political philosophy

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.

Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists.  Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to administer "justice" and to ensure "national defense".  Even intellectual heavyweights such as Robert Nozick felt that a de facto "state", at least at a local level, would emerge from private law enforcement agencies.

So I'm often on the lookout for literature that explains how a private law based society would work, indeed would vastly improve upon the current predominant state run model, and so I am delighted to point my reader to "Chaos Theory", a pair of short essays, one on "justice" and the other on "national defense" by Robert P Murphy.  It is available as a freely downloadable PDF at the Mises.org site.  You can also buy a dead tree version (though I find delivery costs too high at Mises.org to justify having these sent to the UK).

It also provides further illustration of the point I was making in my previous piece on how respect for private property and contracts frees us from the need for a state.

I have also prepared an MP3 audiobook version, which is attached to this post.  It's mainly just for me to listen to again on the way to work, but if you'd prefer to listen than to read, and can face my dulcet tones, feel free to use it, Robert Murphy has given his permission.  It's only an hour and a half long, so you can judge how long it will take you to read this very accessible introduction to some of the ideas involved.

Particularly on the "justice" side, I can see ways in which the Mutualist ideal of creating such institutions and mechanisms within the current system could be successful.  Since the non-aggression principle would not rely on the same ability conferred on state agents (i.e. the police) to arrest someone, there is no reason why such mechanisms could not operate successfully on private property at present.

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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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Okay, so it should now be clear and out in the open that my preferred society would not have a politically organized coercive state government of any kind. It should be equally clear that this is not because I don't care about the least well off in society, but precisely because I do. And because I believe, in a creed consistent with that of some of the great thinkers of the "individualist left" of the past two centuries, that the state actually makes things worse for the people whom, nowadays at least, it (and therefore most of those active in the political "scene") claims it most wants to help. This alone should be enough to want to find an alternative solution to the questions of "social order" than the coercive state, setting aside all the questions about whether the mechanisms the state uses in its failure to achieve it stated aims are themselves just, and let alone the possibility that there are powers the state takes for itself that are almost inevitably unjust, such as waging war.

So, how can an avowedly anti-state campaigner work with those who not only accept and promote the need for a state but who also seek power for themselves or their associates within that state? Chris Mounsey, communication director of the Libertarian Party of the UK (LPUK) and blogger "Devil's Kitchen", said in his talk to the Libertarian Alliance Conference last weekend that LPUK would say that they seek power to get into the position of being able to abolish themselves and the structures they fight against. The same cannot be said of parties who, as one Lib Dem put it the other day, "see a positive role for an activist state". That is, after all a point of fundamental difference. They want a state: they are statists. I am a non-statist: I do not want a state. They believe a state can be inherently a force for good; I believe a state is inherently evil but at stages on the journey to eradicating it, it may appear to be a necessary one.

Well, here my own journey to my current anti-state position might be illustrative. My Mutualism did not spring fully formed in a political vacuum. I was a Liberal Democrat first, a Georgist second and lately an Individualist Anarchist. Indeed, it is worse: I was an active politician. A city councillor, no less. And rose to the dizzy heights of Deputy Satrap for Housing and Economic Destruction, as I put it last week. Hell, I even used to believe that if only, as a city council, we did things better, more efficiently and more business like, we could even make profits to use on other desirable projects instead of continually tapping up the tax payer for them. I could hardly have been more "statist" in some ways!

And yet, I know as I write that that does not tell the whole story. I had always been a civil libertarian (there is something about growing up gay in the 1980s I think that made me realize very personally the effects of the state interfering in private lives and people's emotions). And I was a vocal advocate of co-operatives and social enterprise, even for delivering what had been "state" provided goods. So I was the first to try and propose establishing a social enterprise to take over the city's underfunded leisure services. And I attempted to build a case for co-operative housing being included in the options available to local councils for housing stock transfer. I was the city council's rep on both the Oxford Credit Union and the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum.

