John Locke

Charlotte Gore's started a discussion looking for an argument that would enable us to counter the assertion of an interlocutor of hers, Joe, to the effect that the "social contract" trumps "civil liberties". IanB and CountingCats have both had a go at suggesting arguments, and there's been plenty of good discussion in the comments to all three posts - far more eloquent than I am sure I can manage here.

Now naturally, lots of discussion of the "social contract" centres around whether we have all entered into this contract, if it is a contract at all, and if we have, whether we did so voluntarily, and what the alternatives are if one claims not to have agreed to it. Do we enter into it merely by being born, or merely by living in a territory with a more or less democratic government that asserts such a contract as the will of the majority for the time being? What if we do not vote - are we agreeing to it or repudiating it? If we say we are repudiating it, or never agreed to it in the first place, is the only option to go and live in some other jurisdiction?

Now I don't want to rehash any of that here, but rather further to explore a line that NickM, also at Counting Cats in Zanzibar, seems to have begun to explore in his contribution to the debate, namely that we are all individuals, unique and irreducibly so; that we cannot experience exactly what another experiences without somehow becoming that other and abandoning ourselves. This, he says, rightly, is ignored by any kind of social contract.

I want to go a little further, however. I want to show that the social contract is by nature totalitarian, and amounts to enslavement; both of which I am quite sure Charlotte's original sparring partner, Joe, would recoil from in horror.

We can deal with the totalitarian issue very swiftly; it hardly needs more than a sentence. If the social contract is something which we are all deemed, somehow, to have agreed to, by birth in a particular territory or adoption of that territory and its government by immigration, and we cannot get out of that contract except, as is commonly argued, by moving somewhere else outside that territorial jurisdiction, then surely it conforms to Mussolini's dictum of "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Simply substitute "social contract" for "state" in that dictum to see what I mean. To escape this charge of totalitarianism the social contract would have to be explicitly agreed to by everyone who wanted to and an accommodation made within that territory for those who didn't so agree.

The claim of enslavement does require a little more exploration though, I will admit, and in doing so I enlist the assistance of the contemporary Austrian economist and anarchist philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe has written about this many times, but perhaps the best piece for my purposes is his "The Ethics and Economics of Private Property". In this he explains the logic behind the age-old anarchist and liberal (such as in Locke's "Second Treatise of Civil Government" enunciated first in Chapter 2) ethic that we have an inalienable right to "self-ownership".

All of political economy is directed at finding a solution to what he calls the "problem of social order": in a world of scarcity we need to find a way of managing, preferably avoiding, the conflicts that are inevitable when some good or other is scarce. This, even Hoppe the anarchist agrees (as do all thinking anarchists), will require some rules governing who has the right of ownership of scarce goods. But even in a world of total plenty, where nothing else is scarce (in Hoppe's analogy this would be the "Garden of Eden"), two things are nonetheless still scarce: ones-self and the ground one's own body occupies. So if nothing else there needs to be a universally applicable rule about who owns, has the right to control, one's body and physical faculties.

If you attest that you do not have the right of self-ownership, there are two alternatives: that someone else owns you, or that everyone owns each other in common. If someone else owns and controls your body and faculties, it cannot be a universally applicable ethic, since it creates two classes of people, those who own and control themselves and also the bodies and faculties of others, and those who do not own themselves because they are owned by others. If everyone owns everyone else, then whilst it satisfies this idea of a universal ethic in that the same rule applies to everyone, it is an impossible arrangement, since if everyone needs the consent of all his owners, i.e. everyone else, to do anything, then everyone also has to obtain the consent of everyone else in order to permit the first to do anything, and so on ad infinitum.

This, one might argue, is where a "social contract" becomes useful and legitimate. To get round this problem of everyone having to have the permission of everyone else even in order to consent to someone else's actions, they may establish some form of collective government to take the decisions on everyone's behalf. But in that case we are back creating two classes of people, the rulers, who have the ability to control everyone else's bodies and faculties on behalf of everyone else, and the ruled, so we are back to a problem of it not being universally applicable. As Hoppe says elsewhere, this norm of self-ownership is not merely a convention; for a convention is something to which an alternative exists that you simply choose not to use. There can be no legitimate, logical, universally ethical alternative to self-ownership.

So, a "social contract" denies the possibility of "self-ownership" and when one does not have a right to self-ownership one is, to a greater or lesser extent, enslaved, if not by an individual, then by the collective. And, whilst it is possible voluntarily to submit to some degree of enslavement, if it is to be an act of an individual with an a priori right to self-ownership, such a "social contract" must, once again, be voluntary and explicitly agreed to.

