There's been lots off discussion about poverty this week with the little tiff between the Cameroonies and the rest of the conservatives about embracing and addressing relative poverty and so on and so forth...

Anyway, I want to proffer a different definition of poverty. One which leads to different solutions. A liberal definition as I see it.

If the end of liberalism is personal freedom, then in the economic sphere perhaps the definition of poverty ought to be someone who has not yet attained "financial freedom". Financial freedom is usually thought of as the point at which you can meet your basic needs without being compelled to sell your labour. How does one achieve financial freedom? By having sufficient capital assets to provide an income that covers one's basic expenses, or allows you to liquidate enough to live on long term.

Now, I'm not poor in the conventional sense - I have enough to eat (far too much!) and although I don't have a home that I own, which is a significant step in achieving financial freedom, I do have enough income to want to give much of it away in good causes every month. But if I were to lose my job I would be flung on the good auspices of the state pretty quickly.

The point about financial freedom is that you can then pick and choose what you want to do - do you want to go improve yourself through education in order to accumulate lots more wealth? Do you just want to make a bit more pin money to buy a nice Christmas present?

Despite the attempts of the Tories in the eighties to create a nation of shareholders, financial wealth in this country is even less well distributed than incomes.

We are entering the post-industrial age. A few weeks ago it was noted that there were fewer people engaged in manufacturing than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the prophesies of the C H Douglases of the early-mid twentieth century have indeed come about - that we would have most menial, manual tasks done for us in the future, through the benefits of automation. But that has meant that all the benefits of that have accumulated to the owners of the capital, rather than the providers of the labour that made that capital productive.

How do we change this? There have been lots of theories - Louis Kelso suggested creating more widespread Employee Share Ownership Schemes, that there was spare capacity in all that capital going to waste, that if employees were to be allowed to make use of they should accumulate a share in that capital. Douglas suggested social credit.

But to my mind the real solution is to recognize that we have a cornucopia of natural wealth that belongs to all of us by birthright as human beings. We only have one planet, we cannot choose where we are born. That planet is for all of us. Yet the best bits of it are owned and traded for the profit of the few. If we recoup the value of those natural resources, land, and so on, that are used by people and production processes, the "community collection of rent" suggested as long ago as by John Locke, we would have a source of income producing assets that would keep all of us in the basics and free us up to pursue our talents and interests, rather than our mere survival.

Land Value Tax funding a Citizens' Income. No income taxes, no national insurances; firms would be able to pay employees that big chunk more that could go into capital assets instead of tax. There'd be no marginal tax problem with taking employment and losing benefits. It seems a no brainer to me.