Two things happened when the good people of Risinghurst decided they no longer wanted my services as a city councillor. First, I was asked to go along to the first meeting after the elections of the scrutiny committee I had chaired in case there were odds and ends to pass on to the new committee. And, for the first time viewing a city council meeting from outside their little bubble around the big table, I had this overpowering sense that it was all one big talking shop. And often a talking shop with the least appropriate inexpert lay people on it. Second, a number of messages of commiseration from city officers said that my ideas would be missed, and I thought "well, if my ideas are really that good and so obviously beneficial why should the people of Oxford be deprived them by the political whim of a few hundred voters in one corner of the city?" Why should I not try and carry on to do them anyway. And so, by a variety of routes comes my involvement with Community Land Trusts, local financial initiatives, promoting social enterprise and so on.

Becoming, if you will, a businessman, albeit a "social entrepreneur" (I hope that's not stretching the term too far to fit what I am, which is hardly, thus far, terribly successful in that respect) has further entrenched my growing realization of how state interference can disrupt even the most socially necessary projects for which there is virtually unanimous community consent. And in getting to understand the property development business, its costs and practices and so on, has created a very powerful and practical understanding of how state protection of interests causes more problems that it then needs to try and solve - tight planning and housing regulation for example meaning that we end up subsidizing landowners even more to provide "affordable" housing whilst landing those who can lobby the best extraordinary profits for being the one site allowed for housing or whatever the case may be.

Couple all of that with a decade in which the role of the state in generating international hatred against us has been debated endlessly as a result of wars and foreign policy; in which spin has outshone substance at home, in which despite massive investment in public services changes for the better seem to have been few and far between whether you judge that by health outcomes, education outcomes, homelessness, social mobility, personal indebtedness, wealth imbalances or whatever; in which civil liberties have been eroded and our lives catalogued and pried into more than ever; and now, at the end of which it seems like few if any in public positions could see what some of us said was staring us in the face - the financial tsunami, and even now don't acknowledge their own part in the creation of it is it any wonder one might turn more than a little cynical about the ability of government actually to do anything about all of this?

So, all else aside, I rather hope that this "testimony" of my political journey might prompt a few people to think about their own expectations of the state and how it might have fulfilled them or not or whether the supposed benefits of the state are worth the "collateral damage" state action often leaves in its wake (as the decade's most repugnant euphemism for state perpetrated destruction would put it). And I want them to ask themselves whether, if they ever had a good policy idea for some much needed commodity or service, they really feel that the probability of them seeing that idea to fruition would be enhanced by being done by government and so called democratic decision-making or diminished through red tape and the best intentions of "planners."

But even if it leaves you unmoved, you can yet play an important part in the "Mutualist revolution". For this is where I feel that working within our local political networks can achieve change faster than trying to influence an entire party's policy all at once. When we have a good idea, and especially when it is up and running, we need to be publicising such things through those networks, hoping that they in turn will spread the message "upwards" to others in their parties and "outwards" to their colleagues elsewhere.  Regularly the single most common question when one proposes something new to councillors seems to be "where has it been done previously?  They may want to innovate but appear scared to do so.  Also, spreading the news upward can reach policy makers quite quickly.  For example in the Lib Dems it always seems like there is a bit of a scramble for good, worthwhile policy motions to go to regional conferences. All these get reported up to Federal Policy Committee, and so a small successful local initiative could soon get the attention of people in a position to make policy nationwide.

Perhaps we could call it "viral-anarchism".

"State intervention distinguishes capitalism from the free market." So writes Kevin Carson in the preface to his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" (2004).

In the rather broad and straggly family tree of the children of liberty, I have come to describe myself as being on the "Mutualist" branch. In fact I really married, or perhaps was adopted, into the Mutualists somehow, having started out as one of its first cousins, a "Georgist". Hence my use of that slightly affected double barreled description on this blog - a "Geo-Mutualist". But, apart from the vague notion that this denotes a position somewhere on the spectrum of views variously described as "classical liberal", "radical liberal", "libertarian" or "anarchist" - or simply "liberal" by those brave enough to face down the howls of derision from some people in certain modern soi-dissant liberal political parties not so far from here - most people react somewhat quizzically to the term "Geo-Mutualist", if at all.

So it's about time I think I tried to explain it a little. Indeed, the name having been suggested to me a couple of years ago following a previous attempt on here to put a label on my political position, it is probably only now anyway that I capable of beginning to tell you what it all means. And even now my thoughts are continually developing and changing: which is, of course, a jolly good reason for insisting on the freest of free markets in which we can express our millions of daily changes of mind every time we need to trade with someone, rather than the once every four years or so we might get to change our minds about our elected dictators.

