Herbert Spencer

So for the latest of my forays into reading audiobooks I have decided to embark on a reading of Herbert Spencer's "The Man Versus The State" which is cited several times in the previous book, "Our Enemy The State" by Albert Jay Nock, who also provides an introduction in the Online Library of Liberty edition I have used for this recording.

Each of the essays probably deserve a post of their own, because they all have a tremendous resonance with some of today's pressing issues, especially as we go into a general election.  So for this post I will just link to the audio files.  Once again, there are individual MP3s for each section, an M4B file more suitable for iTunes and iPod/iPhone playing which are recognised as audiobook format and contain chapter information, and a Zip file of all the MP3s for downloading.

The Online Library of Liberty edition I have used contains much more than the four essays originally included in "The Man Versus The State" when first published.  But since I wanted to read his critique of the Liberal Party around the time of Gladstone before going to the Liberal History Group event next week, I've decided to release this section now, which is the original work, and record the other essays over the next few days/weeks and add them as and when.

NB - I have not gone through all of these chapters with the proverbial fine-toothed comb for errors and slips, but I think they're all pretty well intelligible and that any errors will be relatively trivial (and so more difficult for me to find and correct!).

"Education, education, education" the mantra went all those years ago. Nearly a generation of school-children have flown by. Billions and billions have been poured in to state education and supporting services to raise aspirations. And look what they've got...lower so called social mobility, a higher proportion of posh-schoolers taking up more and more of the professional and higher status and paid jobs and the university places to prepare them for it.

The trots are outraged. We must do more they say! More redistribution! Punish the wealthy more to pay for our failings they mean. Even so called liberals have been at it (he doesn't even want merit to play a part through selection in a free service it would appear). Even six-jobs Millburn's report "blames" those top professions for wanting only to take the best. Well I tell you what, when it comes time for my open heart surgery, I will want to be hacked up by the best, not someone who is there because they were put into some class-busting quota scheme.

Look, the state has had decades to get this right. Now it appears that despite the most sustained period of growth in "investment" in education it's all been proven a farce. You know, "investment" usually demands a return. Not this sort of let down.

It's time to privatize the school system. Completely. Clearly the state is utterly incompetent where it matters and only marginally better where they are "good" at it.

I've done the sums. One thing you may not know about me is that I am a closet educationalist. Having been through a private system that failed me academically but which gave me the best years of my life (and as a scholarship boy at that - my parents weren't wealthy) I've always wanted for everyone who could make use of such an experience to be able to do so.

I've done the sums. I could create a private school from scratch, building only the best in facilities, educational, recreational and residential, with tiny pupil teacher ratios (and paying teachers better too), charging top end public school fees for the most wealthy and taking only state level funding for the least well off and still have fully one third of the school effectively paying nothing and everyone else on a sliding scale. In fact, I could pay for half of it out of the annual budget for providing full time care places for difficult kids in the county.

I'm sure there are lots of people who have plotted their own ideas of alternatives to the child-farms we call state schools too. The problem is statists want to fail everyone at once or not at all. Your policies of no competition, no choice, centralized planning, all go into producing a one-size fits all system that is as reactive as the Exxon Valdez as it approaches the rocks when the course needs changing and now the leaks are showing.

Why do "we" ("the people") believe these schmucks when, like Tony Blair in 1997, they claim they can do something about all this to get our votes? Where is he today? Oh, that's right, the failure of his government has given him millions of pounds a year in consultancy and speech fees and possibly even the title and office of "President of the United States of Europe". The rewards of sin eh? Don't even pretend you care, Blair. This is what you politicians do - pretend you are uniquely qualified to bring happiness to everyone and from there you can only spectacularly fail. Morons. Don't pretend Brown gives a shit either - his policy of loose stool money in the early noughties has doubled the number of kids in temporary housing, priced out of your bubble boom and big bust economy.

Screw the lot of you. Leave. Now. Don't come back from your obscene fucking (some of you no doubt literally) vacations. Leave real people to create real wealth; allow real people to work for whatever they can get and with their dignity intact seek to better themselves in one of the many innovative different choices that will spring up in a revitalized education market. Don't patronize them with quotas to plaster over your screw-ups.

God, I'm angry. And sad. Sad for all the poor sods whose lives have been fucked over by trust in politicians. Red, Blue, Yellow or Green - you can offer no better. Just promises and aspirations. Well I'm sick to death of paying fifty per cent of our national income for your failed promises and tawdry aspirations. Leave. Us. Alone.

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement." Herbert Spencer, over 150 years ago, and we still have not learned.

I don't normally do the "fisking" thing as I find it quite tedious to base a post pretty much solely on someone else's. But this is different. Richard Murphy, who runs the "research" group called "Tax Research UK LLP", recently produced an extraordinary rant about libertarians who had had the temerity to comment on his blog. Libertarians are, he seems to believe, neo-Victorian, un-Christian, sociopathic, contemptuous, vicious, self-interested enemies of civilized society who are as repugnant as racists and ought not to be allowed to have a voice in any sensible media outlet, especially his own blog (of which he has, I suspect, a more overinflated opinion than most of us do about ours) and the Guardian, which patronizes him by allowing him far too many column inches.

