liberalism

A number of policy related discussions have recently caught my eye, and my ire it has to be said, because they seem to involve people proposing state interventions in some area or another, along the lines of "something must be done" without first examining and understanding the real cause of the problem they are trying to ameliorate.  And often as not the problems can be shown to have been caused by previous state action or legislation.  And that getting rid of that previous action or legislation rather than piling on yet more legislation ought to be the first response.

To my mind it is crucial that a party that claims the mantle of "liberalism" get to understand this, and that the first reaction when something apparently needs "fixing" ought to be to examine the causes of the problem rather than just come up with another jolly wheeze for further state intervention.  Even if you do not take your skepticism of the state and state action as far as I do, that is to say to want to eradicate the entire edifice as soon as possible, I do not believe you can call yourself a liberal if you do not seek to reduce the state's involvement wherever possible, and most especially when it is the state's actions that are causing the problem you are looking at,

If Lib Dems all made honest and sincere attempts to do this before proposing some new intervention we could probably save many hours of argument between so called social liberals and so called economic liberals and whoever - because we might be more inclined to believe that those proposing something had ensured that it was the minimum intervention necessary to achieve the solution to some social problem.

And this is not a problem restricted to web discussions amongst various groups of "ordinary members"; it is a systemic problem in the party, indeed in politics as a whole, from the highest levels of policy making to the "man on the street" demanding that "something must be done".  Furthermore, rigorous application of this inherently liberal principle would be, quite frankly, a unique selling point at least amongst the bigger political parties in the UK and could be presented as a properly radical alternative to the more knee-jerk interventionism of the other two statist parties.

If we believe, as Nick said during his leadership campaign, that the majority of Britain are instinctively liberal, someone ought to be giving them genuinely liberal alternatives and at the moment Liberal Democrats are failing them as much as anyone else.  We will often, I suspect, find that the state created causes of many contemporary problems come down to only a few sorts of rights and privileges the state continues to uphold - because nobody dared to try to get rid of them, preferring instead to try to "legislate them away" each time a new adverse and perhaps previously unforeseen effect turned up.  That in turn should tell us something; point us to ways of solving whole rafts of issues with one major change and hundreds of repeals of the wasteful legislation that has in intervening years been used to try to ameliorate those issues.

Only when we have eradicated those parts of the state system that cause us so many problems will we truly be able to see whether what results is a "fair" and "just" society and whether there is need for a little redistributive effort here and there to ensure people's quality of life.  It was once called the "doctrine of the level playing field" and was long forgotten as the activist state decided that all it needed to do was to introduce yet more new legislation for each problem that arose.

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!).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Over at Lib Dem Voice Stephen Tall has a short piece on Our Glorious Leader's increasing positioning the Lib Dems as the party of "fairness" in the run up to the General Election.  He concludes that:

Nick’s stated aim – as detailed in his The Liberal Moment pamphlet last autumn – is for the party to replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories. In which case it makes good, strategic sense to pitch the Lib Dems’ tent squarely on the territory – fairness – traditionally associated with Labour.

Perhaps the reason it has been associated with Labour is that it is possibly the most vacuous, subjective, politically hijacked notion one can think of.  Just what on earth is "fairness"?  It is a licence for politicians to make subjective judgments about which constituency to pour favours into at any one time.

Is it in the remotest sense "fair" for a bare majority to decide what is fair and then impose it on a substantial minority (that's if you can even assume that in any sense a majority has ever agreed with the winning party's notion of what's fair)?

Let's face it, democracy itself is not fair, enabling as it does the 51% to push around the 49% for a while till the positions are reversed next time around, or whenever.  Not for nothing has it been described as two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Throughout human history, the story of the state is one that has at all times been "more fair" to one group than to another - that is, indeed, how those that rely on plebiscites to get into power actually win.  And in fact the only way one group or another can be exploited is if there is an entity with some kind of constitutional mandate to enforce the will of some on the many in support of the would-be exploiter: in other words, a state.  As Kevin Carson writes, the difference between (actually existing, exploitative...) capitalism and the free (and fair) market is state intervention.

But perhaps most importantly, the biggest issue I have with what Stephen writes above, is that it does not, in any way, follow that in order to realise some ambition to "replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories" we need to camp on hitherto Labour territory.  Not at all.  In fact I do not want to be associated in the slightest with those who thought that the lying, authoritarian, interventionist, profligate, thieving, warmongering, scum bags who have "run" this country (as in "into the ground") for a decade were even on the right camp site.  Not for a minute.