Mutualism is, most simply, a form of anarchism. We want no political state. Not a small state, a minimal state, a night-watchman state. Just no state. It is no exaggeration to say that we believe that the state is the root cause of all inequity in the world and all coercion in an unfree market. We believe that the truly free market - all the voluntary, non-coercive, co-operative, mutually beneficial transactions between free individuals - delivers the maximum and most just distribution of economic benefits to all its participants. We believe that it is the state that by its interventions (often, admittedly, with the best of intentions but always inept at best and downright, deliberately and inhumanely destructive at worst) makes markets unfree and unable to deliver a just outcome for all its participants. That in the language of the factors of economic production "capital" and "land" can only exploit "labour" by "harnessing the power of the state in their interests" (Carson, ibid., Preface).

Put more simply it is because of state favours on their behalf that capitalists and landowners get disproportionately rich and workers remain disproportionately poor. We note that this has been the case throughout the history of the state and in all types of state, notwithstanding that some of them, such as contemporary "liberal democracies" profess to act, because elected by them, in the interests of all "the people". And, partly at least, precisely because it has this observably inevitable tendency, whichever type of state or epoch of state one looks at, we believe the state has, ultimately, no possibility of rehabilitation - and because those who set themselves up for positions of power in those states, so obviously also personally benefit from their ineptness and downright criminality.

Now most of this creed could be cut and pasted into that of most libertarians and anarchists I have come across. Hell, even Kevin himself said that he thought the major strands of the anarchist-libertarian family were often quite "porous". I have spent more time reading and listening to Austrian school thinkers over the last year and othre than emphasis, there's little, at least in the "ends" of what I have written here that they could not subscribe to, even if they differ in approach and emphasis. Mutualism's pedigree, for sure, would be described as the "left" wing of the family tree:

In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant native American school of anarchism, known as individualist anarchism, existed alongside the other varieties. Like most other contemporary socialist thought, it was based on a radical interpretation of Ricardian economics. The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism. It agreed with the rest of the socialist movement that labor was the source of exchange-value, and that labor was entitled to its full product. Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business. (Carson, ibid., Preface)

But Mutualism is also a mechanism by which we hope to reach our ideal society. Like the nineteenth century radicals - both liberal and later in the labour movement - we want to do something about it. We want to build alternative, voluntary, non-coercive, institutions which can then be shown to produce the sort of "public goods" people currently seem to believe only the state can provide. We also want to build and encourage alternatives to the corporate hierarchical system to show that a multitude of different types of economic actors can compete in that ultimate free market - after all, there must also be a free market in the types of organization that operate in the free market!

So in my case, this may be grand objectives, such as Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, aiming to develop affordable housing without state subsidy, controlled by the communities they are part of and the occupants who will be buying a stake in them. Or Community Finance Partnerships attempting to reduce the relaince of local businesses and households on the mainstream state-capitalist banking sector. It may also mean things like the recently reported idea of an estate in Portsmouth (a copy of which I cannot now find) to hire its own private security force, exasperated by the lack of performance of the state police. But it is certainly also applicable to small initiatives such as the Braziers Park community in Oxfordshire. And obviously this goes hand in hand with campaigning for the state to stop doing things that simply do not need doing too - pursuing the war on drugs, erecting artificial borders and so on.

So that is my quick and dirty introduction to Mutualism. I can hardly do better though than Kevin Carson's own introduction at the Mutualist website:

INTRODUCTION

   Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

   Other anarchist subgroups, and the libertarian left generally, share these ideas to some extent. Whether known as "dual power" or "social counterpower," or "counter-economics," alternative social institutions are part of our common vision. But they are especially central to mutualists' evolutionary understanding.

   Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists. Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself. We are not opposed to money or exchange. We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use. We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid. The "market," in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept. What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

   Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers' cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers' cooperatives. To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

   Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom "petty bourgeois" is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans. Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system. But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.

   Mutualism is not "reformist," as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists. Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists. The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal. A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist. A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

   "Peaceful action" simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell. There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society. But revolutionary action should meet two criteria: 1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.