"Naming libertarians for what they are": July 13th, 2009

Traffic on this blog has been very high of late. I have noted (and those who read the comments on this blog will also have noticed) that my blogs in support of government spending – which is the only (and I stress only) way to avoid depression in the UK and other economies - have not gone down well with the libertarian community. They think that all tax is theft; all government activity is bad and those who win a mandate for government spending from democratic electorates are ‘statists’.

Interestingly, or not, I went off and had a look at the OED for "statist" because whilst it seems always to be used as a pejorative term it must have a "real" meaning somewhere. There are several definitions, some of which clearly do not apply:

1. One skilled in state affairs, one having political knowledge, power, or influence; a politician, statesman. Very common in 17th c. Now arch.

Hmm..."skilled in state affairs"? I think not!

2. One who deals with statistics, a statistician.

Given some of what Murphy produces, I suspect not!

3. (With capital initial.) A member of a conservative Belgian nationalist party which sought to maintain the power of the provincial assemblies or States in the late eighteenth century.

Still a no then...

4. A supporter of statism.

A-ha! Yes, indeed, that looks more promising. So what is "statism" then? We find...

Statism: 3. a. Government of a country by the state, as opposed to anarchy.

So, yes, the very definition of the word, even if not used pejoratively, describes Murphy quite well. He does believe that the state is essential and government basically a good force. As he describes it in glowing terms, his is a way in which people "win a mandate for government spending from democratic electorates". When last did any government in this country have a "democratic mandate"? Even getting more than fifty per cent of the votes of those who actually bother is quite rare, let alone any kind of true majority mandate - i.e. a majority of the whole electorate - which I doubt has ever happened. At the moment we are ruled by what, the choice of just under a quarter of the adult population. A quarter of the adult population is able to decide on how much to take from everyone else who didn't agree with their choice. A quarter of the adult population is able to decide to create thousands of new criminal offenses, some of which, though the penalties are of course not the same, make Siad Barre's outlawing of "gossip" look like reasonable governance!

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner as someone once said. We even have to do it in secret so our neighbours don't find out we've been voting to take more of their property from them! What is tax if not taking property with menaces? If anyone but government did it you'd fight back or expect someone to do so for you and hopefully get your property back, or replaced. All you are doing is using this formula of "democratic mandate" to say that this particular form of theft is justified because a "majority" agreed to it and that it therefore becomes something that is voluntary, consensual, a little bit like the difference between cannibalism and that German chap who volunteered to being eaten!

These people – who wish to undermine society as we know it and who would end all social security, state pensions, public health services, state education and much more besides – want to overturn society as we know it. As one said recently – we should rely for support on our families churches, synagogues or mosques – but not the state.

This would be the "state" that has had years, decades, nay centuries to get these things right and yet still has so many kids unable to read properly before going to secondary school, has 950,000 young adults milling around with nothing to do, decides when people will live or die by refusing to pay for drugs that might save them and denying them the right to chip in for themselves. The state in which even a Labour government in power for more than a decade has presided over a widening wealth gap and has failed even to meet its own targets on child poverty.

As Spencer observed a century and a half ago, "To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

I suspect that even Murphy would balk at the cost if people actually stopped relying on their personal connections and informal communities.

But why stop at the list of the "bribes" with which government and politicians get us to vote for them, even though they are not as great as they are made out to be? Why not look at the bad things that the state gets up to that will also go on the bonfire: the ability to wage war; the history of mass murder in war and otherwise that all states, including ours, have engaged in; the curtailments of free speech that J S Mill thought democratic government would protect and has failed to do; the prying into peoples' lives; the minute regulation of so much of our lives and especially businesses that simultaneously protect their big business buddies and prevent real competition by making it so much harder for others to set up in business.

This ignores the fact that many are simply outside those communities of support. For them I suspect the workhouse would beckon.

And how many of them are actually trapped in the state of welfare and by the difficulty of doing something about it for themselves because of regulation. Murphy ignores that we hand over half of everything we earn to this state of welfare and other government programs and protection rackets. Why do people like Murphy assume that if, as he says, we "voluntarily" agree to the state taking so much from us to help such people we would not do so voluntarily in the absence of the state threatening us if we don't? If society with a state does not stand for the "workhouse" type of Poor Law any longer why would society without a state suddenly find that acceptable?

This Victorian concept of grudging charity is what these people promote – with the consequence of a random lottery of survival – and destitution for many.

One of the biggest fallacies of the statist is to suggest that without the state we would return to some pre-welfare hell - a pre-welfare hell that is largely a fiction in any case, because the mere fact that government thought welfare was a good idea reflected the fact that people were already doing it. All state provision did was to make that compulsory, subject to someone else's decision. That may have speeded up a more universal provision; but there's really no way of telling - because compulsion and centralization stifled all the alternative attempts, whether doing well or not so well. They were not all perfect, but then neither, after a century of trying, is the state's monopoly version.

It says that we are all by nature entirely unconcerned about anyone but ourselves. What a depressing view of humankind! And one which, despite the predations of the state on our capacity to be generous, is contradicted time and again by conspicuous acts of voluntary kindness day in day out. Yet even if I were entirely selfish, having nearly twice as much money in my pocket without a tax man taking it from me would give me more consumption power, creating more jobs, enabling more people to look after themselves and have something left over for others if they choose.