If we cannot find a way of putting across that freedom is first and foremost about fairness, that the latter follows the former, then we are lost, and, frankly, an embarrassment to the name and the history of the liberal movement.  So please, if there is to be "change" this year, let it be the sort of change that can explain freedom, promote freedom.  Fairness will follow if that is done properly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the run up to 1997, I remember that one somewhat better, the Iron Lady was gone, love her or hate her, and the Tory government had become mired in "sleaze" and policy-wise had run out of steam, full of the second division of ministers that had emerged under Thatcher. Tony Blair and his New Labour project was another "Big Idea" whose time had come. Labour without the socialism. Economically responsible. With a plan.

And so we've had Thatcherism and Blairism over that past thirty years. But I think we will not get Brownism or Cameronism. Now, even moreso than in 1979, and certainly moreso than in 1997, we need a "Big Idea". Not merely a change of management. And, for all the coverage, I cannot see any "Big Idea" coming out of Old Queen Street. To prove their management credentials, they present, at their big show case conference before likely victory, a managerial mock-budget. Talk of freezing public sector pay, of everyone working for an extra year before retirement; these are not going to solve the terminal systemic problems in the anglo-saxon pensions system or the bloated state, unable to sap any more out of a shattered and second class productive economy.

And today's "Big Idea" ought to be not looking at how the State can be tweaked here and there or managed differently, but to look at the very nature of the State itself. As I quoted Albert Jay Nock in me previous post, here he is again, also from "Our Enemy The State":

The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or- that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, itlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

[...]

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

Nock, of course, concludes as I too conclude; that the State is an anti-social institution - the enemy of social power that it unremittingly destroys. And so the "Big Idea" for today is, in fact a "socialist" revolution. A complete reversal of the centuries' old process of State power usurping Social power and never giving it back. Not the "socialism" corrupted by the coercive statist tendencies of the twentieth century "left", or of the "social democratic" tendency. But the confidence that social power can achieve what the do-gooders believe their states can do only much better.

It is an irony that in our own party what we think of and term "social liberalism" reflects a belief that the state should help liberalism flourish by its supposedly judicious interventions. For true "social liberalism" ought to be the belief, expressed by Nock, or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Gustav de Molinari that through genuine liberalism social power does not need the coercive state.

As David Boaz puts it in his "Libertarianism: A Primer":

The right term for the advocates of civil society and free markets is arguably socialist. Thomas Paine distinguished between society and government, and the libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock summed up all the things that people do voluntarily--for love or charity or profit--as "social power," which is always being threatened by the encroachment of State power. So we might say that those who advocate social power are socialists, while those who support State power are statists.

State Power is created by conquest and confiscation. From what Paine described as the "French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives" the state has exploited. It was no less exploitative from the seventeenth century Commonwealth's installation of mercantilist power - merely a different group was exploited. Nor, for all the talk that the universal franchise was the zenith of democratic achievement, has that exploitation ceased just because everyone now has a theoretical say - again, just another group, or groups, exploited from time to time. State power is the true "opium of the masses" with its ability to whisper softly, intoxicatingly to us that "the State will provide".

For those managerial politicians, those would be state exploiters, who cannot get away from their amateur management-speak, what we need is to "zero base" the state. For the state is no defier of the laws of the universe: for every state action there is an automatic and most likely undesirable reaction. It is state created privilege that enables some to exploit others' natural competitiveness in the market. And then the state says it needs to intervene and "redistribute" what would be more naturally distributed if that privilege had not been granted in the first place: more coercion, more exploitation, more state power. Every intervention of the state needs to be examined for the usually detrimental effects it has elsewhere and which it then claims as reason to usurp yet more social power to fix.

And we will find, invariably, that left well alone, without the depredations of the state in the first place, social power would have worked better. Social power, the power of all the associations we make one with another, even the ones we don't know about, such as my relationship with the forger of the brass ferrule in Leonard Read's "Pencil" whom I cannot know, is the only thing that can end this spiral of managerial, coercive, exploitative and ultimately futile statism. And its resurgence needs to start now, before George and Dave, and all that seek to come after them, manage to destroy it utterly. And with our now massively increased ability, through modern technology and communication, to organize for ourselves, for "people [to] have more to do with each other and governments less" there has never been a better time than now.

Socialism: it's not what you think!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The debate in the US over the merits of socialized medicine appears to be being successfully portrayed in the rest of the world as the great majority forces of light and twentieth century social liberal ideals of care for all against a tiny minority of the forces of darkness, right wing nut-jobs who really want an agonizing death for anyone without the savings to be able to buy a heart for transplant from some Indian street urchins.

Comparisons on both sides are being made with the NHS and the Canadian systems, with the pro-Obama opinion pointing out the benefits of cradle to grave free at the point of access health care equal for all, and the anti-socialized medicine opinion pointing out the queues, the lack of choice, the fact that some people die because an available treatment is not permitted on several grounds and the total overall cost.

