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I see another article in today's Oxford Mail demanding action over some of the council owned garage sites around Oxford. In Action Demand Over Garages local resident Tony Greenfield suggests that "No-one in the council, it seems, has the business acumen, or real interest, to turn this around. It is a disgraceful waste of our money."

Mr Greenfield and others might be interested to know that since I was ward councillor for his area some four years ago now I've continued to try to get something done about these garages. With my Community Land Trust hat on I have even submitted outline proposals to take over several of these sites and provide mutually owned affordable housing.

I even did sketch plans for these ones off Raymund Rd, and have been asked on at least three different occasions by local councillors (Lib Dems, since Mr Greenfield made such a point of criticisng us/them) whether I've heard any more about it. I reckon with clever use of space and materials you could get at least eight three bedroomed or ten two bedroomed "mews" style homes on that site all with integral garages as you can see in the image below.

The wheels of local government turn very slow indeed in this case. The review of the use of garage sites across the city was begun when I was still on the council - I was not re-elected in 2002! Some have been handed over to "preferred" housing association partners, but others, more difficult to use ones, that the housing associations didn't want to be bothered with, are still festering there blighting their neighbourhoods.

Oxfordshire CLT met on Monday to finalise our registration. Within weeks we will be legally able to accept land, and we have a development partner waiting to help us plan and build. It will only take the city council to say so and we can start putting the effort in.

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.

In my last post I set out what I considered to be the three necessary reforms to create a more equitable society - Land Value Tax (or "The Single Tax"), Citizen's Income and Ownership for All.

In the comments, Tim Carpenter, Head of Policy at the Libertarian Party UK had several objections that I would like to address:

Tim: "LVT can seem fine and dandy at the first off, but over time who decides the future value of your land?"

Why does anyone need to decide the future value of your land? In any case, even if that were necessary the market does that anyway even at present - what people pay for a property reflects their view of what it's worth into the future - they are, literally paying up front, to the previous owner, the rent for a number of years into the future. I agree there are issues with a "100% Land Tax" where the community attempts to collect 100% of the rent (as I and other geo-libertarians would advocate). This would make the capital land value tend toward zero and how would you know whether it's moving up or down over time? Well, the answer I believe is that it would trade at a discount or premium reflecting the buyer's and seller's view of whether the "passing rent" (ie the LVT bill) was set too high or too low.

Tim: "It is fraught with risks, opportunities for corruption and chaos. If you think compulsory purchase was bad..."

As I understand it several of the big RICS member firms have discussed this and have proposed a valuation regime that they would be comfortable bidding for and would expect to be able to handle things like appeals. The Oxfordshire pilot study showed that on average there was only a need to value about one site in ten - ie that that many nearby sites would share the same land value. And there are developing ever more sophisticated data and models for modelling things like "landvaluescape" and how it changes in reaction to things like new infrastructure.

I only don't believe it is as daunting a task as taxing incomes in the multitude of ways we currently do.

Tim: "If CBI is only half what is needed to live on, then surely we will still need welfare."

The Joseph Rowntree report I mentioned included a lot of things that go much further than the "basics needed to survive" (and the headline figure of £13,400 was "pre-tax". Not that I claim that would halve the bill. However the removal of the deadweight loss created by the other taxes that would be repealed, and the ending of subsidies, particularly on agricultural land and other tariffs on the necessities of life would make them cheaper. Two ways to be wealthier - have more money or make everything you need cheaper. As Frank Gallagher in "Shameless" says "Make poverty history; cheaper drugs now!"

Tim: "Removing the minimum wage is fine but be under no illusion, the CBI will be factored into that wage (or lack of)."

But, first, they would also be factoring in the lack of payroll taxes and income taxes - they'd have nearly 40% more in their "wage bill" to play with in many cases. Second, the CBI has two purposes in my mind - one of them is to give people enough to survive, just, day to day, but the intentional beneficial effect of that is that people have a cushion that empowers them to say "no" to a coercive deal from an employer. If the marginal benefit from working x hours for y pay is not worth it and you know you can survive until you get another, hopefully better, offer, this changes the balance of power between employer and employee. And, because it is the same for all workers, and not just the ones currently stuck in the benefits trap, the employers are more likely to have to listen and produce decent remuneration. Though I do concede that there would be hundreds of thousands of currently civil servants in the job market to depress wages...:)

Tim: "It will be no solution to poverty AFAICT and your assertion that it would eradicate x y or x is not explained. I think parish provision is an interesting one, but frankly, look at places like S Wales and you will find that parishes will have little or no wealth creation so no money to spend on their army of dependants - central funding will be needed in precisely the places where people say it causes problems of unconditionality - for once the parish is spending other peoples' money the problems are right back with you again."