I do not believe in this callous, self interested view of life. It offends my Christian beliefs that suggest we have a duty as a society to fulfil the instruction – present in all major religions – but not in libertarianism that we love our neighbour as ourselves.

You are the one calling it callous and self-interested, not us. I don't recall Christ saying that we should have someone waiting to throw us in prison if we didn't share our coat. Whilst the bible mentions taxes, it is quite clear that these are not about welfare - and that welfare is a personal, charitable thing expected of everyone who has sufficient for themselves and finds someone in need.  The state, Rome, the Jewish temple tax, are about the upkeep of the trappings of those in authority, nothing at all to do with the injuction to love our neighbour. 

All these major religions do indeed focus on charity for that, not on coercive force. It's even one of the five pillars of Islam. It offends my Christian beliefs to suggest that we force those beliefs on others through a violent monopoly. Indeed, the state seems to me to be quite inimical to such a belief. How on earth can I love my neighbour if I suspect he is plotting to take more of my property from me?

Of course that requires that we love ourselves and that means we have rights – and that they should be respected. But there is no way on earthy civilised society can ignore the needs of others – and tax is the way we meet this need in our modern, complex society in which expectations of medical and social support are high –and the cost of meeting them as high.

Wouldn't we be "loving ourselves" even more by believing that we can achieve all this without the threat of violence with which the state goes about it? We do have rights, the right of self-ownership that the state infringes upon at every turn. Besides, this is an appalling circular argument - we do things this way, so we must do things this way - what a poverty of imagination this man has! It's also economically illiterate - the state, as a monopoly in many of these services has little, or any, incentive to do things efficiently, no free price mechanism to decide whether it is efficient even if it wanted to.

The various institutions, like fiat money, the state has created enable it to spend effectively what it wants. Even the threat of the electorate voting them out once in a while if taxes get too high for a majority of people need not stop them - they can inflate the money supply, as has been seen through this latest decade of the abolition of boom and bust, according to our current dear leader, they can create crises, either deliberately or through incompetence which, because the state is so big, affect every last one of us, as we are seeing now.

Those who say otherwise are not offering an alternative within out society – they are suggesting we tear down our society and replace it with another. In doing so they show complete contempt for many, some (most, I suggest, by far)of whom are in the positions they are through no fault at all of their own. One on this blog has called those in need ‘an underclass’.

An accurate term for the large group of people who are kept in dependency. And yes, I think tearing down the "society" that keeps a stratospherically wealthy elite in place and at the other end of the scale actively prevents people helping themselves. This society that legitimizes violence, but only by itself, on our property and freedoms, on the say so of a minority, no matter how powerful or sincerely held the contrary belief or however much better the alternative idea.

I make clear I think this as repugnant as racism.

I think it's clear that I regard Murphy's defence of this majoritarian thuggery we call democratic governance as repugnant as racism.

I would reject this language from a racist. I would reject a call from the far left to over throw society.

Why is it then that this vicious, self interested and, might I suggest inherently socially violent group are allowed to make this sort of contribution – as they do all over so many blogs where those with real concern for society, from across the mainstream political spectrum, seek to discuss issues in an open, rational and respectful fashion?

Inherently socially violent? Coming from a man defending the practice of theft with menaces, the institution that decides with horrific frequency to go to war, effectively careless of the casualties inflicted, that inflicts the will of a few on everyone else, ,millions of us, by force of law and threat of force, this is an astonishing statement. Of course, we can perhaps understand his anxiety. Murphy's world would indeed be turned upside down by a stateless society - for he would no longer be able to make a living out of helping to enforce state regulation. He himself would have to find something more productive and wholesome to do than promoting this institutionalized violence. And judging by his output, this would indeed be a huge wrench.

I would love, for example, to see far-right libertarians thrown off the Guardian bogs as a matter of course – which might improve their appeal to many others as a result.

The Guardian website is indeed private property. They are free to do this if they wish. I suspect that its appeal, as a forum in which everyone basically agreed and never had their ideas challenged, would be limited.

It is time we named these people for what they are – as being amongst the enemies of civilised society.

I am happy to do that. It would be good if others would do the same – and fight them as we do racists.

What an odious, censorious, weaseley little man Murphy is.

Let me make no bones about this before I start - I loathe the British National Party. They are the wolves of Nazism in the pseudo-respectable clothing of all the other political psychopaths; trying to be honey tongued while hiding an agenda dripping with hate. I don't believe most of the people who may vote for them in just over a week appreciate their background or would want to see most of their policies even remotely implemented. And they should remember when they stand in the polling booth that it took just four years for the BNP's historical inspiration, the NSDAP, to go from 2% of the vote in general elections to 37% of the vote and catapult Hitler into effective absolute power. The BNP is not the vehicle with which your vote can give the government or the boondoggling and exploiting MPs at Westmonster a wake-up kick in the pants.

But the BNP are merely a symptom of a problem, just as the rise of the NSDAP in Germany was; the problem of a decadent and failing democracy. Both the state of the economy and the expenses issue are other symptoms. Democracy creates the situation in which different groups of people vie with each other to persuade as many as possible of us that they will be able to perform miracles by taking others' property or curtailing their freedoms. And the more that proves not to work the more inured we become to their promises and tribal in our votes.

