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Norwich City Council to pursue hairdressers with undercover agents to check they're not giving their customers a glass of complimentary mulled wine while they wait:

You couldn't make it up!

To Reading this morning for South Central Regional Conference at the wonderful, if somewhat seriously cramped, Oakwood Centre in Woodley. The first, opening, speaker was Sandra Gidley, MP for Romsey. The "Romsey Redhead" herself. She seemed to devote most of her speech to having a go at the Lib Dem parliamentary press operation for watering down anything any MP want to press release so it says nothing at all preferably by the sound of it, but certainly nothing "spikey".

Now, as a defence against charges that our MPs are invisible, even to us, that's one thing, but frankly I don't want to hear that sort of excuse even if it is correct. If it is correct then we should be getting new press officers perhaps. Or not constraining them as much. But it is none of our, South Central ordinary members', business. The Parliamentary Party has to sort this out, not us.

But then she said something that somewhat let the side down - that we should "stop banging on about Site Value Rating and Constitutional Reform" and speak about things that matter to real people. Huh? When last did you ever see a parliamentary party press release about PR, less still LVT/SVR?

I very much suspect that the last press release on SVR was one of Herbert Asquith's.

And frankly, since it is, though I say so myself, the single most important step towards economic and social freedom we could take, perhaps we should be talking about it in press releases. At least it would differentiate us from the anodyne bull turds coming from the red-blue parties.

But to suggest that we do too much of that and too little responding to other issues is just fantasy Sandra.

Over on the Ludwig von Mises Economics blog last week, Ben O'Neill, an Australian libertarian and academic, wrote a piece against the welfare state in Is the Starving Man Free? and the full article is here:

'Modern "liberals" who advocate the view that government should provide us with the necessities or alleged necessities of life rarely appreciate that this assistance rests on a system of mass robbery and enslavement that is highly inimical to their professed belief in liberty. In fact, the advocates of such policies present them in quite the opposite light, as enhancing our liberty.'

Now, much as I hesitate to go up against an article at the great Mises Institute, this issue goes to the heart of differences between some liberals and some libertarians, though not this liberal libertarian. Indeed it is one of the core messages of the "Liberal Alternative" book we are compiling under the auspices of ALTER, and, to give it a plug, what I will be talking about in the ALTER fringe next Saturday evening in Liverpool, alongside James Graham, Tony Vickers and Vince Cable.

I also believe it gives some libertarians a "bad rap"; seeming to leave the "safety net" to the possible vicissitudes of private charity gives them a "beggar thy neighbour" reputation. Yet Liberals, and before the Ayn Rand/Ludwig von Mises school of libertarianism the mutualists and individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, had a neat response. For the record, I tend to agree that if we take from people what they earn with their own labour and resourcefulness it is coercion and even theft, but there is a source of value that properly belongs to us all, and not, as in the current predominant model, to the occupier - rent.

Benjamin Franklin wrote:

But notwithstanding this increase (of population), so vast is the territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully; and, till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long a laborer for others, but gets a plantation of his own; no man continues long a journeyman to a trade, but goes among these new settlers, and sets up for himself.

[From: Observations Concerning for Increase of Mankind (1751), Sec. 8, Works, Vol. II, p. 225]

If we had free land, nobody would starve, unless that is they could not physically lift a spade to grow their own sustenance. The poor could up-sticks, spread out to the next available plot of unoccupied land and cultivate it. It would be a basic existence to be sure, but one that would not depend on another to provide, by state coercion or by reliance on private charity. And in time, one which could provide the most basic means of providing not just sustenance but opportunities to create wealth.

Now the fact is, we are not in that happy situation Franklin described. We do not have "free land". It is all enclosed. And indeed it would not suit modern, sophisticated, "civilized" (in the sense of "urbanized") humanity well if we did have lots of unused land lying around being unproductive. But the corollary of that is that there is no way the landless poor can sustain themselves without recourse to selling their labour to another. And in that state of desperation where one is about to "starve" one is surely more than most liable to coercion by that other. "Will work for food" maybe a simple slogan, but it hides a desperation likely to be seized upon by the unscrupulous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Then he says: "If I am born into the earth, where is my part? Have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin." ..."Touch any wood or field or house-lot on your peril," cry all the gentlemen of this world; "but you may come and work in ours for us, and we will give you a peice of bread."

[From: The Conservative, A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841]

Now what of the other side of O'Neill and the Mises style libertarians' claim that for the state to take anything from everyone to support the "starving man", to give him his basic needs, is "mass robbery and enslavement"? Well, as I said, I tend to agree that taking anything of what someone has made with his own labour or resourcefulness is theft. It is justified by the "liberals" that O'Neill castigates (that's most of us!) on the several grounds that it prevents a greater evil - the starving man, that it pays for the inputs that enable us to make money from our labour - our education and that of others to work for us, and the somewhat vague assertion that those who have much should give more to support those who have less. But it is still an offense against self-ownership; that which John Locke describes as being able to retain the fruits of our own labour.

But there is value in land that the owner does not create for him or herself. It is two hundred years since David Ricardo showed that rent increases to absorb the extra productivity that can be gained from a good piece of land compared with an inferior piece with no effort from the land owner, as owner. There is a perfectly reasonable strand of libertarianism, known as geolibertarianism, that asserts that since this rent is not earned by the landowner, but created by the expenditure of others, in labour and capital, that gives a particular location more social and commercial attractiveness, it is legitimate to collect this value from owners to compensate those who suffer from lack of land. And in a modern, urbanized economy, this would mean cash with which to satisfy their most basic needs, a "Citizen's Income" allowing them then to sell their labour, their bellies full and their body rested, without having to accept a potentially exploitative bargain.