Those who assert that we must implicitly agree to some "social contract" then, are demanding that we submit to the two things they would probably most revile: totalitarianism and slavery.

NOTE: I have deliberately steered clear of touching on aspects of ownership of property external to ourselves. As most of you know, I myself have some conflicting opinions on, for example, ownership of economic "land" - scarce goods of nature including land itself. But more importantly, if I have successfully demolished the idea of a "Social Contract" solely on the incontrovertible right of self-ownership, then discussion about legitimate rights in property other than our own bodies becomes the subject of a separate debate about how to manage such rights in a system without an inherently coercive "social contract".

The time has come to pass as it was written in the year of our lord Sixteen hundred and ninety, and in the second year of the reign of our glorious sovereign majesty William, Stadtholder of Holland, Prince of Orange and Count of Nassau-Dillenburg and his Queen, Mary; King and Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, etc. by Mr John Locke:

222. The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who. have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society. What I have said here, concerning the legislative in general, holds true also concerning the supreme executor, who having a double trust put in him, both to have a part in the legislative, and the supreme execution of the law, acts against both, when he goes about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of the society. He acts also contrary to his trust, when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes; or openly preengages the electors, and prescribes to their choice, such, whom he has, by sollicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise, won to his designs; and employs them to bring in such, who have promised before-hand what to vote, and what to enact. Thus to regulate candidates and electors, and new-model the ways of election, what is it but to cut up the government by the roots, and poison the very fountain of public security? for the people having reserved to themselves the choice of their representatives, as the fence to their properties, could do it for no other end, but that they might always be freely chosen, and so chosen, freely act, and advise, as the necessity of the common-wealth, and the public good should, upon examination, and mature debate, be judged to require. This, those who give their votes before they hear the debate, and have weighed the reasons on all sides, are not capable of doing. To prepare such an assembly as this, and endeavour to set up the declared abettors of his own will, for the true representatives of the people, and the law-makers of the society, is certainly as great a breach of trust, and as perfect a declaration of a design to subvert the government, as is possible to be met with. To which, if one shall add rewards and punishments visibly employed to the same end, and all the arts of perverted law made use of, to take off and destroy all that stand in the way of such a design, and will not comply and consent to betray the liberties of their country, it will be past doubt what is doing. What power they ought to have in the society, who thus employ it contrary to the trust went along with it in its first institution, is easy to determine; and one cannot but see, that he, who has once attempted any such thing as this, cannot any longer be trusted.

[from John Locke, "The Second Treatise of Civil Government", Ch XIX "Of the Dissolution of Government", Para 222 (1690)"]

At the present government's behest we have:

• over a decade seen ordinary people robbed of their earnings through massively rising house prices and the debt money inflation created on to finance these;

• in the past year seen the result of this: further destruction of capital on a scale almost unprecedented, affecting those impoverished by the first as well as those made more wealthy;  

• seen that our own and future generations will be paying for the bitter pill with which they have tried to clean this ordure of their own making through the further attachment of our earnings, property and wealth;

• overt examples of politicians taking our money for their own frivolities under the eyes of all the others;

• a parliament reduced to a leisure club by the business management of a government desperate to get their authoritarian legislative program through further to curtail our liberties;

• and a government that has used all the patronage at its disposal to buy the votes of those elected to represent us, not them;

• had a government that has taken us into military adventures of the most unwise kind, based on lies and exaggerations and at the behest of a foreign power and which have killed many of our bravest fellow citizens.

I do not believe the good and wise Mr Locke was suggesting that it was up to the various people inside that suppurating House of Common Thieves and Accomplices to invoke the right to dissolve and choose the form and method of replacing it, perhaps especially those whose main interest is in securing power in the next parliament. He said it was up to us, the "other half" of the social contract: We The People.

To stitch up a new set of regulations to permit lesser troughings amongst themselves would be a complete travesty. We need a comprehensive and popular settlement that will not become a part of a package of hundreds of other policies in a party manifesto whose importance may vary from voter to voter and eclipse the program of change in the orders of the House.

I suggest that we have a National Government beginning as soon as possible, with, effectively, only one task: to consult as widely as possible with the people of Britain on a new constitution, new forms of government and representation, to include the powers and competencies of national, local and community level governance, and to produce a short list of different constitutional options to be voted on by the people in a referendum.

If we can be trusted to choose from thousands of hopefuls to dance or sing or otherwise perform before our monarch in a variety show, we can surely manage to sift through the various options and priorities and put together a constitution worthy of Her Majesty's signature.