And yet we hear nonsense such as from Alan Johnson recently about their leaders being the sole messiahs who can run Britain and get her out of her problems, cynically ignoring the part their beloved system has played in causing those problems. As if we are a nation of numbskulls who would collapse without Our Dear Leader. And if we lose patience with their failed promises we drift around looking for some other silver tongued hero, and latch on one we either think is telling it how it is about the others, or baffling us with the science of how they can do better with our money and security.

There has been much talk recently about how the fall from grace of parliament over the expenses issue and so on ought to lead to big constitutional change. That at last there must be an appetite for proportional representation, or of independent scrutiny of this, that or the other. I'm sorry - we elect these people as our representatives. If we trusted them that much with the best part of half our production and property why on earth do they need some higher watchmen to watch over them? The system is clearly broken, and is making the country broken, leading some to make rash decisions that someone new, almost anyone, no matter he be a extremist at heart, could do better than this lot.

PR is no longer enough for me. We are, I believe, at that moment of which David Hume wrote in 1745, where we need discover the system is irretrievably broken and need to decide to do things differently. That democracy itself, at least this electoral democracy of state government, is the thing that has failed. That it gives to much power to too few over too many with too little of a mandate. It is fertile ground for all sorts of corruption and psychopathic nastiness, but only because we grant them this power over us as if we concede we need it. We do not.

I don't think I can be both a Liberal and a Democrat. They are irreconcilable ideas. It is time to abandon the quest to reconcile them.

In a quick diversion from my task of preparing a business plan to rescue Oxfordshire's distressed home-owners and businesses from the worst effects of the state-created credit crunch I noticed the other day, in a rare foray into blogging himself, a Lib Dem Federal Policy Committee member, Geoffrey Payne, has been reading Vince Cable's new book about the credit crisis, The Storm. Geoffrey is one of those Lib Dems with a visceral hatred of anything "economically liberal", which he will always equate to something akin to "what Maggie and Ronnie did".  He notes that Vince quotes Herbert Spencer, saying that it shows how little Vince thinks about "extreme libertarians":

I have read the book and would heartedly recommend it. I agree with most of it. Because it is short there are obvious gaps - the chapter on Malthus is rather short and inconclusive which is a shame as I for one think it ought to be the most important part.

However there is no doubt what he thinks about extreme Libertarians;

"(quote from Herbert Spencer) 'The ultimate result of shielding man from the efects of his folly is to people the world with fools' . This approach was influencial in the years of the Great Crash, and it helped inform the advice given to president Hoover by his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon: to do nothing. '[Panic] will purge the rottenness out of the system ... People will work harder and live a more moral life ... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.' Since Hoover and Mellon emerged as the fools who precipitated the Great Depression, their abstemiousness become seriously unfashionable", page 46, The Storm. [From Left Liberal: Vince Cable lays into Libertarians]

Now, I don't suppose for one minute that Geoffrey has bothered to read the Spencer essay from which this quote comes. I hope Vince has. For in "State-tamperings with money and banks" which can be found in Vol 3 of his "Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative" available on the web courtesy of the Online Library of Liberty Spencer produces a fantastic critique of state controlled money systems and how they will inevitably exacerbate bubbles and crashes.

Allowing for the slightly convoluted Victorian English prose style, it is a fabulous analysis of why, as Hayek concluded a hundred and tenwty years later, or as both Mises and Rothbard have concluded in their ciriticism of the Federal Reserve system, the state is incompetent in the running of currency.

What the government is doing by quantitative easing is abolishing the rule of law and its part in enforcing contracts. What they are saying by creating additional money into the system is that you no longer need to pay all the debts on contracts you have issued, because here's some extra money-tokens to cover them. And that if banks were allowed to run under free banking these crises would never been as deep or as pervasive as they are through manipulation of the currency by the state and the banking system by regulation.

It is a brilliant exposition of the origins and effects of what we know of as "moral hazard". And that the effects of us being shielded from that moral hazard by state offered, ultimately worthless, guarantees, is to populate the banking system with the sort of fools we have witnessed, from Fred the Shred to Adam Applegarth.

I encourage you to read Spencer's essay (it runs to about 23 pages of one and a half lines width print on A4). If we are to avoid this sort of crisis again, we need to learn from the likes of him, and Hayek, and Mises and Rothbard, about how these crises come about through the state currency system. I am very proud that English liberals understood this a hundred and fifty years ago, and equally ashamed that politicians ever since have believed themselves immune to these facts of economic life.

There's been an awful lot of terminologically inexact harrumphing going on all week, in no small part I hope egged on by my contributions to the "debate" within the party. The "debate" that is, about neo-Thatcherite Tory entryist libertanarchist corporate shills who are either a. trying to capture the soul of the party for their wicked ends or b. seriously deluding themselves that it is possible to persuade the Lib Dems to be a truly liberal party.

