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What is the world coming to? You know, I may have very grave concerns about our own democracy and the things our elected dictators are imposing on us, but it behoves us daily to thank whatever deity, sprite or inspiration we believe in, that we are not in Zimbabwe. The inhuman brutality of Mugabe is an affront to mankind. And this is a man who professes to be a Christian.

Leviticus is not my favourite tome, but Chap 23 verse 22 seems quite apt: "And when you reap the corn of your land, you shall not cut it to the very ground: neither shall you gather the ears that remain; but you shall leave them for the poor and for the strangers." There's no conditionality in there. It doesn't say "so long as they vote for me.

I know some of our distant Liberal Party forebears were so imbued with Welsh Methodism and non-Conformism that they viewed alcohol as the work of the devil herself and each town's brewing family as an instrument of the industrial masters' subjugation of the working man, but I cannot square Norfolk Blogger's paean of praise for Gordo's strong hints that the government will once again increase the prohibition on cannabis with any of the schools of thought of modern liberalism...

I wonder if Nich is one of that strange breed who still believes that alcohol should be banned, or one of that rather more populous breed who believes that their own poison is okay but anyone else's must be ruthlessly repressed. I've harped on about cannabis enough lately, so won't say much more except that I just cannot see how a liberal can want to criminalize such relatively harmless personal habits or fail to appreciate how that very illegality is the thing that causes the most harm about drugs. Regret perhaps that some want to indulge (or damage whichever way you see it) themselves in such a way. Desire to help the worst cases who clearly cannot cope transform their lives, indeed. But criminalize? Please.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty

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.

Apparently the Data Protection Act turned ten years old on Wednesday, according to El Reg. But you'd be forgiven for thinking it never existed, or has been repealed, given all the recent stories of data loss by, of all organizations, the government, and the newer suggestions that all our DNA, phone and internet communications records, should be in a database, forever, and instantly accessible to any accredited official (I won't say "qualified" because I suspect they won't be) with an easily contrived excuse.

Fortunately, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, stands between the state and its ambition to know everything there is to know about its citizens and what they do, consume, learn and who they associate with. But with such a lax attitude to their own obligations under their own Data Protection laws somehow I doubt Mr Thomas will be heard, let alone listened to.

My attachment to a few home comforts prevents me from becoming a survivalist type, and I am too much of a coward to be a martyr. But I do seriously consider at times whether there is a way to opt out of this inexorable creep of the surveillance state. Emigration? Where would be any better though I wonder? Switzerland maybe, but I doubt they'd have me.

And I just do not understand why so many people, it seems from my view anyway, are able passively to accept this state encroachment into our lives. I know plenty who do not even see it going on. Why on earth is it any more acceptable say, for the state to know about all your telephone calls or emails than it would be, say, to open every posted letter somewhere in the postal system, or, creepier still, have someone follow you so they can check out who you talk to in the street or who you visit? I'm sure there have been times when this ability is exactly the reason why the Royal Mail existed - for intelligence purposes - and with a monopoly too, mind you, though in the popular conscience the Royal Mail, USPS and other national mail services are actually supposed to be trusted guarantors that nobody should tinker with private correspondence with impunity.

Of course, such surveillance of physical media communications or personal movements would be impractical on a mass scale whereas electronic communications tend to leave tracks for all sorts of (usually business) reasons. But "just because we can", just because massive scale monitoring is now feasible and manageable with electronic communications does not mean we should. I have a contract with a phone company, and the data even they keep should be limited to as little, and for as short a time as necessary, as needed to deliver me the service they promised. And indeed, that is core to the principles behind the Data Protection Act.

No doubt they will all say that you can breach those principles "in the national interest" or whatever. But at the very worst, such a situation should be the exception and not the rule, and should be subject at all times to proof of probable cause via judicial oversight. After all, the "national interest" could, and usually will be, what the government of the day decide it is if it is left up to them and their agents. I always have a rueful smile when I recall that for years each part of your annual tax return would be dealt with by a different Inland Revenue clerk so that no one government official would actually know what you earned in total. Can we ever hope to resurrect such a level of government respect for our privacy?

I'm not sure I believe any longer that grand government database and surveillance projects do originate in a genuine desire to do something good. I just think it is an innate trait of government and power to want to have as much information about those over whom they wield power or those on whom they are dependent for power as they possibly can. Acton's dictum is writ large in the creep of the surveillance state: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Information brings, and sustains power.

I linked to this post at the Libertarian Party blog the other day, but if you didn't read it then, please go have a look now. It's a light-hearted look at the inconveniences that could beset the most minor activities in your daily lives if all these supposedly beneficial systems actually come to pass. Forget that "if you've nothing to hide" crap, I challenge anyone to say they would not be severely pissed off with this level of "helpful" surveillance.

Yet all of this need not be the end game, just as I am sure today there are thousands of people trying to find new ways of evading the Chinese national firewall, or make a few phone calls without being billed for them, people will continue to develop ways of keeping one step ahead of the voracious information state. Ultimately, I don't believe that the state can win against the advance of the technology. But there is a danger, if we do not start constitutionally protecting our privacy now, that the state will keep trying on any pretext they can muster, and turn truly tyrannical in their desire to control information flows.