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In an article intended to solicit opinions under the heading "Should the Government attempt to curb house prices?" The Telegraph yesterday posed some very pertinent questions about the potential effects of government tinkering with house prices. Amongst all the various responses online at least - that it's all down to immigration, freeing up planning to release more land (presumably except anywhere near where the author lives), hitting second homes, buy to lets and so on - not one mentions the real solution - Land Value Tax.

But the questions they ask need to be answered by Land Value Taxers, particularly "Single Taxers" such as myself - those who propose eliminating all other taxes as far as possible and collecting the entire value of economic land as the sole revenue source for government (or, as I would prefer, for distribution as a Citizen's Income following the elimination of the state!). For what we propose would indeed reduce house prices and so put at risk what many home-owners and property investors see as their rightful wealth.

We have to offer responses as to why first, it's not their rightful wealth, that they have done nothing to earn the uplift in values they have enjoyed, and second, that the wealth itself is a chimera and their "loss" can be compensated for.

Anyone with an eye on the property market knows the issues as set out:

First time buyers are being forced into record levels of debt to get on the proper ladder, new figures have shown, with houses now less affordable than ever.

According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the average house buyer needed to borrow 3.37 times their income in May - the highest figure recorded.

Rising interest rates, continuing house price increases and an average stamp duty bill of £1,458 are all combining to price first time buyers out of the market. They now account for just 35 per cent of all mortgages taken out by people buying a home.

But I want specifically to address the questions they ask:

Should the Government attempt to make homes more affordable or should the market be left to its own devices?

Land does not and cannot operate as a properly free market. Unless you can find a way of creating unlimited amounts of it, and all locations have equal access to all other locations, locations are effective monopolies.

Is it reasonable for young people to expect to be able to buy their own home? Do homeowners who have benefitted from the boom deserve their windfall?

Should the Government ease planning restrictions to increase supply of new homes? Should stamp duty thresholds be altered to give first time buyers an easier route into the market? Should there be restrictions on second homes or buy-to-let mortgages?

Or do young people simply have to make the best of a bad situation? Should they live at home longer, as young people do on the continent? Should we accept that it is no longer feasible for us to be a nation of homeowners? How would you feel if the Government took action which reduced the value of your home?

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.

Remind me again, was it not Frankenstein's monster that was brought to life with jolts of electricity? So, is giving Cardinal O'Brien a pacemaker not "an unprecedented attack on the sanctity and dignity of human life" after all...

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Cardinal O'Brien gets pacemaker:

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has had a pacemaker fitted following recent heart problems. Cardinal Keith O'Brien was fitted with the device under local anaesthetic at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The 70-year-old, who suffers from a heart murmur, had experienced dizzy spells in recent weeks and fainted prior to Palm Sunday mass.

On Friday he will attend a public meeting to campaign against the government's Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. At his Easter Sunday mass the cardinal accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of "an unprecedented attack on the sanctity and dignity of human life", and warned the research could lead to experiments of "Frankenstein proportions".

Okay, I may give the impression that I dislike US politics. But I never cease to be amazed at local government in particular. Relations of mine have been mayors of Decatur (pop c 55,000) and of Double Springs (pop c 1000) in Alabama. But with the controversy raging in Virginia today I was looking at precinct returns there and local ballot measures.

Take Arlington. Population 200,000. The county board of five people from what I can work out run the county with a budget of $900m. They have five elected officials - Sheriff, Revenues Commissioner, Treasurer, Attorney and Clerk of the Circuit Court. Fully half of their budget is raised in local property taxation, and only a tiny fraction - 10% or so comes from state or federal coffers, with the rest apparently raised from local fees and other little taxes like taxes on restaurant bills.

Those five people are technically part time just like British local councillors, but all draw a salary of between about £12,000 and £15,000 a year. Lots of other people get involved on a voluntary basis on advisory boards and consultative bodies (for example the 13 person housing board). The schools budget accounts for about $330m and that, whilst set by the county board, is run by the schools board, again of five people.

43% of the population are minority ethnic and sixty languages are spoken by kids in the county's schools.

This tight little ship maintains property taxes at less than 1% of assessed value and its bonds (for it has the power to contract debt as it put to the electorate yesterday for five major projects totaling just over $200m dollars to spend on capital projects over the next five years, including schools buildings, transport systems, public spaces and so on) are Moody's AAA rated.

Remind me, why do we need 48 city and 16 county councillors to represent Oxford with a budget of about the same sort of figure, plus hundreds of directly employed staff, none of whom are ever accountable to the citizens? Why is getting people to participate in helping those councillors to make decisions (as if they ever listen when they do consult!) like pulling teeth? What is wrong with us in the UK? Why do we seem to need vast numbers of people to do things on our behalf?

And these structures are many and varied across the US. So why the hell is Ms Kelly, who would no doubt be proud of Virginia for other reasons today, deigning to offer English local councils just a few tightly regulated options as to how to run the place. Don't try telling me that on a small island we need more homogeneity. We don't, we need local innovation and public entrepreneurship. We need to tell our Whitehall and Westminster overlords to sod off and leave us to decide for ourselves, locally, how we pool our citizens' skills (and boy, do we have them by the truck load in Oxford) to make local communities work.