What I have learned this week is that:

• My unknown father must have been a Tory, perhaps even one of those grandee types who gets to tup one of the milk-maids for his fourteenth birthday just to make sure he's not one of those left-footers that needs to be put away in a military school.
• I must have, unbeknownst to me, been a closet Con all my life until waking up one morning and thinking "hey, I know, the best place to promote my arch-conservative ideas would be in the liberal party, I think I'll join them and make my life difficult."
• Either that, or I have come under the evil influence of such closet Tories since I joined the party, possibly closet Tories with names like Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Spencer, Mill or Henry George, and "double agents" such as Fred "Why I am not a conservative, no wait, I really am...or maybe not" Hayek. Or ideas from such evil closet Tories speaking from beyond their graves.
• I shouldn't be in the party, because I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I should be in the party, because, erm, I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I want to have carnal relations with an octogenerian former Prime Minister and a dead former US President in tribute to the fact that they are the true leaders of my global conspiracy theorist ideology. Possibly some kind of spit-roast arrangement. Perhaps filmed by Ann Coulter.
• I am the willing, small dicked, narrow minded, socially inadequate gnarled goblin herald of the twin devils of inequality and wealth and their four horsemen; monopoly, capitalism, markets and MacDonalds.
• When I grow up, I'll find myself under a bed, or out of a tree, or off a trolley.

Still, this might seem to have little to do with the "five wars" and "four battles" of my title. I just wanted you to be able to read what I'm about to say knowing what some others think of me and my type.

Liberalism cannot win the five wars without fighting the four battles. In other words you cannot be a "social liberal" truly without fighting those battles the "classical liberals" first promoted.

The five wars, of course, are from the Revelations of St William, first Baron Bill of Beveridge. More precisely his "war on the five giant evils" that stalked the entire fabric of a society emerging from a devastating world war - Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The cult of St William is observed by many in the party who use his Revelations to stake the claim that the "welfare state" in Britain was a "Liberal" invention that defines the essence of British Liberalism of the entire 20th century. So dominant is this cult at times that they may even claim that some time in that century, perhaps early on, say in 1911 or something, there was a "Year Zero" for British Liberals before which it is somehow no longer permissible to look for answers to modern problems.

The thing is, that many of the intractable problems that the Venerable Leonard and St William worked on appear to remain quite intractable. A hundred years later. When we realize this, we find this warning from the pre-year zero Liberal Anti-christ Herbert de Spencer prescient:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

...how many thousands now more acts in Parliament do we need to have, tinkering with this, toying with that, before we listen to him? The real difference between what some have called "classical liberals"† and "social liberals" seems to me to be the sort of questions they were asking in their exploration of political economy.

The classical liberals seem to have been more interested in preventing causes; the social liberals in treating symptoms. The classical liberals on the systemic problems that contribute to inequity; the social liberals in how to mitigate that inequity after it's arisen. The classical liberals say that by changing the core system, by reducing government interference, government protection, corporate welfare, and specifically by focussing on what Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker and Mutualist Clarence Swartz called the "four monopolies" - the monopolies of money, of land, of tariffs and of patents we can create a far fairer economy; social liberals that the system was not simply unfair but fundamentally somehow unalterable and that we had to deal with its consequences through increased government action.

It seems to me that just at the point our Liberal party forebears were coming to understand these systemic monopolies of the classical liberals and beginning to want to do something about them, there was also a collective feeling that "these can't help quickly enough" and that the argument that won out was the one that said "we can only deal with the effects". This perhaps especially after the Land Tax was derailed by the privileged interests in the House of Lords and in spite of two general elections returning a government mandate to implement it.

And it is true that the basic principles of the two positions are, apparently, irreconcilable. On the face of it the one insists that the solution to poverty and inequity is to reduce government; the other to increase it. The one says reducing government results in greater liberty; the other that increasing government results in greater liberty. How can both be right? Well, of course, they cannot. They cannot both be the "end game".

Now, surely, if we are at all liberal, we would all agree that other things being equal, we would prefer to have less government interference in our lives and property than more interference. Furthermore, I am sure we would agree (or we would not be liberal at all but just enamoured of power over others like other ideologies) that of two solutions on offer, one which increases the freedoms of all without harming the freedoms of any would be preferable to one where the improvement for one group can only be delivered by decreasing the liberty of another group. Indeed there's even a "second place" in between those positions, one that's less bad than interfering by force in someone's freedoms in order to make something more equitable for someone else; that it is be better if the "interference" were voluntarily accepted than state enforced. The state action is always the least good of these three, because however democratically we dress it up, government is still always interference by someone else and by force. Like an S&M party we can accept that force on us of course, and some may even enjoy it, but far better not to have to inflict it in the first place if at all possible.

Classical liberalism's advocates claim we can have the former solution if we fight the big battles, the four great monopolies. Social liberals would say that at the very least, we need to be prepared to use the latter solution, the interventionist solution; most, I fear, would go further and say that a priori there are some things that only state intervention can deliver at a certain cost, in a certain timeframe and most equitably. Here the two can co-exist, to an extent. Whilst classical liberals' policies tend towards a longer term large scale systemic change, perhaps taking a generation or more to feed through, in the mean time the ongoing problems of inequity continue and their adverse consequences need to be addressed in the shorter term. But if we don't make our "end game" a more classical liberal vision of a level playing field rather than giving the uphill facing team a lighter ball, we will be doomed to continue the state of welfare we appear to have become and not the safety net St William and the Venerable Leonard envisaged. And that state of welfare is likely to get more costly, and require more interventions into other peoples' freedoms to achieve as a. our expectations rise and b. as we take more of the market's production away to pay for earlier liabilities and failings.