A Zero Based State! By the people and from the people. Vive la Revolution!

The contempt with which I hold this man is such that I cannot bring myself to waste time thinking about writing something of my own, but fortunately an old liberal wrote quite eloquently enough for me three centuries ago and some...

...whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who. have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.

Every day I grow closer to being in Locke's state of war with Gordon and all those legislators who support the system he presently presides over. And I fear no political party currently represented in that legislature shares the breadth and depth of my growing hatred towards these institutions and the tyranny they now prosecute. Maybe someone will surprise me. Maybe someone will just start a project to prevent my further "radicalization".

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.

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

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

Nay! I have two problems with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone who has read more than one post of my blog will realize that I am a passionate supporter of Land Value Tax. In other forums, when the subject comes up, people sometimes feel, and say, that I pursue the issue too zealously. Even those that support some LVT are sometimes embarrassed at the "hard core Georgists" like myself shrilly calling for more. I know plenty who regard the claims from some of us as to the myriad benefits Land Value Tax could bring as just plain rubbish - "nothing could be that good and not have been tried".

None more so than when housing policy is to the fore, as it ought to have been, floods permitting, these past couple of weeks. No sooner was the Housing Green Paper published to great fanfare than it seemed for all the coverage that half our existing housing stock was plunged knee deep in water and all the discussion about housing was about building in flood plains or not rather than the rather more pressing issue of ensuring everyone has a decent place to call their own in the first place.

So, read on if you want to try to understand just why it is that "hard core Georgists" like myself so fundamentally believe that not only is Land Value Tax the only permanent solution to the broken market that is housing, but also why it forms such a core part of any human being's fundamental right to an opportunity to achieve personal freedom and the root of many equity and economic justice issues. I hope you'll understand at least that we are not talking about just a different way of raising tax but a radical shift in how we think about tax itself and more importantly an alternative view of our relationship to the planet's resources and each other.

Land: our common birthright

The headline of Polly Toynbee's article on the green paper from Tuesday 24th July, "Everyone is entitled to a stake in the nation's soil and bricks", showed promise that at least one of the chaterati was going to describe this basic principle. Though she failed convincingly to explain the entitlement the headline proclaimed or how one might achieve such an entitlement the sentiment embodied in that headline gets close to the core rationale for Land Value Taxers.

Every human being ever born is ultimately utterly dependent on the bounty of our common planet's natural resources to survive. Consequently every human being ever born has to have a common entitlement to a share of that bounty if they are ever to achieve self-ownership. If you are always dependent on another for a place to rest your bones, that other has a coercive relationship over you, you are dependent on them for how much of the fruits of your labours you are able to keep.

It's an easy thing to say and in an agrarian, low population, subsistence economy a relatively easy thing to envisage - everyone simply spreads out until they've got enough land each of a quality sufficient to keep themselves alive by their own labours on that land, growing food for subsistence and no more. Indeed, John Locke, proto-liberal to some of us, said that since it was mankind's calling to be steward and master of his planet, you have the right to take as much as you can keep and make good use of with one important proviso - that you always leave as much left over, and of as good quality, to be divvied up amongst everyone else.

But such an economy isn't conducive to human development as a whole. In order the better to put nature's bounty to use for everybody's benefit we specialize, in specializing we come together in markets, communities, cities, and our relationship with land changes, though our dependence on it does not diminish. Johann Heinrich von Thunen described and then David Ricardo explained how human interactions and communities create rental value in land - those locations closer to where more people want to circulate, live, conduct commercial or social activities rise in value simply by virtue of where they are.

In fact, the rental value of a location in land is the financial expression of by how much that location breaches Locke's Proviso mentioned above - that you can take and own as much as you like, so long as you leave enough for everyone else, of as good quality, for everyone else who needs to be in that location to share. Collecting that value and pre-distributing it to all the people that together create that value - via a Land Value Tax (others have described it as the "Community Collection of Rent" perhaps more descriptively) and a Citizen's Dividend - is giving each person the financial value of their birthright to a piece of land.

Now, there are lots of objections to such a scheme, frequently voiced by those who do already own, or by those who don't think this could produce significant amounts of revenue. I shall try and anticipate and respond to some of those objections in following articles. But I hope at least that you get the picture as to why some of us believe LVT is more important than just another taxation method. The sharing of the land value we all collaborate in creating is a fundamental right to an equitable share of our common inheritance in a complex world where it just isn't practical for us to spread out and have an equal share of actual land each.

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