For those of us not politically active in the UK in the 1940s it should be a fascinating debate (if it weren't being so hideously caricatured on both sides). Because more or less ever since the National Health Service Act was passed in 1948 it seems to me that nobody has seriously challenged the NHS model, seen as it is with great "affection" as the mainstay of our post-war "enlightened" caring society. On this side of the Atlantic it seems the majority of any opinion being expressed is along the lines of cheering and celebration that what we have had for sixty years finally America is going to get and propel them into that enlightened caring society at last.

But we should take the debate much more seriously, for when the critics of socialized medicine make their case, they are, in effect, making the case against our NHS as well - highlighting potential failings that we no longer even bother looking for. First off, we should understand that the opposition is itself two separate oppositions.

In the one corner are the beneficiaries of the current, and admittedly badly broken in my opinion, system of HMO's, big pharma, heavy regulation and legal (both state and federal) protectionism that makes a few organizations and individual very wealthy but actively prevents the sort of health care we would want to see everyone able to access. But I suspect that these folk are not the sort of people many who would want to see big change in health care provision here would support.

In the other corner, and with a far more honest, sincere and coherent critique, are those who recognize that the current system is deeply flawed, expensive and exclusive, but that that is itself caused by state interference, and that actually nationalizing that system will end up even more expensive for all (though of course hidden in government rather than household or company budgets), and entrench the sort of rationing culture that is now so evident in our own NHS. The message from these people is that the solution is not to throw more regulation, more money and more centralized control at the problem, but radically to reduce the red tape and protectionist regulations at all levels - to reduce the grip of big pharma and of lobby groups, of professional accreditation bodies in whose members' interests it is to keep health care resources scarce and therefore lucrative.

And this is the side I am on. I do not want to see the NHS broken apart and true competition introduced into UK healthcare because I want to end the idea of care for all, but because as a monopoly with more or less centralized control and hence no real measures of cost effectiveness together with the fact that it is financed by taxes - a mechanism that is inherently unable to allocate resources efficiently - it is more expensive, less flexible and more exclusive than the alternatives. Bevan was reputed to have said when asked what he would do if doctors refused to join the new scheme in 1948 that he would "stuff their mouths with gold": a prediction that has embedded huge levels of economic rent in the medical professions ever since.

And so, I commend to you this piece, "Health Care: An Anarchist Approach" by Gary Chartier at the Centre for a Stateless Society which sums up well the argument of those of us, like myself, who want the state out of these sort of essential goods precisely because all they ever do is screw it all up and make things more expensive. Please go read the whole lot, but I will end with his bullet point recommendations. We still need to have this debate here.

A Sensible Policy Agenda

Bottom line: the thing government officials could do to reduce health care costs would be to get out of the way. They could:

1. Stop offering protection to patents and copyrights.
2. Eliminate hospital accrediting and professional licensing rules, leaving a variety of flexible, competing market-based certification systems to do the job..
3. Limit malpractice awards to actual damages plus the costs of recovery (including reasonable legal fees)
4. Repeal regulations that prevent the sale of insurance across state lines and the prevent the operation of what amount to insurance schemes by health professionals.
5. Alter the tax code to de-link employment and insurance. (This change would have the potential to boost net taxes, of course, if it weren’t made in tandem with the tax cuts for which I’ve argued.)
6. Replace the FDA approval process with competitive private certification systems.

And government officials could also ensure that ordinary people had the resources needed to pay for (newly much less expensive) health care. They could:

1. Eliminate licensing, zoning, and related restrictions that help people from starting small, low-capital businesses.
2. Eliminate rules that prevent poor people from entering business regarded as off-limits (like selling non-approved pharmaceuticals—which could, again, be certified by competitive, voluntary, market-based certification services).
3. Eliminate rules that force poor people to choose between the kind of housing middle-class planners and neighborhood busybodies prefer—and no housing at all.
4. Eliminate import duties.
5. Dramatically slash the tax burden at the state and federal level—sharply increasing the standard income tax deduction and the Earned Income Tax Credit—and making corresponding reductions in spending.

Notice how this package of reforms would work. It would ensure that poor people had more money. By eliminating monopolies (and quasi-monopolistic market distortions like tax subsidies for particular insurance choices), it would also ensure that prices for health care services—whether purchased directly or provided via insurers—were lower. By keeping a competitive market in place, it would ensure that competitive market pressures would tend to elevate overall product and service quality. And because it wouldn’t involve the installation of yet another czar, or the equivalent, because it would leave people free to make their own health-care choices, it would preserve liberty rather than limiting it. It would achieve all three of the goals proponents of current health-care reform measures say they want.

But such a plan would be anything but a continuation of the status quo. It would be a dramatic attack on the status quo, one that redistributed wealth from privileged monopolists to ordinary people, and dramatically increased the likelihood of access to inexpensive, high-quality medical care for all Americans.

"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.