And finally, a note on the "Georgist" side of my political family tree.  As I said, I came to Mutualism through Georgism.  I saw that Henry George's "Single Tax" was a way, not least for George himself, of significantly reducing the size and reach of the state.  Ultimately I got to the position where the state might only collect and redistribute land rent as a community dividend.

Obviously within the Mutualist ancestry with Proudhon and Tucker there are strident views also of the place of land in creating and perpetuating an inequitable society.  Tucker and George indeed had a long running correspondence and though they disagreed on George's remedy to the "land question" there can be no doubt that all the main stream branches of libertarianism put addressing this "land question" as a high priority until the second third of the twentieth century.

As I mentioned, I have been reading a lot more Austrian school stuff lately and am gaining an appreciation of their logic for a strong ethos of private property, and whilst I can see that some of the measures the Austrians would implement would reduce the inequities in land ownership substantially (different means and emphasis to similar ends again) I still think there will always be a "scarcity rent" to land that deserves a system such as Henry George's to mitigate it best.

It's a matter of emphasis really: if one day I am persuaded that the biggest economic hurdle we face is the fiat money system, perhaps my more strident Georgism would recede a little, but for the moment I certainly still believe that these problems are at least as important as each other, and because land is something over which we have ultimately less control - we have one planet after all, for now and we cannot base economic policy on the possibility that we will one day find another one suitable - I tend to say that the land issue is the more important one to solve.  So to that end, I still maintain the moniker "Geo-Mutualist".

I have, happy days!, managed to find my copy of Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia" and have started reading it.  I found him quoting a lovely piece from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century" - an analysis which, I think you will agree, stands even today, indeed in many aspects unimagineably more so:

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic! Hypocrisy!

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 is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

I am a "land taxer".

Some people seem to believe one cannot be both. On the one hand, we find people like Lib Dem Matthew Huntbach, who in the comments to this Lib Dem Voice piece on my opposition to the suggested "Mansion Tax" claims that as a self-described libertarian I am likely to drop the idea of land taxes, however much I may talk about them (much more than him I'd wager but there we are) as soon as the opportunity to enrich what he thinks of as my fellow wealthy libertarians allows. For the record, I don't think that I know any truly wealthy libertarians or anarchists, and indeed I know of not a few who, despite being not very well off at all, subsisting on benefits, campaign actively for the destruction of the welfare statist system that seems to sustain them at the moment. On the other hand, we find lots of other libertarians who resolutely refuse to accept even as libertarian those who would appear to want to "confiscate" the value of private property in land they hold as a near sacred element of libertarian thought.

Now I realize that one blog post by an insignificant in Oxford is not going to settle this argument once and for all. Far better economists and political theorists than I have tried. But it is a personal battle for me, because it was the ideas of Henry George that brought me to libertarianism - for his is a libertarian idea, in direct response to the "land question" raised by so many in the history of liberal and anarchist thought - from Locke, Paine, Proudhon, Spencer, Mill, and the individual anarchists Spooner and Tucker. And it is as I have heard, read and hopefully understood more by the likes of the Austrian school market anarchists that my views on George's "single tax" solution have been challenged. Yet I still hold them.

First, a bald statement: I do not believe there are many libertarians of whatever branch or flavour (and we are truly a Baskin-Robbins ideology on that score, whatever the misinformed Lib Dem detractors believe) who do not appreciate that there is an issue of equitable access to land - that which has historically been called the "land question" by many (including Murray Rothbard [pdf] even as he criticized Henry George's solution to it). Sure some place more emphasis on it than others - but I really believe that any who denies there is any issue has not thought terribly deeply about it. I'd go further - that before the early part of the twentieth century it was a touchstone of most or even all of the emerging theories of libertarianism and anarchism; that the four "great monopolies" - of land, of money, of intellectual property and of government - that the individualist anarchists and mutualists described were commonly held to lie at the root of the inequity caused by the statist systems of privilege which they wanted to smash.