Whenever we see a mismatch between demand and supply, which seems to be what people mean when they talk about "market failure" to deliver something generally regarded as important to everybody's welfare, we must first check to see whether that mismatch may be caused by something actively preventing the market addressing the demand - which is, after all, how enterprise functions, by attempting to meet a demand at the right price at which the buyer and seller will mutually agree to trade.

Perhaps affording a home is an unrealizable dream for some not because they have too little money to afford one in a truly free market, but because our system subsidizes landlords at our expense making land also more expensive for everyone else in a largely unfree market. You don't want to increase government interference and bureaucracy by adding to the subsidy, but reduce the cost by removing the subsidy. Smaller government, more level playing field, social justice. Perhaps people could afford private GPs if we didn't (deliberately) create an economic rent in GPs' remuneration in a publicly owned monopoly which in turn keeps the average cost of choosing private provision up.

We must, moreover, seek evidence to prove that a given interference would be better than non-interference and private provision. We cannot rest assured that Hobhouse a hundred years ago said it was a good thing to provide a universal education actually means via a monopolistic state provider and purchaser as opposed to a private mechanism. And if the answer is that we "cannot prove or disprove it" we should assume the thing to try first is private provision. And even if we don't have private providers capable of meeting the task in the market at the moment, we should seek to create private providers (most probably as mutual or social enterprises), perhaps through seed capital if the barriers to entry in a particular market are high (or by removing the barriers would be even better), rather than create a structure that requires constant input of tax money to continue delivering.

So, it is quite wrong to say that there's no room for classical liberals, in the broadest sense, in what has become a social liberal party. Social liberalism's aims simply cannot be met unless we address the concerns of the classical liberals and their libertarian friends. And both are needed to prod the other into proving that the interventionist case is the necessary one in the likely few cases that turns out to be true.

† - in which I include, probably, what people think of as "anarchists", "minarchists", "libertarians", "mutualists" and no doubt other -ists.

I’ve long been wanting to try and address an issue which appears to be a fairly significant point of conflict between various people who would otherwise all call themselves libertarians. A post by our good Devil and the comments that follow it provide a good opportunity. Some there and elsewhere in libertarian groups would even suggest that those of us who subscribe to the opinion that land values are somehow not legitimate private property cannot really be libertarians at all. On the contrary, some would say even that we are crypto-communists for wanting to rob people of the yields from their landed property.

Yet it seems to have been a matter of controversy throughout the history of anarchist and libertarian thought, and both sides even invoke John Locke as the supreme expositor of property rights in support of our arguments.

But let’s start from where we generally speaking agree. We all, I think, would agree that monopoly is inimical to the free markets we would want to see. I suspect we would all subscribe to the idea that we are entitled to self-ownership, and that to a very great extent, self-ownership means the right to own the fruits of our own labour. And I think most of us would subscribe to what Herbert Spencer described as “the fullest liberty to do as [we] will compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other [person].”

I feel most of us also acknowledge that there are some problems in the historical distribution and acquisition of land and recognize that much vested interest has been created through violence or state intervention - either forcibly taking land off others as in many of the enclosures or through grant of title over others’ claims by the state favouring individuals or great families.

But that’s about where agreement ends insofar as land is concerned. It seems that most libertarians view land as a free market in which people are free to participate or not to the extent they wish - to own, to rent, whatever suits them at their time of life or financial circumstances. To use the fruits of their labour to buy up more than they can use for their own needs as an investment and charge others to use it if it has such a value. And that anything that impedes that is theft just as taking away your chattels or other property would be. In fact, I think they also feel that since, as they see it, we are inexorably moving away from dependence on land (most of us no longer have to till the soil for sustenance) the importance of land itself is diminishing and it becomes an ever more free market.

So, before getting into discussion of possible remedies, I want to set out why I think there needs to be remedies to the “land question” as many of us would call it. I believe that property in land breaches the three main tenets of libertarianism I mentioned above: it is monopolistic and therefore not a free market; it exacts a toll on the fruits of others’ labour; and as a result it denies people Spencer’s “fullest liberty…”.

First, some definitions, because I think people get quite confused about just what we mean by “land”. “Land” in the economic sense is not just the earth, the ground we walk on, the soil we till. It is the third factor of production; everything in the material universe not originally created by the application of labour and capital; resources in their “natural state”.

But more than just that, when we are talking about “the ground we walk on” we are really talking about its “location” as much as its extent. A million acres in the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica may, for all we know, have no material value whatever. The few acres of Chelsea Barracks was worth £970 million last year. Similarly, we may yet have no use, and therefore put no value on, one part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but have many competing businesses dependent on technologies that use another particular, finite, location on the spectrum. So we usually mean “land in a particular location”.

Land as monopoly. When Winston Churchill made his “speeches by the yard” on the land question in gathering popular support for Lloyd-George’s land taxing 1909 “People’s Budget” there were of course very much fewer people who owned their own homes than do nowadays. But he was also expressing the views of some anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker, Leo Tolstoy and Proudhon, as well as Liberals such as Spencer and later Henry George, that the land monopoly was one of the greatest barriers to free markets.

