There's been a couple of blogs having a little spat about whether libertarians can ethically support having some kind of military in order to intervene in unfree countries in order to assist the oppressed people of those countries gain freedom. We can be all happy in our stateless country, no coercion, no taxes and so on. But we might think ourselves callous, careless, if we didn't worry about how so many other people on the planet are doing under their oppressive regimes.

For some this turns into a justification for a state in order to intervene abroad. It was, ultimately, Tony Blair's final plea to the people of Britain in his speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference as millions of us were marching against the Iraq war on the morning on Feb 15th 2003. So how could we help those oppressed peoples of the world in a stateless non-militarized society? Do we merely rely on our shining example of liberty making all dictators and tyrants quake and fall? It seems unlikely doesn't it?

How about "mercenaries of liberty"? Or even "charity mercenaries"? We have, I am sure, many fine men and women in our current military who joined up thinking they were going to help people around the world. Especially today when so much is spoken of our military's role in peace-keeping and policing in areas of conflict. I'm sure the likes of Col Tim Collins (he of the "We come to liberate not to conquer" speech to his troops before going into Iraq) could be cast in such a mould.

How about armed and militarily trained squads going in, funded by private charity say, alongside the Oxfam delivery in Darfur? Perhaps even developing international "protection agencies" who might advertise their services in Saddam's Iraq offering to protect your Marsh Arab village against Saddam's security forces? Always of course working on the same basis as protection agencies in our stateless private law society - spreading out private law society into another society. No initiation of aggression, but just protection. That protection could even help break down the forces of the oppressor. How much of Saddam's military, who after all largely fled when confronted with well trained troops, acted all their military careers out of fear of the consequences of not obeying orders from a tyrannical bastard?

Perhaps in defending the Marsh Arabs, with as little aggression as possible, some of Saddam's forces might come to understand that if they came under your protection too they would be able to escape from Saddam's predations until the latter is actually left weak enough for people to act against on their own to grab their own liberty. I suppose ironically this is not dissimilar to how the neo-cons at the Project for the New American Century were suggesting getting rid of Saddam without actually going to war with him - by offering protection to the people in the south and the Kurdish north until they had the confidence to act on their own.

Would it work? Is it ethical for a libertarian? How would one ensure that such an armed protection agency capable and willing to take on others' statist oppressors did not become the "might is right" monopolistic wielder of force when back at home? I suppose the market-anarchist line would be that they can only build up those businesses in the public glare if they do as their customers pay them to - if they were charitably funded by people here wanting to help Iraqis, say, that would mean only being able to build up the weaponry to take that role on, and being answerable to arbiters if they breached their contracts of non-aggression here or even in theatre. That they would be inefficient if they spent time and money developing anything more than the best defensive power, skills and weaponry.

Those of us who quite like the idea of anarchism, or to use a word I've heard used more frequently recently and which rather neatly it seems to me gets round the inevitable comparison with bomb throwing revolutionaries, Spanish priest killers or G20 violent-left credentialed academics when unsympathetic folk hear the "hot button" word "anarchy", "voluntarism", are frequently goaded with taunts such as "look at Somalia, look at how great your ideal of anarchism is doing there (not)! Explain that if you think anarchism is such a great alternative.". Or even "why don't you go live in Mogadishu if you think anarchism is so good?"

Well in the past I have really tended to wave away such taunts with something along the lines of "that's not really a great example of the sort of thing we mean, because it only arose out of the complete and unplanned collapse of a previous totalitarian regime with no time, as we would want to have if we were deliberately introducing anarchism here in a developed country, to develop those alternative sorts of institutions that we would probably expect to replace state run public goods like security and rule of law."

Nonetheless it is an example of a country that has been essentially stateless for much of the past two decades, and which continues to be in the headlines now and again, whether over piracy, as recently, asylum seeking or the scene of a shambles of a US attempted invasion popularized by a Hollywood action adventure blockbuster. So I figured it deserves a closer inspection. Also, though, as I grow ever more impatient to sack all the politicians and bureaucrats that currently are making such a destructive hash of ruling us, I think it is actually an interesting experiment to consider how it might pan out here if we were to manage to achieve an unplanned revolutionary change.

