political philosophy

Hat tip to Matt Wardman (also posted on Liberal Conspiracy ) for highlighting this CiF piece by Richard Reeves of Demos wondering whether the internet might be killing off the rationale for think tanks. I'm not so sure. If anything the web has made such organizations more visible. Their ideas, more readily available to as many of us who can be bothered to read them, expose the poverty of policy discussion within the established political parties. For those of us who are somewhat tired of the choice between the behemoths that are our mainstream political parties who produce manifestos attempting to cover every area of life and with which, when it comes time to vote, we probably only agree with parts and have to hold our noses over their other policies, the think-tanks offer a more focussed discourse.

However, Reeves does have something of a point; in many cases the higher profile think-tanks are the ones as closely connected as charity law will allow to the political parties. The CiF article quotes a Facebook piece by Jim Knight MP where he says that think-tanks are "ultimately very elitist top-down institutions populated with very bright people who politicians sometimes seem to sub-contract their thinking to." Now, aside from the fact that I'd probably rather have "very bright people" making policy than generally self-important electoral spin driven politicians with psychopathic power seeking traits, this does undermine the independence from electoral considerations that think-tanks ought to be able to enjoy.

I am a great fan of the concept of the "Overton Window" which is a strategy of policy development mostly used by US right wing think-tanks but which can be applied by any. What happens is you take a spectrum of views on some issue and you will find opinions and thinking that is "way out there", unthinkable, at one end of the Overton Window and ideas that are actually policy being implemented at the other end of the window. To start shifting policy in a particular direction you "push" that window. You start looking at even more moon-bat ideas that make the previously unthinkable seem a little less scary. You do that again and again and the original mad idea becomes acceptable, then mainstream, then actual policy that gets implemented.

The Wikipedia entry on the Overton Window describes the steps as "Unthinkable" → "Radical" → "Acceptable" → "Sensible" → "Popular" → "Policy".

Think tanks occupy a part of this space. Previously I suspect they have prided themselves in thinking the unthinkable or at least the radical. It is true that in the UK they have tended to be less aggressive, and have perhaps seen themselves less working the Overton Window than "planting seeds" for development and further discussion and eventually policy drops out the bottom of the electoral parties (often literally I suspect!). But the point is that if they are not seen as linked to a party they can work the Overton Window more effectively because their lack of a party identity means nobody in electoral politics has to get all defensive about them.

Now, it may be that the think-tanks are moving away from really radical thinking and are becoming the "policy sub-contractors" Jim Knight writes about, maybe now occupying the "sensible" part of the spectrum. Those with party links are probably trying to move the discussion from "Sensible" to "Popular" so that "their" electoral party can then work up "Policy". And this is where the other internet players - bloggers especially perhaps - can fill a gap. Not only may we not have formal party links (and in any case as individuals we can always disagree with our chosen parties' ideas on issues with some impunity) but we also don't have to have any "responsibility" to anyone for our thoughts. People can ignore us. Even in our own parties. We can therefore indulge in flights of fancy that even the think-tanks, who have to raise the money to pay their way for example, could not contemplate. If there are enough of us out here spouting similar "Unthinkable" or "Radical" ideas then a think-tank may pick it up and develop them a bit more into "Acceptable" or "Sensible".

Perhaps now then it is the blogger that is on the far end of the Overton Window. That and things like the "Global Ideas Bank". Which, to me, is exactly how it should be. Ideas have to originate somewhere. Individuals now have a mechanism, via the internet, for publicizing our ideas, however outlandish, and I'm sure we all hope that one day party policy will spring spontaneously from one of our "good" ideas. But at the very least, we can hope that someone, perhaps a think-tank, will pick up on what's being said out here in the vastness of cyberspace and develop some of those ideas.

Actually, I'd like to see the think-tanks replace the political parties - how's that for "unthinkable"? Break down the behemoths into more specific policy area groups whose ideas we the voters can vote for directly. No more would the unreconstructed socialist have to hold their nose and vote for the amorphous electoral blob spanning neo-liberal eocnomics and authoritarian imperialism that is New Labour.  Nor the radical liberal the squidgy semi-left Lib Dems.  No longer the social conservative for the policy free New Con Party.  There would be something that really represented our opinions on different issues for which to vote and only once in parliament would they coalesce into functioning groupings of roughly like-minded groups. 

I might choose to vote for IEA economic policies, for Progressive Vision 's health policies, Liberty 's justice policies and so on. As I said, if an "elite" is going to claim the ability to rule over us "top-down", I'd probably rather it was the "very bright" elite of Jim Knight's comment rather than the populist psychopathic politicians. For the moment though, I guess we have to accept that for the vast majority of the voting public they currently seem to need those policies all packaged up into broad ranging manifestos and sound-bites they can vote for.