Many today feel that land, especially in the form of property in housing, is much less of a monopoly if at all. After all, in a world where nearly 70% of households live in the home they own, how can it be the monopoly problem of grasping landlordism that it was at the turn of the 20^th century? But the problem of land monopoly has not gone away. In fact, because it is less obvious I would suggest it is more insidious. Every location is in effect a monopoly of its own. A monopoly of the various circumstances, services, links and other infrastructure that make it unique. If you have the only house for sale in a particular school catchment area, the only house within a reasonable distance of a transport link that will allow people to get to the nearest good employment opportunities, or any number of other factors, you have a monopoly.

By and large we can only have one occupier occupying any particular plot - okay, we can build upwards and fit more people on the same plot, but that itself is exploiting the monopoly power of that plot.

Some will say that a monopoly is not necessarily the worst thing that could befall us, after all, if someone owns all the shares in a company that too is a monopoly - you just invest in another one. If someone is the only doctor in the community they have a monopoly, but someone could start another surgery. But we all have to live somewhere. So far as I am aware, pace Patri Friedman’s “seasteading” project, we have yet to find a way of living that does not involve some contact with land - even boats have to moor somewhere once in a while.

So land is a monopoly quite unlike being the only person able to own and admire that genuine unique Picasso. Yes, others may want it, but it does not alter their ability to live by not having it.

Incidentally, it is this monopolistic quality of locations that means it is so easy to bid them up into a bubble, such as we’ve seen recently. All that needs to happen, in our debt-based money system is that the banks have got to be prepared to lend to someone more than the next bidder for the one desirable location in the area. Yes, this can encourage others to cash in and create more opportunities in an area but we remain in a quasi-monopolistic system. Those of us, which includes most libertarians I suspect and certainly all Austrians, who regard the fiat and debt-based money system as the root of all problems should be extremely worried about this monopolistic ability to talk up the price of any individual location - it is, or has been these past few years, the prime factor in enabling the creation of mountains of debt-based money.

Land exacting an unjust toll on others’ labour. If you happen not to be able to borrow enough to get you a home in the optimum location for your work, or your kids’ school, or near enough for relatives to look after the kids when you go out to work or a whole host of other reasons, you may find a place further away, but more of your labour is going to be spent circumventing those more optimal locations.

Or if you have a business, a shop say, and cannot manage to pay the rent for the optimal “pitch” where most people will pass your shop display and be tempted in, you’re still likely to have to employ the same minimal number of employees to get the work done as someone in the higher rent location, but your takings will be lower. If you look at the structure of retail rents in the UK for example you will find that landlords try and capture this difference explicitly - they try and charge a premium based on ever more complex formula for guessing what a business can make in that location.

This illustrates David Ricardo’s so called “Law of Rent” in which he discovered that rent will rise at any particular location to capture the difference between productivity at the lowest priced location relative to the one in question. The huge land values usually found nearest the most lucrative business districts of communities and cities arise directly because people who cannot afford to occupy them have to work harder to avoid those locations.

In its simplest form this is best seen just by having to spend a fortune on your season ticket, an hour on the train to work and so on. Churchill again used to tell a story about the tolls of London Bridge and the landlords of Southwark. Most people in Southwark worked in the City of London as relatively low paid workers. It was the cheapest area they could get within reasonable travel distance of work, their means of sustenance. The parish elders responsible for enacting the poor law support in the parish of Southwark noticed that though most of the community were gainfully employed over the river, they still had to hand out a lot of dole to give them an acceptable quality of life.

London Bridge at the time had a toll, and so the parish petitioned to have the toll removed so that the workers would at least have to spend less getting to and from work. They succeeded in their aim. For a while the dole required fell, but then they noticed it rose again nearly to the former levels. What had happened? The landlords of Southwark had also noted that the workers would have a few extra pennies in their pockets and put up their rents to capture it.

With developments in transport methods and so on of course it is easier nowadays to get further to work and so on, so the gradient if you like at which landlords closer to the centre of things can cash in on others’ inability to rent their locations is lower, but it exists all the same. At some point, on the outer fringes of any settlement, there will always be those locations which are only just “marginally productive’ in which the residents can only just get to work or their other needs and maintain a reasonable standard of living. Ricardo’s Law of Rent says that inside those locations rent will rise to capture the bulk of the difference between the costs of those living further out and those living closer to the centres of economic activity.

Land impinging on others’ “like freedom”. Both of these previous factors combined clearly affect those excluded from the better locations freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labour. This is where Locke comes in. Robert Nozick coined the phrase most often quoted here - the idea of the “Lockean Proviso”.

Locke had said, in his Second Treatise, that it was legitimate to appropriate as much land as one wanted, so long as one left enough, of similar quality, amenity and so on, for everyone else. He also said that we own the earth “in common” with everyone else (note - common, does not mean “collective”). If we are to have self-ownership everyone born (who has to make do with this our only planet on which to eke out a life) must have a common birthright to claim a place to do so. You cannot own the fruits of your labour if someone is always taking some of them off you just to have a place to sleep at night.