The first thing to consider is what expectations we should have when looking at Somalia as such an example. Those who taunt supporters of voluntarism with Somalia seem to expect a miracle and are trying to suggest that voluntarism has obviously failed because people dont't live forever, all drive around in Bentleys, have rosy cheeked children dreaming of graduating from the world class University of Mogadishu into world leading management consultancy firms and have the highest standard of living on the planet. But this is to mistake the claims made for the superiority of voluntarist statelessness. We only claim that in a cost-benefit analysis statelessness would do better for any given group of people than a statist society. If somewhere was more or less a shithole with a government we would want it of course to be less of a shithole without and, one would hope, on a trajectory of development and improvement that would see it advance more quickly and to a higher level than with a government. We would, I think, agree that to expect somwhere to go from armpit of the planet to surpassing the standard of living of some Monaco style playground of the world's wealthiest would be unreasonable. Wouldn't we?

So, can such claims for the superiority of statelessness be demonstrated by the Somali example? Well, before considering that a little history of the place is called for. Let's face it, Somalia was not merely in the "bit of a shithole" category in the years preceeding the period of statelessness: it was one of the worst. Even in a period when there were rivals such as Congo's Mobutu vying for the title of the regime with the worst record on human rights, the era of Uganda's Amin and other such paragons of sound government sharing the continent, that of Siad Barre in Somalia was described by the United Nations as "one of the worst". Barre had run a totalitarian "scientific socialist" regime for his first ten years and then as the western aligned powers tried to butter him up to end his reliance on the Soviet bloc he had slowly introduced a few economic, in the main reforms.

He was still a complete bastard. In a country with a clan system that goes back millennia he was ruthless in persecuting those of clans other than his own. There was massive corruption and lotos of world aid ending up in the hands of his favourites. "Gossip" was a capital offense. Not that you would notice it since his internal militia just killed people they didn't like the look of anyway. He had complete control of the media - with just one state owned newspaper for example. There were hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people as he made frequent land grabs to give to his friends and more refugees over the border in Ethiopia. Of course we didn't hear so much about all this because those who would speak out were terminated before they could.

Apart from the short nine year period between independence from Italy and Britain in 1960, Barre's rule was pretty well the only time this "counry" had existed as a monocentric governed state. These two colonial powers had suppressed traditional clan based polycentric natural and property law based justice systems that had survived successfully operating for eleven hundred years regardless of which Caliph had claimed what bits of the territory.

So, has the ensuing statelessness made things better or worse? And if better, has it been better than what might have been expected had a more controlled, humane, government been in charge? Well, first of all, you probably wouldn't consider the immediate aftermath of Barre's overthrow an "anarchy". It was a state of civil war, in which those warlords who had collaborated in overthrowing Barre fought to get to form a new government. But when that fizzled out in stalemate, despite interventions from the "international community" on one side or another, real statelessness set in. Of course quite a number of the positive studies of the benefits of the statelessness are by people with something to prove about anarchism - libertarian authors who could be said to have a bias toward showing statelessness in its best light. But I'd encourage you to read this one by Austrian economist Peter Leeson - it's only 33 pages of double line spaced text and appears quite methodologically sound to me.

Nonetheless, the World Bank (in a report co-authored by Tim Harford), The Economist, the BBC and National Geographic are amongst the more unbiased positive studies of various aspects of the working of markets to provide many public goods not available under Barre's regime. Indeed the World Bank report states that "Somalia boasts lower rates of extreme poverty and, in some cases, better infrastructure than richer countries in Africa". In telecommunications, electricity generation (at least in the urban areas), air transport and financial services, sophisticated markets, unburdened by regulation (and sometimes "buying in" regulatory services such as with airlines all safety checks are contracted out to the destination countries' civil aviation regimes) have flourished and are amongst the cheapest on the continent. There is a thriving competitive media with a dozen radio and TV stations and many newspapers. Cross border cattle trade has more than doubled - and the insurance contracts required by Kenyan buyers to assure them that cattle are not stolen have lower premiums even than those paid by Kenyan sellers.

