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...is that it always seems that the first steps towards it, the first things to be cut away from the protectionism ridden form of capitalism we have now, hurt the small person more than the big person. If the "average Joe" (and no, it's just a phrase, not meant for you Joe O or Joe T!) cannot see the benefits to them of peeling away layers of protectionism and bureaucracy why would they support removing the state's comfort blanket?

Much of what we remember about Thatcher era attempts to roll back the economic power of the state, for example, centers around mining and industrial communities with their "hearts ripped out" and of the "haves" becoming the "have mores" through privatisation whilst those often for whom the state industry had been the economic lifeline were cut off. Or of the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, leeching off the common property of the people of that country in the form of its natural wealth.

Which is why economic liberals must strive to show that the root cause of the grossest inequalities we see in the world around us is that the rich and powerful are, as often as not, made so and maintained by protectionism and monopoly. Then when we act, unlike in the Thatcher era, we must be clear that each step we take strikes directly at that privilege and produces a perceptible incremental and preferably material rather than hypothetical benefit to those whom the existence of that privilege has hitherto harmed.

Our Liberal forebears knew this, hence the urgency with which they attempted to go about radical change, attacking monopoly and protectionist created wealth, in the People's Budget. It must be equally obvious with hindsight that the failure to drive through the most radical of those proposals left the way open for the Labour party to sneak in and push socialist, statist, coercive rather than liberal means to what they claimed were the same ends. Those means we now know have failed and continue to fail wherever they are tried. And not only that but they do not have the saving grace of freeing people from that other gross dependency on the state and the political establishment.

This is the main task for our shared liberal future - and it looks like 70% of us might just agree.

Hat tip to the Adam Smith Institute for pointing out that today is the anniversary of the death, 231 years ago, of one of my favourite wonks, David Hume.

David Hume (1711-1776):

On this day in 1776, after a long illness, David Hume died. He must have been one of the most intelligent, and indeed one of the wisest human beings to have lived - a truth that can still be inspected in the pages of his history and philosophy.

A notorious skeptic on the subject of religion, Hume found himself excluded from academic posts. But he made up for it with literary masterpieces, such as his Treatise of Human Nature and Essays, Moral and Political, his sweeping, controversial History of Great Britain, plus An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But he cautiously reserved the publication of his essays on suicide and on immortality, and his (then) sensational, skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after his death.

Hume took an empirical view of the world. Our senses are the best guide to it, he thought, and not the fanciful theories of metaphysicians and churchmen. It was a philosophy of common sense. And his writings analyze a huge range of subjects - ethics, philosophy of science, free will, the is-ought problem, politics, human nature, and even economics - with a precision and simplicity that is still enjoyable to read (no really, it is) even today.

And, armed with this simple common sense and a towering intellect, he rarely seems to put a foot wrong, even when off his natural ground. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, for example, wrote that modern readers of Hume's essay Of Money would find 'few if any errors of commission'.

Sociable and witty, Hume made many friends among the great minds of his day, including Adam Smith, one of the few contemporaries who could claim to be his intellectual equal. On this day, we at the Adam Smith Institute should remember our friend, David Hume.

Personally, the work I like most of Hume's is a relatively minor one, the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" in which he shows how we should remodel government where the power comes from the lowest rung of government upwards. Where the central government only makes laws that the counties acting together want. I even have a domain 1754.org.uk on which I would like to set up a "wonk site" in honour of the anniversary of its publication, but which I have not got around to yet!

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.

When Gordon Brown came to power last year he promised a "government of all the talents". A year or so on and with what, 45,000,000 adults to choose from (most of whom of course would not touch his government, probably any government, with a very long barge-pole), one has to wonder just what talents he had in mind to bring this motley crew together:

Come to think of it, there's probably not one talent between them. These three, and this choice by the "dear leader" to bring them into government, just highlights for me how hopeless the very idea of state government is. There is no way that these people are somehow uniquely capable, any more than anyone else in the country, to make the momentous decisions we stupidly cede to the state to take on our behalf.