However, the LVT is more likely to move economic activity to areas where companies, and employees, and therefore also companies as employers, will pay less tax, which is turn will raise the economic activity in poorer areas and tend to level out regional disparities of economic activity. It cannot be any worse than the current situation where some regional economies make up more than half of their regional GDP from state handouts and subsidies to individuals and businesses.

Tim: "As another person has mentioned, the mutualist company can occur NOW. What is to change here? The fact that it does not happen now should either make you ask what stops it legally/financially or regulatory OR that it is actually a factor of how humans are socially, in that it takes certain individuals the gumption to kick start a company (and that is NEVER to be underetimated) and once they do so, why would they then let a whole load of strangers take just as much out of it as he/she does?"

I certainly don't underestimate the setting up of a company. I have been an employer for precisely one month in my life and it was a bloody nightmare. But it would certainly be less troublesome if I was not burdened with all those damn tax calculations! But again, I refer the honorable gentleman to the answer I gave a moment ago - the "cushion" that empowers the employee to say "no" a bit more; to hold out for a better share of the total returns to a business. This of course goes to the core of mutualism as I see it, as opposed to the anarcho-capitalist type of libertarianism. Mutualists believe that the current capitalist system is lop-sided, "toxic" and that it is itself a coercive and damagingly hierarchical system. Empowering labour to hold out for a better deal, making use of new corporate forms like limited liability partnerships and so on, will accelerate this change.

...and finally...

Tim: "Monetary reform and changes to fiat issuance will not happen by itself. The problem is coming up with something to replace it that actually works. I have seen many attempts and none appear to work or are just a cover operation for hatstand ideas like "social credit"."

As I think I said in response to another comment, I'm actually quite agnostic about how monetary reform should happen and what direction it should take. Personally I like the Hayek idea of fully privatised commercially competing currencies. I am told that the legislation actually already exists to allow commercial "complementary" currencies run by corporations. Air miles, Nectar and Kit-Kash are but early examples.

But consider this - if you collect 100% land rent and the capital value of land falls towards zero, the structure of the money system is bound to change - a large proportion of our broad money is lent into existence to pay for land in the form of mortgages. At the very least banks are going to need to have to adjust to that.

Actually I believe the real question is what lengths states will go to to prevent what I see as inevitable change if we allowed it. I haven't played there for a long time, and the hype about it seems to have died down a lot, but "Second Life" and "Kiva" are but a glimpse of what might be to come.

Incidentally, I presume I've been linked to in a discussion on the Libertarian Party forums (link will only work if you are a member and registered on their forums).  And that, now they have closed the public forums that were accessible to non-members, I am unable to see what people are saying.  I believe that none of these three policy areas step outside the bounds of libertarianism.  In fact that they address more inequities that create coercive human relationships than, say, anarcho-capitalist flavours of libertarianism do.  It would be nice to get the jist of what you are saying, if anything, over there!

Sod the European Union and loss of sovereignty. News arrives this morning that two state owned investment funds - The China Development Bank and Temasek, the investment arm of the Singaporean government, have between them taken a 10% plus stake in Barclays Bank.

Now, there's nothing new, or inherently threatening, about overseas money investing in UK companies, but in this case there are two issues.

First, these funds (as with the Qatari bid for Sainsbury's last week) are themselves so wealthy because of state protectionism. China in particular is not operating on the same economic "rules" as most of the west, what with pegged exchange rates and state control of assets generating this cash.

Second, Barclays is a bank, and as such in an incredibly privileged position. It is part of a cartel of a few organisations that effectively have the ability to create our money. A few choice quotes should suffice to show how awkward this could be...

Reginald McKenna, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915 and later Chairman of the Midland Bank, at the time the world's largest bank:

"I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."

Meyer Amschel Rothschild:

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."

Robert Hemphill (a director of the Federal reserve Bank of Atlanta in the 1930s):

"This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."

Franklin D Roosevelt:

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."

It's not that there should not be overseas investors in our commercial banks and so on. But that our commercial banks should not have the ability to create fiat money on their own initiative but in our name. We must either privatize the money supply or nationalize it - but if we allow other governments to take over the function through acquisition we can forget worrying about losing sovereignty to the EU and other such arguments, we will have handed real sovereignty, through control of our money supply, to foreign governments.

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