Literacy is high, even though schooling has fallen (though before 1991 all schooling was being funded by international aid money which has fallen off rapidly because the "international community" cannot cope with the idea of a stateless entity - there is no government, corrupt or otherwise, to do aid deals with. Nonetheless private primary education is taking off, and there are now three universities where there was only one. Life expectancy is higher than in its relatively "stable government" neighbours, as is access to medical care, even though it is private. Infant mortality and maternal mortality in childbirth are both lower compared with their regional neighbours.

The clan system of extended family support for the destitute has kicked back into life - so although access to safe water is lower than in its neighbours, the poorest do not pay because their clans arrange that for them. The Somali diaspora remits nearly a quarter of the entire GDP through a network of unofficial but quite sophisticated money transfer agencies operating internationally - a little like a Somali version of Western Union. Homicide is, if I understand the measure correctly, down to 4% as a cause of death, compared with 3.6% in parts of the USA.

In fact, the periods between 1992 and today which have seen most turmoil have been those in which the "international community" has taken it upon itself to say "enough is enough, you need a government and we're going to help impose one". When there is a chance of a government, the war-lords start fighting again hoping to get the upper hand. When the energy for the establishment of a government fizzles out they go back to looking after their clan based interests and leaving the others alone. The ancient polycentric "Xeer" system of clan justice, based, as mentioned above, on restitution for property loss and natural law has which was by all accounts a very humane legal system has been usurped for the moment by the allegedly more brutal Shari'a based Islamic Courts Union with its Shari'a emphasis on codified punishments and we do get to hear about summary and brutal justice being doled out on occasion. But when we consider where they have come from under Barre's brutal regime even that is an improvement.

In conclusion then, yes, Somalia is still in the "bit of a shithole" category. Yes, it confuses the hell out of governments and international organizations around the world to have a state without a government and they keep trying to interfere to impose one. It is probably not yet the sort of place you would tend to want to go for an Indian Ocean holiday, let alone to settle in some kind of a global "Free State Project". But on the basis that we claim market anarchy is not a miracle cure, but merely better than government based institutions operating under similar constraints of national natural and human capital, it certainly looks as though the period of statelessness has seen many improvements in Somalia, and improvements that have come more quickly than in comparable neighbouring countries with functioning governments.

They still face enormous challenges of course, not the least of which is the continual hand-wringing of the "international community" desperate to try and help impose some state apparatus from time to time. But maybe, just maybe, if that "international community" can refrain from attempted power-broking and limit themselves to things like trying to persuade the traditional courts system or the Islamic Courts Union to take responsibility for dealing with the likes of the pirate problem - since it would be in their interests to do so if it keeps the heavy hand of government imposed from without away from them - perhaps Somalia can continue to prove that statelessness can bring bigger faster improvement than governments can.

...in a good if probably unsuspected cause.

Most of you will probably realize that I regard the need for a military as one of the state's defining, and worst, features. States are made for war, and they have to have such bodies of their finest young men and women to do unquestioning their filthy work for them.*

I have had retired Gurkhas as security guards at my hall of residence for several years now. I am always both touched and embarrassed when I go down to take a walk around the site with them always to be addressed as "sir". I cannot imagine any of the other guards we have had doing so. They are the best guards we have had. They are reliably on time, and stay reliably till the end of the shift. I always know (for many years with other guards I didn't have such confidence) that if they come across an incident they will deal with it and that if they cannot, they will not just leave a student's concern or complaint unanswered and call us in if they need to.

