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For balance, and because I am personally quite ambivalent about which direction monetary policy takes, there is an alternative to having a state run money supply. One that I believe Hayek speculated, and which in any case is steadily coming to pass.

Completely privatize money supply.

If just 3% of our money is actually created as base money, what's the point? After all, national currencies are irrelevant in the modern world aren't they? A defining attribute of a national currency is that it circulates in one territory mainly. It therefore acts as a restriction on globalization because it encourages us to trade with counterparties that share that common currency. And if controlling it is already quite a dificult balancing act for central banks, why bother at all?

Mervyn King himself recognizes this. At a conference of Central Bankers at Jackson Hole in the US in 1999 he speculated that the rise of the internet and the globalization of communications and information could render national currencies obsolete. Already 25% of global trade does not involve national currencies at all, but various forms of barter - France built power stations in Brazil I think it was in return for oil for example.

Anduntil now, such barter was really only worth doing on a grand scale like that or on a tiny scale between people you trusted because you knew them. But interpersonal communications, facilitated by the internet, and the ability of people to form their own communities separate from the geographical location they happen to reside in means that we could easily be entering a world in which all the information was there at our fingertips to be able to decide what we will pay whom for what and in what type of currency.

Already we do it to an extent without thinking. If we have more than one credit card we make a quick almost subconscious calculation of how much we will have to pay for something and when if we use one card rather than another. If we take it one step further, we join an internet community like Second Life, the fastest growing economy inn the world I am told, with its own, convertible, currency. Participants in Second Life already decide amongst themselves when they put something up for sale whether they want paid in US dollars or the local Linden dollars, or whether they will be open to negotiation as to what they get paid in.

Hayek merely saw banks competing to create their own currencies - you would choose which one to use depending on various factors - well managed backs would have a stable backing for their currency and minimize the risk of a collapse by prudent management. If there was too much of one bank's currency in circulation it would become devalued and markets would make sure it levelled out in time through people choosing to use other banks' currencies.

But now, potentially, we can deal in all sorts of "currencies" - even of our own making. And the more we get around the global arena the more people will trust our bona fides as creditworthy.

There is a catch. For all that this should appeal to those economic liberals that championed monetarism under Thatcher, they reject it because, as goes the argument over the Euro, if the state doesn't have control of its own money supply, it loses all economic sovereignty. Well, yes. it would. But that's the point, if we want a global economy with a level playing field, the protectionist nature of national currencies does in fact have to disappear.

So, if you want some control, any control, as a nation state, then we have to take more control of our money supply as mentioned in my previous opus. If we want truly free global trade that would truly lift the fortunes of the worst off on the planet, we have to abandon that pretense and go for privately created currencies appropriate for each transaction and the central bank is redundant. The technology nearly exists now to enable us to manage multiple currencies every day of our lives. Some people effectively already do - there was a fad if you remember for choosing Euro denominated mortgages. Well soon that flexibility could be available for the purchase of your morning paper.

But if we carry on with the buggers muddle of state sponsored but commercially created monetary systems, we will end up blindly handing all our economic sovereignty over without having a say in the matter. I give it five years, a decade at the most. We need to think about it now.

I've belatedly noticed that I was tagged by Andy Hinton for my top five political influences. My excuse is that I was taking a couple of weeks off, as it turned out, to try to rewrite some of the code behind my blog, and that even now the auto-discovery off references to my blog isn't working on the live server. Mine probably won't be as unexpected as Andy's five, and unusually for me probably won't deserve the amount of explanation he gave to some of his, but here goes...

After some considerable thought (yes!) number one goes to:

• Henry George, author of "Progress and Poverty", the seminal work on Land Value Tax and "Protection or Free Trade" a similarly influential book showing how free trade ought to be the vehicle that gives the best chance for the working man and woman to maximize what they can get out for their labour. They are the basis of much of the early twentieth century liberal economics that led to the People's Budget of Lloyd George in 1909. Figures as diverse as Mark Twain, Einstein, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Churchill and Milton Friedman acknowledge his influence, so I figure why not me too!
• Number two goes to Conrad Russell who, when I was in my Liberal infancy, showed in his "Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism" the multiple faces of liberalism that ought to be balanced to produce a coherent and successful liberal polity.
• At three has to be a chap called Paul Oliver, a dear friend from school, with whom I am sadly no longer in contact - hmph! the youngsters of today with their mobile phones, email addresses and Facebook profiles to keep them in touch! - but with whom I would sit up to all hours of the morning "sorting out the world" at school and who probably got me thinking about more political and philosophical issues than I can now remember.
• Fourth goes back in time some way - David Hume and in particular his "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" gives me hope that if we ever get to sit down and design our political system and constitution again we do not need to start from the undemocratic elected dictatorship we have now.
• And, probably not actually fifth if I had to think about it harder - probably higher - comes Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of seventeenth century England, Christian "proto-communists" who fought for the right of everyone to have common access to the bounty of nature with which to sustain their lives by their own labour.

So there we are - quite a difficult choice really - there are so many I could have added:

Paddy Ashdown for example who provided a refreshing antidote to the 90s sleaze culture in the way he handled his affair and which probably convinced me as much as anything that the Lib Dems were basically the most decent folk in British politics;

or Joe Nutt, my English O level teacher who shocked me by giving me a 19/20 for an essay I wrote on inner city deprivation but at the same time noted that it was probably somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan in its apparent assumption that some people appeared born into and stuck in "vicious and semi-criminal" (to use Charles Booth's phrase) lives and communities that they had little hope, in Thatcher's Britain at least, of escaping;

or former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer who offers a vision, in "The Future of Money" of an economic redesign that could produce "sustainable abundance" to use his phrase in a superconnected world having to deal with globalization, environmental and demographic change;

or maybe even Robert Owen for planting the seeds of the worldwide Co-operative movement from his mill in central Scotland.

Oh - and I am flattered and gratified that Andy suggests my incessant nagging about Land Value Tax is not without merit or use. Every person convinced is another step towards acceptance and implementation of a sustainable fiscal system that could finally complete the vision of the great liberal reform agenda.