I have frequent run-ins with a particular individual who, like me, calls himself libertarian. He takes the view that libertarians have to be able to compromise to get libertarian ideas heard, and indeed they are launching such a compromise "lobby group" within the Lib Dems at the forthcoming conference (Liberal Vision - at the conference fringe, Monday 15th September, 1pm at the Marriott Highcliff Hotel). But to me that misses the point. It is the party itself, when adopting policy, that has to make the compromise along the spectrum of opinions put forward in the preceding debate on an issue. If the radicals themselves "water down" their message before the party hears it, it will not impact on that compromise. So for me, I'd far rather remain at the far end of the Overton Window and hope that my unadulterated , radical and sometimes even unthinkable ideas get taken into account when the debate is held and the compromise based on it.

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

A number of others have kindly blogged about the interesting discussion at the ALTER conference fringe event last Saturday night. From the point of view of being on the platform for the first time it was all the more interesting for me. I wanted to pick up on some of the issues that were raised, not so much by the audience, though many were very insightful questions and observations, but the issues raised by both Tony Vickers in his introduction and especially by Vince Cable in his speech.

First, Tony Vickers introduced the whole event by saying that ALTER wanted to spend some time focussing on the second half of our acronym, Economic Reform more generally, rather than Land Tax which we have fixated on thus far. I'm afraid I rather brushed that aside with my little speech about our book, which will now focus more on land than anything else.

I have always taken the view personally that there is indeed more to the essential economic reforms we need to see in an equitable economic system that will benefit the greatest number of ordinary people than just land. I look to the great individualist anarchists and mutualists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fore-runners of the libertarian movement, who all held that there were four great monopolistic systems we needed to eradicate to level the playing field for all - land, banking, intellectual property and the state itself, or most especially the tariffs they use in pursuit of protectionist policy. Indeed my journey to understanding the land problem began with reading books about the debt-money system.

Colleagues involved in the editorial team for the book, whose economics education is far superior to mine, however, are more convinced that the land monopoly underpins all of these others, and whilst I am yet to understand their arguments fully I do I think see roughly where they are coming from. Essentially their argument is that by creating "free land" the power of the worker is increased by enough to offset the coercive power of debt money, that the ability of governments to manipulate a tax system based on market set values of land to effect protectionist policies is reduced and intellectual property becomes much more a negotiable part of an inventor's portfolio rather than something easily "enclosed" by big business as a result of the relative increase of the power of labour versus capital. At least I think that's how it goes.

But anyway, the upshot of all this is that the book will be more about land than about any of the other areas I have been interested in and which Tony suggested we would be looking at in the future. Though no doubt the chapters on each area of policy will show how "free land" feeds through into greater empowerment of the individual and worker.

Second, (we weren't ganging up on Tony, I promise!) Vince again turned the discussion around onto land tax. He said, I think, that we had largely won the theoretical argument on land taxes - that the party acknowledged its potential importance. But that there was much work to be done he said to produce "SMART" (my corporate bingo word, not Vince's) policies that can actually be sold to people (ie voters) and implemented. And on that theme I want to post a few separate thoughts of my own in separate posts in the near future.

James Graham rejoined that actually we need to make the "moral case" for LVT, what I would call, and agree with, the TINA (there is no alternative) argument - though my powers of persuasion in the housing debate on that position were clearly not very good! I could put it a slightly different way - "can we afford not to". And that, I think, is also shaping up to be the real message of the "Liberal Alternative" book.

I will end this introduction to a series of posts on "can we afford not to" with a thought on what seems to be a trait in Liberal Democrat policy making. Do we need to have such detailed plans for exactly how we would proceed from day one of a Lib Dem administration, or should we focus more on getting the "big messages" across. It seems to me that the last time we had a big ideological shift in British government, in 1979, that the Tories had a clear "direction of travel" but were not obsessed with landing in Number 10 with a full set of detailed measures to implement that. They may have had behind the scenes, ready to wheel out when the time was right, but the message to the public in the election was of the broad direction of travel.

This is not something we are alone in. Nowadays every party seems to have to have these details all thrashed out in order to give them credibility amongst the electorate that they would be competent to run the country. But I'm not entirely sure that that is what the voter actually wants - perhaps they want the big ideas rather than the detailed minutiae. I suspect this minute detail is a symptom of our modern managerial one-upmanship and the absence of ideological politics. But surely as a party we actually want to return to ideological politics that we think voters will engage with and be excited by.