Unlike taking part of what a person earns from his labour, impinging on his or her self-ownership, this can be justified because it is value that the owner does not earn for themselves, that it does not affect their ability to earn from their labour in future, and as a user fee in return for the state's or community's protection of their right to occupy such a location, a user fee in proportion to the potential natural productivity of that location, whether they make use of that potential productivity or not. Location is a monopoly, protected by the state; libertarians are against monopoly and state protection. It forms a neat, virtuous circle, from which those left without access to free land can be supported without the "mass robbery and enslavement" O'Neill rightly denounces.

See, he may be the donnish one, but we can do a bit of Latin too "up the hill". Kudos if anyone can tell me where it is from...

Anyway - I sing of arms and a man. Me. And a broken arm. It is well and truly broken, but what I hadn't realised was that the Ortho-what-do-you-callem Trauma unit were there to make the incident a whole load more traumatic. I was prepared for a scene out of the Inquisition with racks and stretching machines just so some sadist could prove how much more it could hurt. But the eagle eyed doctor from yesterday maybe missed the bone chip which prevents me twisting my arm - not just making it painful. And so they haven't decided whether to put it in a cast or to cut it open, dig around and remove some precious part of me.

I won't know till at least Monday, when they've booked me in for a CT scan. I am irrationally terrified of operations. Despite gaining solace from just how many miracles Mr Campbell-Gore could pull off even while drunk in charge of a scalpel.

Still - a visit to hospital usually manages to prove to you how lucky you are. There was a young chap in one of these:

Over at the Latin lovers collective David has been trying to fathom why anyone would call Milton Friedman a "liberal". I responded with a long comment that really deserves to be a post of its own on my blog...

See, I actually think Milt is much misunderstood and misrepresented. Just like Smithy. I've seen him make the "claim" that a company's only duty is to create profit for its shareholders. And there's a but. He is talking about the sole legal obligation, indeed the founding rationale, of the law that created incorporated companies in the US.

When incorporation was first enshrined in US law it was in response to the sort of abuses that marked out things like the South-Sea Bubble in the UK. Investors would be conned into parting with their money and then the merchant adventurer would go off and do what he pleased with their money. The same happened in the early US and so they created a legal framework that was solely intended to protect the stockholder from the conmen that sought to part them from their money - business could not get investors without that certainty that if they clubbed together to form a corporation their interests would be legally protected.

His line is actually a philosophical one that a corporation has no moral conscience, that it's not really a "person" - I get the impression he doesn't like the later case law in the late c19th US that made a corporation into a legal person. But, he says, those people who go to make up a corporation, employees, managers and most importantly stockholders do have moral consciences and crucially that it's the process of making money that allows them to exercise that moral conscience for good.

I don't think that's a bad way to look at it actually. We occasionally, in the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum, have to define "social enterprise', and lots of people say such is a "not for profit company". But a preferred phrase amongst social enterprise "practitioners" is that it is a "more than profit company". Profit has become in some circles a dirty word. But Friedman's line, and that of social entrepreneurs, is that it's what you do with that profit that could be dirty or could be good. In Friedman's case, in US law, the point is that it is simply not up to the corporation itself to decide for the stockholders what to do with that profit, for good or bad. Every corrporate entity, in order to justify the trust that investors and members put into it, must make a profit to be able to carry on trading, but what those "real people" involved decide to do with their profit is what counts.

For me though, it was "Free to Choose" that made me think differently of Milt. To me before then he was the academic heavyweight that gave justification to some of the worst aspects of Thathcerism. But then I read him describe how people could take control for themselves. His example was education. He suggested, for example, that something as precious as the education of our children should not be left to the state, and advocated parents and teachers getting together and forming PTA co-operative schools to put them in control locally.

And this is Adam Smith's line as well in my opinion. He said that the state should get involved, amongst other things, when something needed doing that was too big for a person or small group of associated people to arrange for themselves. And I would say that the whole story of the twnetieth century welfare state has been usurping the right, and ability, of groups of people to get on and arrange such things for themselves or amngst themselves. As John Howson reminded us when we had that consultation on the public services policy paper in the Town Hall in Oxford, state schools are legally merely the "default" option. The obligation legally is on parents to ensure their children are educated, and they are allowed to go private, to home-school, whatever, but that the state provides a fall-back. But the way state education has developed in this country at least we have had our minds numbed to the idea that there are other options. That is what one could describe as enslavement by conformity.

I believe there are other areas where Milton Friedman has been done a disservice by his connection with Reaganomics and Thatcherism. He does change his mind. But those who took his ideas and made them their political ideology don't like to hear that. Monetarism is a case in point. Friedman has had a long standing philosophical problem with fiat money. I think he's really a "hard money" advocate - one who believes that stable money means something still backed with a relatively fixed amount of some precious specie such as gold. His adaptation of this to the inflationary pressures and policies of the seventies was to advocate tight control of fiat money which became the mantra of the political monetarists - they even made a song out of it to educate the great British unwashed in the late seventies - "We'll count our blessings if we apply/Tight control to our money supply". But since then Friedman has said that if he were to go through it all again he probably would not have placed such a heavy emphasis on control of money supply.