body of experts, before any legislation or orders are made under the Act.

By coincidence, I notice that today Kevin Carson has a post up about the State's role as a drug baron itself at the Centre for a Stateless Society, and that the UK now has a branch of "Students for a Sensible Drug Policy" (SSDP) which I have been supporting in the US for some time.  Maybe someone could establish an Oxford Brookes Chapter?

There are a few vocal Lib Dem members who appear to delight in every possible opportunity to denigrate libertarians in the party, and to dismiss us as the vanguard of a neo-Thatcherite "right" that they (correctly) feel would be incompatible with our party. I say that such denigrators are not only only being unpardonably rude and abusive to fellow party members, bringing the historical commitment to pluralism of opinion of the party and movement descended from the likes of J S Mill into disrepute, but also that they are themselves demonstrating a fundamental and pitiful ignorance of their own party's and philosophy's history. A history which both those who are now called libertarians on the one hand and the "social democratic liberals" that have tended to dominate the party and its descendents on the other for much of the past century share.

I can trace the moment of the beginning of my journey to libertarianism to a specific date, 28th May 2002, a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the Assembly Room at Oxford Town Hall. It was the first meeting of the tongue-twistingly Orwellian named "Economic and Social Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee" after I had been defeated in the local elections. I had been chair of the said committee prior to the elections and had been asked by the chair-elect, Lib Dem councillor Fiyaz Mughal, if I would mind attending the first one of the new council year as an observer in case there were any issues carried over from the previous year that I might assist with.

Being on the council one tends to get all wrapped up in the feeling that you are doing important work; that you are "making a difference"; "contributing to your community". And throughout my period on the council I had been known as someone who strongly believed that if we could only make government run service delivery that bit more efficient it would indeed be better than leaving it to private profiteering operators; that we might even make similar "profits" ourselves that could be used to fund other "good works" out of running quality services. So much enamoured was I of the possibility of public sector delivery being such a generator rather than consumer of resources I was known within the local party, and described at AGMs as "Jock, the one sitting over there on the far left".

This meeting blew a gaping hole in that rosy view of public sector delivery. I have always subsequently described it as a "meeting to discuss what they wanted to talk about next time they met to discuss what it was they were going to discuss in future meetings". It's not that I don't believe that most of the "elected ones" sincerely believe, or have convinced themselves at least, that they are well intentioned, and that a few of them actually are, but if they could see what I saw, "from the outside", I really felt that most of them, at least any with the vaguest modicum of intelligence, would begin to see that there could, nay must, be other, better, more efficient and even more "democratic" ways of delivering the sort of things they believed needed to be done.

I cannot think of any other sort of an organization that would allow policy and delivery to be handled through multiple meetings of rank amateurs who often don't really understand the report they are reading, and certainly don't appear to appreciate how tortuously slow the process is compared with any efficient organization whose ability to survive financially if nothing else would be compromised by such Byzantine processes demanded of a "democratically elected body" that was responsible for "spending others' money wisely".

But nothing, in that moment at that meeting, changed the reasons I had wanted to be on the council in the first place: that I thought that was the preferred way of helping make a difference for people less well off. I merely felt, albeit very powerfully, that this "representative government" thing was not the mechanism that could make people better off, more equal, more free. How I have moved from that small realization, to the position I hold today that almost no other mechanism could in fact be worse than this "representative government" thing; indeed that the heavy hand even of local government and other state sponsored interventions in fact stifles other potentially much better ways (such as through my own experience working on Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts) is a much longer tale.

Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

"You know my name. You people gave me the fucking number."

Whether it's John McVicar's prison number, an army number, a tattoo on your forearm or a piece of plastic, there is a tendency of authority to assign some "unique ID" to their "subjects". Sometimes "unique IDs" can be useful - they make database management more efficient - all our students have unique IDs, so do all our staff. Often times people will not know they even have a unique ID on any particular database as it may only be used internally. For example, I have several different account with my bank, each with their own identification features such as sort code, account number or VISA number, but I'll bet the database helps keep them all together under my name by assigning me as an individual an ID that I will never see - probably even the bank staff will not see.

But none of these attempt to define who you are. Except one. The National Identity Register. Most other forms of unique ID are either entirely voluntary - you don't need to use a firm that keeps a database, but your customer experience may be the worse for not doing so; you can choose the convenience or the privacy, say - or operate in only one aspect of your life; you may be in the army, voluntarily of course, and accept that they give you a number, but that only applies to your interactions within the military network.

While we may exist on lots of different databases dealing with many different interactions with others and have many different "unique IDs" from each of them, they are subservient to the individual. But the state proposes to create for us an entry on a database that will expand to cover so many aspects of our lives that it becomes effectively the ID database that will eventually verify our very existence.

We do not exist because the government says so but because we were born, and our continuing existence at any point in time is a function of the networks we operate in - those who can identify us best may be our family, friends, employers work-colleagues, neighbours and so on. We may even call ourselves one thing in one context, amongst our friends for example, and a different thing in a different context, our family or workplace say - and everyone within those networks will recognize us. We may even wish to do this precisely in order to keep those two "identities" apart - especially say if our work is sensitive and so on.

Or we may wish to vary our identity over time - in order perhaps to give us a "new start" after some calamitous event in our lives or just because we don't really like the person we were before any longer. But having one database that brings all our interactions with government, and presumably in time others such as banks or landlords or travel or whatever, together throughout our lives we lose that basic right and ability - your records will be there forever.

Revealing the design of the ID Card the other day, Home Secretary and former postie (who presumably had little difficulty getting letters, and postal Giros, to people without a centralised ID) Alan Johnson, trotted out the old cliche that it will help prevent us having to carry around lots of different pieces of ID when we want to engage in a contract. But there are other ways of achieving that without the government getting involved and storing everything on a single point of failure (and multiple points of corruption) database; without transforming the relationship between state and citizen from occasional protector and safety net to the body that defines your very existence.