I don't think I would be accused of disloyalty if I said that we are not going to be the party of government after the next election! So we spend a lot of time selling detailed policies that we will not get to implement before circumstances, most likely, change again. We have had most success with our "big themes" - we are known for PR, for opposition to war in Iraq, and for the idea, expressed through our previous tax pledges (though I hate to admit it in oh so many ways - not least that it will give succour to the likes of Evan Harris!) that we want "fair" taxation. We can sell LVT as "fair taxation" without minute details as to how it would be implemented, perhaps at most a broad timescale for a tax shift, as the Tories did with reducing income taxes in 1979 - something that actually took them three terms to really implement as far as the average voter would feel in their pocket.

Our detailed policy making produces a couple of not always welcome effects - that we are hostages to fortune - what we promise in one election might one day come back to haunt us several elections later when we make it to Downing Street, and it saves other parties a deal of work thinking for themselves when we create policies that they like to nick. We can of course take some pride in others wanting to use our policies, but people soon forget where they originated, and we risk being forever a glorified "think tank" rather than a party with the big ideas that will win us power. LVT is such an idea. We should not be afraid to tout it without trying to explain to people exactly how it would be implemented except in broad outline until we are closer to being in a position to do so. That will not stop the likes of us in ALTER, however, trying to show the party internally how it might work, but in the end, the detail is what the Treasury is for when we have control of the Great Court!

Conference is coming, and I'll have an opportunity on Saturday evening to share a platform with Vince Cable and James Graham at the ALTER fringe event, entitled "Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n, for anyone interested - note the change of venue from the conference program). My task is to set out some more details of the book of essays we propose to publish in time for the Autumn Conference, entitled "The Liberal Alternative". And since I shall also be seeing Vince tomorrow evening at the Oxford East constituency dinner, I thought I ought to prepare what I am going to say on Saturday so I can let him have a copy tomorrow night. So here goes with a first draft...

Tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty!

By the next time most of us get together again at Bournemouth in September we will have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service and the centenary of the legislation that gave us the first Old Age Pension. Both of course were the triumph of political economists steeped in a tradition of liberal economics and concern for the least well off in society.

So we've decided that for our big project for the year, and to prepare for next year's centenary of David Lloyd-George's great 1909 People's Budget, we're going to publish a book of essays investigating some of the problems they faced both at the turn of the last century and in the widespread domestic poverty after World War Two that Beveridge sought to address through his "war on the five wants".

We want to show that despite throwing ever increasing resources at tackling the unequal outcomes of our economic system, successive socialist and conservative governments have completely failed to address the causes of inequality that Lloyd-George, drawing on that long tradition started to attempt in that budget.

And we want to persuade you, and the party more widely, that that tradition, never really given the chance to show its potential since then - a whole century ago, is just as relevant today. That it remains a precondition to creating an economically and therefore socially equitable society.

Prevention, in economics as much as in health, is always better than trying to cure or treat the symptoms once a malaise has taken hold. For as the cures become ever more expensive, and consume ever more of our productivity, so they also become steadily less liberal.

We are more, not less, dependent on the decisions of politicians where they deliver monopolistic public services. And the more of our labour they appropriate to pay for those services the less we are able to make our own choices anyway.

Talking of "choice", I know that some of us seem instinctively to shy away from choice, because we feel that it excludes the least well off. But I'll bet we all deep down believe that choice, unlimited choice, would be great if only we could ensure everyone was able to afford to participate in such a market place.

Well that's what we want to show you can happen when we address the central inequities of the economic system we have inherited. Taxing income and productive investment slows the creation of wealth for all of us. Failing properly to tax land allows those who happen to own or have inherited the best locations to absorb much of the value of our labour and productive investment, and especially the labour of the poorest. The wealthiest grow fabulously rich off the back of the labourer through land. And even, in this era of widespread home ownership, as it's called, many benefit unfairly, while paying, through their other taxes, for the attempts to relieve the poverty this system sustains!

If we took that tax shift seriously, our economy could be as much as a third bigger, and distribute that extra wealth more equitably according to what we put into it - our work and our savings. We would be better able to compete with the newly emerging economies of the world without retreating into hiding behind protectionism. We would be able to allow people more choice over their lives and the services that sustain them, whether that be health and education, housing, or basic needs like food.

I want to end with a brief quote from Herbert Spencer, who, writing in 1851 said:

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

I suggest that 150 years later, we are still tinkering with laws, often ever more coercive laws to try and reach that nirvana of the "greatest happiness" through government intervention. We take more from everyone in the process and limit everyone's ability to decide for themselves. Addressing the central causes of our economic inequity has not been tried since 1909. 2009 is high time we put this, left, right and centre at the forefront of the new liberal political economy for the next century.

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So, having read roughly what I'm going to say, you can now come along to theALTER fringe and hear Vince Cable (who will I hope by then have been formally adopted along with Nick Clegg as an ALTER Vice-President!) and James Graham as well!

"Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n - note the change of venue from the conference
program)

We are living through a period which is seeing some of the most momentous changes in human relations in the shortest time in history. Thirty odd years ago when we lived in Kenya and I was seven it was a big thing living abroad. Just the travel arrangements I remember seem like climbing Everest compared to today's era of mass international travel. Three stops, visas to everywhere, currency controls all over the place, expensive flights. Nowadays my father and stepmother seem to have few qualms about travelling to Durban for long weekends or shopping trips. We hear of people resident in Monaco and working three days a week in London, or people with a regular getaway home in Thailand.

Jon Snow, our university Chancellor, told us in one of his annual lectures once about when Sandy Gall, remember him, was out with the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupation, he would be given a camera, a notebook, a reel of film and told to come back in three weeks with an interesting story for the evening news. Nowadays we are in instant touch right around the world and news is relayed as it happens. I remember hearing that during Live Aid in 1986 stadia in South Africa and India had their first live international incoming broadcast from the concerts in London and the US and people remarking that it was really the first time they knew there were other people out there thinking about them.

When I worked in a Glasgow based Stock Exchange firm in the mid eighties we still had to book international telephone calls in advance to the US. Now the fight is about roaming charges because so many of us take our phones abroad with us - unimaginable back then!

But more than that, more significant than even that has been the internet. Coupled with urbanization which has seen us reach the point where more than fifty per cent of the world's population lives in cities, it means that given the right equipment that already exists and is enjoyed by many particularly in the more wealthy world, fifty per cent of the world's 6+ billion people could be in personal individual contact with any other anywhere around the world live. It's truly like waking up one morning in human history to find a whole new dimension - imagine living in a two dimensional world and suddenly discovering the third.

This has huge implications, epochal implications for the way we live, work, form alliances, invent, learn, trade, develop our common future and view the institutions that have served us till now. Governments and trans-national corporations have developed as intermediaries, as the contact point between whole nations of people who did not have direct access to each other in other countries as individuals. Even money, national currencies, are intermediaries, temporary stores of value that allow us to separate transactions by time and guarantee the creditworthiness of our counterparties in commerce.

I have a friend who has developed a pet theory of markets:

Market 1.0 - decentralised but disconnected - past - the local market with occasional trips to other local markets

Market 2.0 - centralised but connected - ending now - bigger, say national markets with intermediaries, governments and corporations, trading between these national markets

Market 3.0 - decentralised but connected - future beginning now - consumers and producers are ever more in direct contact with each other, the markets can be global and everyone can participate on the right network.

And this third, facilitated not by governments but by technology, and even sometimes in spite of governments, poses huge challenges. Challenges that can only go two ways - one way lies a massive increase in the power of the individual as opposed to the intermediary, whether governmental or commercial, the other sees those two huge vested interests try to prevent their loss of power or compensate for it with ever more draconian measures to place limits on this super-connectivity. Of course other, new intermediaries will emerge. Instead of being dependent on government to guarantee our ability to trade we may become dependent on a small number of global communications superpowers for granting us access to their networks. But the speed with which new ideas and inventions traverse and emerge from the ether will enable the individual to keep one step ahead of absolute dependency on a single supplier or a single technology.

And it's all eminently affordable. For half of what we spend as a single nation on our NHS each year, every single household in Africa could have a "One Laptop Per Child" type device and the infrastructure to connect to the outside world with it. Skype them altogether and they could be providing secretarial services to the rest of the world or selling their best quality coffee for full price to the small boutique blender who charges premium prices to his increasingly affluent western consumers. Think of the possibilities of four hundred million kids bursting with a will to learn suddenly enjoying all of the knowledge the internet can provide.

So, we have the potential to learn from each other without intervention, to trade with each other and to learn to make decisions about who to trust in trade without paying Nestle or whoever the middleman's cut for doing so. We don't even really need money - everything on eBay could be priced in Paypal Pounds for example and we could trade away without having to convert back into real 'currency' unless we had to buy something in an old fashioned retailer - and even then they'd soon learn to accept Paypals or Tescos or whatever.

Now, you may think this is all a bit far fetched, but I predicted, even if I didn't have the skills to capitalize on it, not only the Amazon business model (I tried to sell something similar to Blackwells in return for a job developing it in 1994) but also the Amazon marketplace that manages fantastically to match sellers of second hand books and so on!

Anyways, the point is, we always talk in Libertarian circles about being pragmatic to get our policies enacted, and that's all well and good, but we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. The world is changing, changing fast. The era in which big government and big corporations thrived because we needed them to be intermediaries for us is ending in the superconnected world that makes us, truly, a global village. And it will affect every policy area. We can either sleepwalk into a totalitarianism of governments and corporations who want to stop this progress in their own interests or we can help it along by showing people that a free world need not be a chaotic and dangerous place, that on the contrary, the more we know the other individuals in our global village the more we trust and care about them.