Once upon a time these men I work with had fought it out, amongst their friends from their remote mountain villages, for the honour and privilege of being able to be sent away, cannon fodder for imperialist and post imperialist political egoists half a planet away. For two hundred years their villages have carried on what seems, to me, to be something of a mystifying tradition. They have fought, been feared as amongst the best, toughest soldiers in the world, for this jumped up belligerent little lump of rock of ours off the coast of north western Europe, and have died in their tens of thousands in our name.

In civilian life they are small only in stature. Their honesty, sense of respect, attention to duty, courtesy and loyalty are second to none. That is I am sure quite natural, but it is also, to them, the manifestation of what they consider to be "British". And boy do they do it a good deal better than many of the well-heeled native youth we come across wandering around off their heads, screaming and shouting and being abusive in the dead of the night who are to be, one presumes, our leaders of the future, once they graduate.

This weekend they are dumbfounded, to put it mildly, at the latest turn of events in the saga that has been the fight to allow some of their older comrades (mine all served post-97 I believe), the men whom they followed generation after generation from the top of the world to fight for this country, its people, its monarch and its self-serving politicians, to settle here.

Most of you will also know my outspoken views on immigration and border controls - that sharing the birthright of this planet we are all born onto, that freeing trade amongst all the nations of the world, means that people must be able to follow goods in freedom around the planet.

But for Fuck's Sake. If we do have to have borders. If we do have to try and stop people getting into this country, and I am prepared to be practical enough to realize that whilst open borders do not exist around the world and whilst many do not live in freedom and so are forced to try to escape their own tyrants we may well have to have some form of control, it should not be these people. These tough, loyal, courageous men who have done more for this country, with so little thanks, than so many even of our own have done or ever will do to deserve a living from our tax payments.

The Home Department, Secretary Jacqui Smith and Minister Phil Woolas should hang their heads in shame. For me, it would be fair justice if these men, inheritors of the heroes of the Western Front, of Sepoy, of Burma, of Borneo and Malaya, of Afghanistan and Iraq both now and ninety years ago and of many other battles in between, were to take matters into their own hands and turn their fighting talents to the walls and fences of Downing Street, and I'd hope that every last man and woman with a Queen's Commission or Shilling to their name would be right there behind them.

Our craven, cowardly, authoritarian, destructive, ungrateful, penny pinching, mealy mouthed, thieving, self-serving "representatives" would deserve everything they get.  Alas for us, these Gurkhas are too honourable to do our dirty work for us.  It is up to us to show this shitty spineless government the door, and preferably the inside of the cell beyond it.

*I am prepared to acknowledge that in this day and age much of what they do can be "humanitarian" in one form or another, but their need even in those situations would be lessened if it were not for other states at war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember that day, in February 2003 when there were supposedly 1 million plus people marching in demonstration against the Iraq war through the centre of London. Well, on a population pro rata equivalence, Dublin has just seen more than that protesting the credit crunch and their government's handling of the economic crisis:

Huge protest over Irish economy Protesters said they wanted to make their voices heard but avoid strike action Up to 100,000 people have gathered in Dublin city centre to protest at the Irish government's handling of the country's recession. Many are angry at plans to impose a pension levy on public sector workers. [From BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Huge protest over Irish economy]

(100,000 of a population of 4.4 million is like having 1.3 million of us Brits out on the street). Now, okay, we're not quite as close up to the nostrils deep in merde as Ireland is...yet, but why aren't we more angry? It must be time we hit the streets in protest - although quite what we would be protesting for is quite another thing; the government may have got us into this thing by its economic policy, but the last thing we therefore want is for our government actually to do something about it, maybe that's what we should be protesting for.

As we speak, the Bank of England is waiting with the equivalent of the on switch on the money press: every page of theoretical shiny new notes it prints is stealing directly from us, from the value of our existing money. Is that not enough to protest about? The government, the economists, he money markets; they do not know what is really going on at the moment nor how to fix it. They have been staring into an abyss for months now not knowing how deep it is or what's going to be waiting for us at the bottom. They have been "doing something" because the did not want to be accused of "doing nothing" - the thing that is often blamed for turning the Wall St Crash events into the start of the Depression; and they don't want to be responsible like that.

