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The Telegraph is reporting that the US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role:

US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul and David Blair, Diplomatic Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 04/12/2007

The United States is backing Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader who served as the international community's "high representative" in Bosnia, to be the United Nations new "super envoy" to Afghanistan. The proposed role would see Lord Ashdown being charged with uniting the efforts of both Nato and the UN in Afghanistan. Nato officials are understood to support his candidacy for a job with exceptional power.

Can anyone doubt the talents of the man, or the esteem in which he is held around the world? But, given the history of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, could this one be a bridge too far for any international statesman? It's a pity he's probably already too old to be in the running for General Secretary after Ban Ki Moon has done two terms though.

Now, I understand the arguments in favour of a smoking ban on public and employee health ground but over at Freedom and Whisky in Only following orders David Farrar highlights that the smoking ban is also an erosion of private property rights.

You know by now that I can get Land Value Tax into almost any discussion! And here is an apt one for those that tell me that real estate is absolute property and therefore not something the state should tax. Yet in the smoking ban the government of Scotland (and the rest of us soon enough) is removing a property right - the right to decide who you allow onto your property and what they can do there.

So far as I am aware, smoking is not, yet anyway, illegal. Yet the powers that be are able to prevent you doing perfectly legal things in your own property. Real property is not absolute property, but a bundle of rights that can be altered, in modern times at least through democratic processes, which is at least better than for most of human history where they have most often changed by force or diktat.

In fact the only absolute property one has is, as John Locke pointed out, property in oneself. Assuming you are not a slave, the only thing you ultimately have which is absolutely yours is yourself. Indeed this is why slavery is itself such an horrific practice. This is one of the philosophical bases behind the argument that land tax is better than income tax. Income is the fruits of your labour, the efforts of the only thing you absolutely own, yourself. Land rights are utterly contingent on the society and jurisdiction of which it is a part, so the profits on land ownership are, as Adam Smith said, a better specie on which to base tax.

We are living through a period which is seeing some of the most momentous changes in human relations in the shortest time in history. Thirty odd years ago when we lived in Kenya and I was seven it was a big thing living abroad. Just the travel arrangements I remember seem like climbing Everest compared to today's era of mass international travel. Three stops, visas to everywhere, currency controls all over the place, expensive flights. Nowadays my father and stepmother seem to have few qualms about travelling to Durban for long weekends or shopping trips. We hear of people resident in Monaco and working three days a week in London, or people with a regular getaway home in Thailand.

Jon Snow, our university Chancellor, told us in one of his annual lectures once about when Sandy Gall, remember him, was out with the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupation, he would be given a camera, a notebook, a reel of film and told to come back in three weeks with an interesting story for the evening news. Nowadays we are in instant touch right around the world and news is relayed as it happens. I remember hearing that during Live Aid in 1986 stadia in South Africa and India had their first live international incoming broadcast from the concerts in London and the US and people remarking that it was really the first time they knew there were other people out there thinking about them.

When I worked in a Glasgow based Stock Exchange firm in the mid eighties we still had to book international telephone calls in advance to the US. Now the fight is about roaming charges because so many of us take our phones abroad with us - unimaginable back then!

But more than that, more significant than even that has been the internet. Coupled with urbanization which has seen us reach the point where more than fifty per cent of the world's population lives in cities, it means that given the right equipment that already exists and is enjoyed by many particularly in the more wealthy world, fifty per cent of the world's 6+ billion people could be in personal individual contact with any other anywhere around the world live. It's truly like waking up one morning in human history to find a whole new dimension - imagine living in a two dimensional world and suddenly discovering the third.

This has huge implications, epochal implications for the way we live, work, form alliances, invent, learn, trade, develop our common future and view the institutions that have served us till now. Governments and trans-national corporations have developed as intermediaries, as the contact point between whole nations of people who did not have direct access to each other in other countries as individuals. Even money, national currencies, are intermediaries, temporary stores of value that allow us to separate transactions by time and guarantee the creditworthiness of our counterparties in commerce.

I have a friend who has developed a pet theory of markets:

Market 1.0 - decentralised but disconnected - past - the local market with occasional trips to other local markets

Market 2.0 - centralised but connected - ending now - bigger, say national markets with intermediaries, governments and corporations, trading between these national markets

Market 3.0 - decentralised but connected - future beginning now - consumers and producers are ever more in direct contact with each other, the markets can be global and everyone can participate on the right network.

And this third, facilitated not by governments but by technology, and even sometimes in spite of governments, poses huge challenges. Challenges that can only go two ways - one way lies a massive increase in the power of the individual as opposed to the intermediary, whether governmental or commercial, the other sees those two huge vested interests try to prevent their loss of power or compensate for it with ever more draconian measures to place limits on this super-connectivity. Of course other, new intermediaries will emerge. Instead of being dependent on government to guarantee our ability to trade we may become dependent on a small number of global communications superpowers for granting us access to their networks. But the speed with which new ideas and inventions traverse and emerge from the ether will enable the individual to keep one step ahead of absolute dependency on a single supplier or a single technology.

And it's all eminently affordable. For half of what we spend as a single nation on our NHS each year, every single household in Africa could have a "One Laptop Per Child" type device and the infrastructure to connect to the outside world with it. Skype them altogether and they could be providing secretarial services to the rest of the world or selling their best quality coffee for full price to the small boutique blender who charges premium prices to his increasingly affluent western consumers. Think of the possibilities of four hundred million kids bursting with a will to learn suddenly enjoying all of the knowledge the internet can provide.

So, we have the potential to learn from each other without intervention, to trade with each other and to learn to make decisions about who to trust in trade without paying Nestle or whoever the middleman's cut for doing so. We don't even really need money - everything on eBay could be priced in Paypal Pounds for example and we could trade away without having to convert back into real 'currency' unless we had to buy something in an old fashioned retailer - and even then they'd soon learn to accept Paypals or Tescos or whatever.

Now, you may think this is all a bit far fetched, but I predicted, even if I didn't have the skills to capitalize on it, not only the Amazon business model (I tried to sell something similar to Blackwells in return for a job developing it in 1994) but also the Amazon marketplace that manages fantastically to match sellers of second hand books and so on!

Anyways, the point is, we always talk in Libertarian circles about being pragmatic to get our policies enacted, and that's all well and good, but we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. The world is changing, changing fast. The era in which big government and big corporations thrived because we needed them to be intermediaries for us is ending in the superconnected world that makes us, truly, a global village. And it will affect every policy area. We can either sleepwalk into a totalitarianism of governments and corporations who want to stop this progress in their own interests or we can help it along by showing people that a free world need not be a chaotic and dangerous place, that on the contrary, the more we know the other individuals in our global village the more we trust and care about them.

"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.