It may be that it is merely a difference of emphasis. George, for example, like Proudhon believed that the land monopoly was the "mother of all monopoly" and that solving that, for Georgists as for Proudhon, will tend to render the other three insignificant. When we sat down to discuss the content of the Lib Dems ALTER's recent book "The Case for a New People's Budget" I wanted it to include pieces on the money system and intellectual property but one of the other editors, a better schooled Georgist than I felt that such was completely unnecessary, since solving the land question would solve these others.

On the other side, the Austrians today believe, perhaps, that the fiat state controlled and cartelized money system is at the root of monopolistic behaviour and that sorting that out will render the others nearly insignificant. To this extent, whilst we acknowledge there are other problems, if all we are saying is that sorting this one or that one out first will resolve those others, we are, by different means, aiming at the same ends, of equitable economic distribution of scarce goods.

Others still acknowledge that there is an historical problem - that most land title ultimately and historically descends from aggression or statist privilege - such as monarchs kicking off serfs to give rewards of land to favoured courtiers, or the state sanctioning enclosures without any recompense to those who required the land to maintain life and limb. And they might suggest, as in the excellent introduction to libertarianism by Morris and Linda Tannehill - "The Market for Liberty" (available here as a free audiobook) suggest that at the advent of a truly libertarian society such ancient titles would be revoked since they would be next to impossible to prove and that everyone would have to stake their claims anew. But to me this resolves the problem as a "one off" and not the ongoing problem that land distribution necessarily is given the propensity for populations to change and land requirements with them.

Since it is as a result of hearing Hans-Herman Hoppe on the "Idea of a Private Law Society" nearly a year ago now at last year's Libertarian Alliance Conference that I have become more interested in "full blown" non-state ideas, it is, perhaps naturally, to the Austrian School and in particular the Mises Institute that I have turned to learn more; devouring several years' worth of podcasts of the Mises University series, but also listening to various contributers to the FEE's Freedom University series. And whilst they do indeed talk very little about land, I can glean some of the following with which I find myself in agreement that relates to the "land question" in their thinking:

• If we did not have the corrupting influence of inherently inflationary and statist fiat money there would be much less speculative froth in the system to be ploughed into land values.

• If we did not have state controlled zoning and planning restrictions, more land would be made available as development was needed and land values elsewhere would tend to fall.

• If we did not have state enforceable land titles, we would have to find another mechanism for protecting our rights of ownership of land which would tend to release land that land owners felt was uneconomic to protect compared with the utility they got out of holding it.

• And, I really do appreciate the arguments in favour of the protection of private property (well, I'd rather, after Proudhon, say "possession" than "property") being the mainstay of a civil society, that without which original appropriation and therefore economic production would be all but impossible. And allied to this I feel a sense of unfairness that someone who has, in the Lockean term, "mixed his labour" with "land" and thus brought it into production in the first place, might find that simply because others have later agglomerated around his far-sighted piece of appropriation, he would be subject to paying rent on it that may price him off it.

But...and you knew there would be one...what I cannot get round is the idea that, whilst anarchists anathematize taxation as confiscation of the legitimate product of labour and therefore an attack on Lockean self-ownership, the rental value of land is really a tax on everyone else who cannot use a particular location, even though they may have a more productive capacity to use a particular piece. All of us pay for the monopolization of locations of better quality in terms of our needs, than what we are then forced to settle for. If we have to live further away from work, we pay in time and travel costs to get past those locations that would serve us better. These values feed into land values. It is not merely that land value increment is unearned by the land-owner, but it costs the rest of us in like measure. And it is a huge burden - in the UK it amounts perhaps to about a third of what is the salaries portion of GDP. This effect, whilst it may be smaller if all the other Austrian remedies above were implemented, would never, in my opinion, disappear.

Austrians, of course, reject the value theories on which this hypothesis of land values is based - the labour, or cost theories of Smith, Ricardo and other Classical Economists. They prefer their subjectivist or utilitarian theories based on the work of the likes of Carl Menger and Eugen von Böem-Bawerk. And, whilst I also do not agree with a wholly unmodified labour theory, I am becoming more and more convinced by the likes of Kevin Carson's critique of Menger's and Böem-Bawerk's criticism of the Classical cost theories in his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" - which is just as well since I describe myself as a "mutualist"!