A well known news anchor told me a few months back that even with just an economics A Level forty-ish years ago this was literally the first time he had ever felt to be on a par in terms of understanding what was going on with his expert interviewees. However eminent, learned, wealthy or powerful in the field of economics and banking they might be, they were themselves fishing for ideas, points of reference and relevant examples of what was going on and what they might do to achieve some difference in outcome.

So it is high time that we, the people whose only apparent interest in this is that our financial futures are being taken from us daily, stood up and expressed our real concern. In forty days or thereabout the leaders of the twenty most powerful and influential countries on the planet will be here in Britain to talk about a way through this mess and we're going to be there represented by the loonies from Downing Street who are responsible for the mess in the first place.

For real man.

Not literally of course - I am irreversibly against the death penalty - but today the Daily Mail - I was pointed to the story by another blog; I would never voluntarily read it - reopens the story about the UK cover up of official knowledge and condoning of torture in US detention:

British collusion in U.S. torture of suspected terrorists was covered up after extensive top-level talks between the two governments, it can be revealed. Foreign Office officials spent three months working with their American counterparts to hush up the allegations made by Binyam Mohamed, it was claimed. Mohamed, a British resident, has spent six years in U.S. custody - including a spell in the notorious Guantanamo Bay. [From Torture case 'cover up': Foreign Office officials 'spent months colluding with U.S. to hush up claims' | Mail Online]

So, which should be hung out to dry in the international criminal court - Tony Blair for colluding in the first place with what he must have known (after all even I saw the episodes of torture in "24"!) was going on or David Milliband for his desperate attempts to cover up our knowledge and forethought in torture.

Come on chaps. We are signatories to the treaty on torture. If our judges won't indict Bliar and Millibland, perhaps we can persuade Spain's.

...but strangely intensely exciting at the same time?

I'm just watching the news on Channel 4 and they've got all this coverage of the squirming going on in Washington and Wall Street.

Is it just me or am I right in the impression that Privilege and Power is absolutely terrified at the moment? That "they" really believe things are on the edge of a precipice which threatens systemic melt-down or revolution?

And also that there is a real massive popular movement going on to get the message across to "the Hill" that "they" will not be forgiven for allowing "our" money to pay Goldman Sachs bonuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

Saharan sun could power European supergrid | Environment | guardian.co.uk Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

...well, perhaps not quite but this is interesting, if blindingly obvious in a sort of a "why didn't we think of that" way:

HMV customers to exploit tax loophole at digital terminals - Telegraph

Customers at HMV stores will be able to avoid paying VAT by ordering CDs and DVDs through digital terminals. The "HMV Delivers" kiosks are being installed across the chain's 240 UK branches over the next two years. Their initial role will be to allow customers to order products that are out of stock in their shops.  The merchandise will then be sent from HMV's offshore site in Guernsey.

I've been writing for a while now about how the globalization of communication (and delivery) technology is set to make it ever harder for states to quantify and collect taxes based on trade and incomes and make it imperative, if they want to have any revenue stream into the future, to switch taxation to more fixed sources like ("economic") land - ground rents, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum and so on, or face the prospect of ever increasingly authoritarian measures to force people to repatriate income and assets for tax purposes.

I hadn't counted on VAT being amongst the first to be threatened, but here it is. It's not going to help buying cakes from Tesco yet because it will only work if it is actually imported, I suspect (no getting away with simply operating from a warehouse in every town that happens to be owned by a Channel Island company I would think).

But people, liberal minded political types especially, need to wake up to this double threat - to recognize that revenue collection will be more difficult in future if based on moveable assets, incomes and trade, and to recognize that addressing that means going one of two ways - the more equitable land tax, or the more authoritarian crackdown on trade and "cross-border" earnings.  The ability to move money and income and so on overseas is moving fast and getting ever easier for the ordinary person - you no longer need to be super-rich to go offshore.  We need to act fast to counteract its effects on future tax revenues.