A nice idea I quite like is what I call "networked identity". The network is the group of people and organizations you deal with on a day to day or even just an occasional basis. You could have a card, provided by an independent data holder - you could do it mutually as a community or commercially by a firm like Experian or Verisign - and every time someone confirms your identity you get points - it could start with single points for friends verifying who you are, through to hundreds of points perhaps when a bank confirms your identity to their satisfaction in order to open an account; you could get points for making sure you are on the electoral roll, or for voting, or each time you pass through customs and immigration.

The higher the points you have on the card, verified by digital signatures of the verifying contacts, the lower the threshold for proving your identity in future, perhaps even to the point where you could bypass airport security checks and so on. Nobody need know precisely who else has verified you, just that their credentials for verifying anyone can be recognized. Perhaps your bank's fraud insurance might insist on biometrics, but they would not be mandatory and held by the state, just on your card maybe. Over time we would be freer because of our network of verification rather than potentially the more restricted by a state with hundreds of thousands of people able to access aspects of your data. If for some reason we wanted to make a "fresh start" just as with bankrupts now you would start again with your verification network and build up points as the new identity.

When you think about it, the state ID system is also a form of protectionism for private interests. Those companies, like banks, who deal in complex risk based transactions with you have an incentive to minimize those risks - of misidentification and so on. The ID card system saves those companies who can afford to gear up with the technology and set in place procedures to comply with access requirements set by the state and so on get what they will no doubt believe (at first at least) is more definitive identification of potential customers.

So apart from usurping the position of the state vis-a-vis the individual if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a great big piece of corporate welfare, and an unnecessary monopoly, paid for by us!

I hope that anyone who calls themselves a liberal of any flavour would regard conscription as anathema. It is, after all, a form of slavery; greater even than the slavery we all participate in to a state whose policies we do not agree with but are obliged to conform. So, whilst I realize that it's a sentiment that does exist within the party, I am a bit disturbed that some amongst us agree with conscription when it comes to education.

See, I don't reckon that Tim Lott makes a case at all. Yes, he makes a series of assertions about how much better state education would magically become if everyone were compelled to go to state schools and private schools outlawed. But it seems to me that it is no more than blind faith. If those parents who current choose private education were to be forced, yes, forced, to send their kids to state schools, he argues, they would magically find their voice, not a voice of idealism and patronizing concerns for "other peoples' kids" but the self-interest of getting the best for their own.

The trouble is, it never seems to work that way. When it comes to government run services, with their one-size-fits-all approach, even if you do wish to change it, it takes a herculean effort, a lot of time and a great deal of persuasion - you are trying to turn around an enormous ship with an Oxbridge punting pole for a rudder - and you still have to settle for what potentially a bare majority decide. If you don't like how things are done at one private school, well you vote with your wallet and go to a different one whose ethos you prefer.

And if achieving change was such a lot of effort, would not someone prepared to pay north of twenty grand a year today not simply buy extra tuition - or are these statist idealists proposing to outlaw that as well - or perhaps rule that if state registered teachers want to offer extra tuition they have to do so for free so anyone can avail themselves of it?

And what of the specialist private schools that offer such specialized excellence that they are simply not replicable across the country - okay so perhaps we could nationalize the Royal Ballet School, but what about Chetham's, or, whilst there are other issues raised by post-compulsory education (assuming 16 remains the school leaving age) what about professional football club academies, and similar such centres of excellence? Are all places to be allocated by lot so there is an equal chance of every state school having its fair share of mouthy middle-class parents demanding change, regardless of how far the child has to travel or where his or her circle of friends are based?

Amongst the very wealthy (who, let's face it, are the only ones who can afford top boarding schools these days with fees approaching £30,000 a year) perhaps there would be a renewed interest in governesses - and at what stage does a group of families getting together to hire a couple of private teachers to "home-school" their kids become itself an illegal school? Or would home-schooling be outlawed as well? Even for our next potential Wimbledon winner whose parents want to support that talent whatever the cost?

No, the exact opposite is what is needed - free competition in the provision of schooling for everyone. It's bad enough that what passes for an education should be compulsory. We ought to see plenty of innovation and choice of styles, specialisms and prices. Frankly I think it is a good sign that, with just seven per cent of the market, you can get private schooling for round about the price that government funds state secondary schooling. Expanding that to one hundred per cent of the market can only bring those costs down so far as I can see.

And yes, Darrell, that includes the possibility that "profit making business" would be involved - and why not? Every business, even a social enterprise, has to aim to be profitable or else it aims to fail - the only difference between a social enterprise and a "profit making business" is whether one distributes the profits to individuals like shareholders or to social goods. After all, if you built a new school, would you expect the builders to do it for no profit; if you borrowed to do so would you expect the lenders to make no profit on the loan, if you have outside caterers do they operate for the love of it, what about the text-book publishers, the uniform suppliers, its IT infrastructure contractor or bandwidth provider? What if the school is a profit distributing teachers' co-operative? Is that any better, morally or ethically, than a Nord Anglia group paying their investors, the investors that made it all happen?

What is sure is that in a genuine free market, unencumbered by the sort of regulation and barrier to entry that government currently sets out for people who want to set up an educational provider, these profits would not be so great as they are when they are protected from other, innovative competition. Such protection, incidentally, would certainly include flogging off current assets to a private provider at some discount that, say, a local start-up provider were not offered - if there is going to be competition, it cannot start with some schools being transferred "on the cheap" to some big corporation simply because it has some kind of "preferred bidder" status.

Then we can start working out how much additional financial support people might need in the current inequitable economic system to be able to afford the appropriate sort of education for their children.