That may have been easy in the New World, where there seemed as if there were vast, perhaps unlimited, tracts of currently unoccupied land just there for the taking. But in a more sophisticated economy, one not based solely on one’s agrarian abilities (and let’s face it we all benefit from that agglomeration of humanity into bigger, more specialised, settlements), more and more people will want to settle in the same area both to contribute to and benefit from the economic activity that human civilization affords. At that point, when Locke’s Proviso is breached, and there cannot be “enough and as good left over for everyone else”, land starts to have the two qualities already mentioned - of a monopolistic, zero-sum, market and of exacting a toll on others labour. At that point it begins to have a rental value. The rental value reflects the extent to which Locke’s Proviso has in fact been breached - the higher the rent the more people could make “as good” use of a particular location and the fewer “as good” locations are available.

So that “rent” is not something the current owner “earns”, except by the purest luck of being there before anyone else, so much as something that all the other potential owners of that monopolistic location create; what they have to pay to avoid the previously occupied location.

I’ve already gone on too long in this piece to be able to go into the possible remedies to this situation. All I wanted to show in this though is the problems land in particular as a type of property creates. Problems which all are inimical to the principles of markets and freedoms that libertarians are supposed to stand for.

If the monopoly factor were not of itself enough to make a libertarian think twice about treating land, location, as a species of property worthy of different treatment from other chattels and goods, the fact that it gets its value not by any of the labour the first appropriator expends on it but because of the costs others expend having to avoid it, and the consequent limits on the freedoms of others to do as they please and enjoy the full fruits of their own labour ought to convince them.

As I said in a comment on the Devil’s blog earlier, some libertarians feel that you can’t be a good libertarian if you believe the land market needs some type of reform, I have to say that I find it difficult to see how one could be a good libertarian without acknowledging that land needs some kind of reform because the effects private ownership of rental value of locations are so opposed to the basic free market and self-ownership tenets of our philosophy.

No doubt I will return some time to try to convince you about the best remedies to these problems.

Surely it is a given that we are all different? Size, shape, gender, colour, intelligence, personality, practical ability... So surely the human brain, and mind, are also infinitely variable. So why then do we have clothes, shoes, accessories, food, gadgets, literature, music, art, newspapers, all sorts of media, cars, houses, gardens, holidays, hobbies and pastimes of every conceivable colour, shape, size, sophistication, individuality to suit our needs and tastes and yet, when it comes to nurturing minds, especially young ones, in other words education, the state seems always to want a one size fits all, or nearly all solution we must all be dragooned through?

_{Scary kids from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video, copyright Columbia/CBS. Is this how we see education?}

Even the current advocates of increased "choice" in education are generally not calling for the sort of individually tailored schooling that might cater for a near infinite combination of aptitude and need in different subjects. No, squeezed onto the cattle trucks of the "skills agenda" at an increasingly early age, our children's precious formative minds are driven through National Curricula, SATs, Literacy Hour, regurgitated standardized lesson plans and a plethora of targets till they get an OFSTED stamp on their forehead to say they are ready to be part of Britains fast changing economy. Or at least, the fast changing economy that was being predicted by, yes, you guessed it, government, a decade ago when they started.

On Saturday I was having dinner with friends who either have children going through this system or looking to have soon. All of them, I think it would be fair to say, would be termed "left of centre" and would never have considered private education or home-schooling previously but are all actively considering it now or would if they had the money. They feel patronized by the system, and treated with varying degrees of contempt by the school and its staff.

But most of all they feel helpless when they can see that their child needs extra help or a different approach in one subject where they may thrive in a totally different subject with little struggle. Such different approaches may not be available in the one school. And the lesson plans used don't vary a great deal from school to school so there isn't a great deal of choice anyway. If they wanted to change schools - as one is trying to do now as a result of their experience - the bureaucracy is stifling.

Oh, this all sounds incredibly expensive doesn't it? How can we satisfy that nearly infinite combination of needs and aptitudes? Turn it around and ask, if we can satisfy a near infinite appetite for different trainers, baked beans and holidays, why can we not produce individualized education - surely one of the most important human needs, even for those of us who tend towards Herbert Spencer's view that the state should not be dictating or providing education at all.

I think we need to consider how to personalize education, from the earliest age; we're not going to achieve any step change in attainment just by adding a few extra teachers armed with standard lesson plans, just by putting a little extra money in the direction of the least well off - though that will no doubt help, assuming they can actually find the package to suit them.

Localism is certainly a part of the answer, as perhaps are things like "free schools" on the Dutch model and an idea expanded on at Regno del fines blog. Why not return the provision of schools much much closer to the families using them - at parish level or something similar sized. Parents could decide amongst themselves in a mutualist structure whether to get in a teacher who's going to teach the children proper grammar or to learn their times tables.

And we should not be so squeamish about the corporatization of education. By which I don't mean the mish-mash of schemes to get token private money into the current system. I mean that education, or at least the "skills agenda", is already a subsidy to business (or it ought to be if the education system produced people business can use). It is corporate welfare. So why not instead expect business itself to contribute directly to nurturing the skills needed in an area - perhaps paying for particular teachers is specialized subjects related to the local economy? It would be more transparent at least than corporate lobbyists persuading a few politicians far away to spend our money on providing them workers, and probably more reactive to changes in the economy.

A quantum leap in the amount of flexibility and personalization of education is what we need. And for government to butt out as much as possible. For surely, we have pretty well reached the situation Spencer predicted: