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I thought I would write about something quite close to me tonight because it has angered me. Rather than the ethereal world of politics which can sometimes feel quite abstract.

I have a friend currently buying a house, with several acres of field adjacent, in a village in the Green Belt just outside Oxford. The vendors are the Church Commissioners. Apparently hurt after being stung over several years or decades by having sold off properties on which the buyers have then got planning consent and made a fortune they are trying their best to tie down buyers.

This is nothing new. The landed have often put restrictive covenants on land that say that if the buyer subsequently gets permission to do some profitable development they will get some profit. I personally think this is an outrage in itself - since I don't really believe in the right to trade in land, our only real common wealth, for profit.

But get this - the Commissioners think they have it all sewn up. They would like to sell my friend only the freehold of the surface of the land itself. A 'flying freehold" where they retain the freehold of the airspace - yes, the air - above three meters above the ground, and the subsoil more than a meter below the surface.

My friend is not buying an option, he's buying a home. If circumstances change twenty years down the line and this piece of green belt becomes developable, yes, he might make a killing, but that's not why he's buying it. If the Church Commissioners want to retain this, they should not be selling the property at all. If they were to sell a bunch of shares they hold to someone, would they expect to be able to keep the dividend, or to stipulate that if the company is taken over after twenty years and the buyer rakes in a small fortune they should have some of it? No, that's what's called investment risk - the risk that they sell something that's still got further to go upwards for whatever reason.

All this just goes to show that what people generally think of as "theirs" - the land on which their homes stands and so on - is frequently not. It's bonkers. Large areas of North Oxford still have restrictive covenants granting some nobleman not so far away the right to prevent development on land long ago sold by his forebears.

Why on earth do people therefore complain about the idea of a Land Value Tax. At least that tax is going to the common treasury to be spent on others usually less fortunate...rather than to vast institutions and ancient landlords wanting to maintain a finger in a pie they disposed of, presumably for good investment decision reasons, ages ago.

...but bats in your bra? The rest of the office has just realized my tears are of laughter...

Is this what people mean by "NFN" I wonder?

Did anyone see "Tory! Tory! Tory!" last night on BBC4? Fascinating, and challenging. I've often agreed with things from the Institute of Economic Affairs, as they have always seemed to be on the correct side of Libertarian to me. And indeed recently they published a very good pamphlet promoting Land Value Tax by a chap called Fred Harrison which definitely got me excited! But I had no idea that they were quite as instrumental as last night's program portrayed in the "creation" of Thatcherism.

It turns out I am a monetarist. And that I rather expect that there's a big difference between Hayek's and Friedman's monetarism and what became diluted and corrupted by governments, including Thatcher's and Reagan's. Just as there is between Keynes's exhortation for governments to ensure the sufficiency of effective demand (enough money in the system to consume the products of that economy) and the application of that by governments of the fifties to seventies in the UK spending money like water to satisfy labour demands and the like.

Though these two economic "camps" are portrayed often as diametrically opposed, I'm not so sure they are now. I always thought that Keynes wanted restraint in government money creation, such that over time it would be hovering around the capacity of the economy. Exceeding that capacity over a prolonged period would indeed be inflationary and he knew it. So you either need to be careful about how much you want to spend into the economy or find a mechanism to regulate it so you can withdraw some if things overheat.

On the other hand the monetarists' political acolytes have also got it horribly wrong. They have never really restrained money supply, just privatised it. Sure, there are only about £50bn in notes and coins circulating in the UK economy, but well over a trillion pounds of debt created money simply willed into existence by the banking system. It is kept approximately in synch with economic activity through varying interest rates, but it's always increasing - have a look at "M4" money supply. Remember how the Tories kept abandoning one or other monetary measures because they could never hold them properly in check - it was because they were doing so "second hand" as it were, via interest rates, and not by some agency directly manipulating the amount of real money in circulation.

How do we know they got it wrong? Well Friedman himself has consistently railed against "fiat money". He has recognised for a long time that this money created by private debt, as most (97%) of ours is, is itself inflationary. And nowadays he acknowledges that he was, in any case, too prescriptive about money supply - presumably acknowledging there is some room for over or under-shooting the monetary base depending on circumstances so long as they line up with economic activity in the longer term.

But the biggest thing I took away from last night's program was that it all started with a small group of outsiders prepared to put twenty odd years into the development of the theory and lobbying for it. How influential were Friedman and Hayek before all this? I don't know - I'm not clear on the timeline. I'm not likely to be getting a Nobel Economics prize any time soon for sure - you tend to have to be an economist for that.

But if we can reconcile Keynes and Friedman (if not, quite, Hayek), promote the careful replacement of fiat money with harder money (if not a return to the sort of specie money Friedman advocates) created for our benefit and not as private debt, and promote a system, such as land value tax, to act as a pressure release if one is needed, we can produce a radical economics that promotes sustainable development, levels many commercial and social playing fields (because it takes the extraordinary power of money creation away from private interests) and solves some of the pressing problems of highly indebted poor countries, the demographic time bomb in the west and the resultant pensions crisis, and reduce the need for a headlong rush for growth just to pay off our debts.

And then I saw this and realised that I cannot be a Tory, just yet anyway.