On the other hand, I am with the anarchists in that I do not want a government or quasi-government institutional structure to value and collect such "rent". And so I am attracted to ideas such as those of geo-libertarian Dan Sullivan in the US, of how it could be handled by a voluntarist system of community management companies. And it is on his ideas that I think can be developed a system that fits with both the Georgist aims of collecting land rents and the anarchist aims of not having government structures impose taxes on us. In his essay "Are you a Real Libertarian or a Royal Libertarian" he says, toward the end:

Can't we do this without the state?

There are, in fact, proprietary communities operating on the single tax model. Arden, Delaware, with a population of 4900, has had no local taxes since 1900. The Arden Corporation collects a fair market rent on each land parcel, which is reappraised annually. (They actually collect only about a fourth of the rent to which they are entitled.) From that they not only pay for all the municipal services, but rebate all property taxes levied by the county and school district.

There are excellent reasons for libertarians to prefer the land trust route over the political route. Private communities can be built on explicit contracts (leases) with the citizens, can have internal democratic processes that are vastly superior to electoral democracy, can be far more flexible and free of state intervention, and can be downright profitable (even with trust investors pocketing a mere fraction of the rent). Most of all, dealing with investors is far more pleasant and self-affirming than dealing with politicians.

But what worries me about this approach, taken literally at least, is that we might end up with one agency acting as a local monopoly that becomes a de facto government, just like Nozick says that private protection would combine into one agency with a monopoly in an area (though I am yet to read "Anarchy, State and Utopia" - I bought it and promptly lost my copy! - and so haven't read his arguments, I instinctively disagree with this as an inevitable outcome) and be to all intents and purposes a coercive albeit limited government.

However, I think there is a resolution. Admittedly I have not gone into this too deeply as yet. I have not followed all the economic incentives through the processes. It is based on the idea that in a "private law society" (necessarily the case of course in a no-state anarchist system), defense of one's life and property would be handled by competing insurance, protection and arbitration agencies.

In the absence of a single, state-provided, system of land titles, one's ability to hold onto a piece of land (that is, not to fight for, but legally to defend one's right of occupancy against any other claims) would usually be handled by your insurance and protection agencies. Of course, you could opt out, but then you would have to pay for such physical protection and legal protection against claimants by yourself and on a simple division of labour basis it is likely to be more cost effective joining with others via an insurance and protection agency system. But your premiums would likely rise to be something similar to the market rent value of the location - because it is on that basis that other possible claimants would be likely to be basing their claims on. If your insurance agency were a mutual agency operating with profit policies, they would effectively disburse the equivalent of the statist "citizen's dividend" to the members with with-profit policies.

Here, there could be competition. My insurance agency would make a (probably class action on behalf of all their clients inconvenienced by your monopoly holding of land that costs us money to avoid) claim against yours, yours would pay up and that would go into the profits of my insurance firm for distribution to the with-profits members. And these firms could compete across whole areas of productive land. So, for example, you couldn't have only those in expensive locations in Mayfair joining together and insuring against each other and effectively doing so cheaply because you're hardly likely to lay claim to your neighbour's similar property if it's going to cost you money and you're both pretty happy with your lot and are not costing each other anything by your occupancy of neighbouring sites. My firm may be based in Sutton or Dagenham and have most of its clients there, but will still be likely to be making claims against yours.

Eventually it is likely that these individual claims would not be processed at all, but that reciprocal arrangements between these agencies would spread premiums around amongst them such that the dividends paid to each one's clients would tend to even out, but all the same, the claims mechanism would remain available where there were disputes, just as, for land taxers operating within a state system, there would be tribunals to adjudicate on land value disputes.

UPDATE:  I've thought of perhaps a simpler way of understanding this - it might be looked on as competing land registries paying each other premiums for recognizing and upholding each others' clients' titles.  Does that make sense?

As I say - I have not followed the economic incentives right through such a system. But I think it contains the germ of a possible solution that does not rely on confiscatory quasi-state bodies but does equitably distribute the values created by and paid for in other ways by all who need to use land within an agglomeration area.

Remember please, this is a genuine search for a reconciliation between two sets of ideas with which I generally agree but which in contemporary libertarian discourse seem to be all but irreconcilable. But if you've read this far, I'd love to hear your responses.