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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.

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.

I've just spent a fantastic weekend in the hallowed halls of the National Liberal Club at the annual Libertarian Alliance conference. If, like me, you see yourself as more of a theoretical policy wonk doing the background stuff of coming up with ideas, rather than the rather more practical work of debating actual proposals and then selling them on the doorstep, this was the perfect sort of a conference. A little like spending an entire party conference in the various fringe events where hand picked speakers with great ideas to sell challenge the little gray cells rather than in the sort of "win or lose" arguments over specific policy proposals of the main conference debates.

Yes, since going to Lib Dem conferences over the past few years, I have found the latter enjoyable, I don't think I've been on the winning side of a controversial debate yet, but this sort of event is where, I think, policies are incubated and born out of ideas presented by people with brains the size of several planets each or you gain the intellectual ammunition with which to turn that losing streak in policy debates into winning arguments.

I've come away from it with both many new acquaintances, a reading list that will probably take me till doomsday to get through and enough controversial ideas to keep my many sceptical Lib Dem friends arguing till, oh, next year's LA conference. I shall work up several ideas into blog posts of their own in the forthcoming weeks and months but to start with I thought I'd give a quick overview of the sessions and speakers. All the sessions were being filmed and will eventually appear on the LA website to refer to so if I fail miserably to pass the essential detail on, you'll be able to watch the originals should you wish...

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray
Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers
Session 3 - "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield
Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray

Aubrey is a fun, and at times controversial, biologist at Cambridge University working on the science of "fixing" the aging process. There are, apparently, two conventional approaches to dealing with the problems of aging. Basically, at the moment, from the moment we are created we start storing up the means of our own death. The very processes that keep us alive, metabolism, causes damage in our cells and throughout our bodies. That damage builds up until the body can no longer prevent it becoming one of the many illnesses associated with aging and that eventually, if we are not killed first by an external event, it will kill us. Globally, 100,000 out of the 150,000 people who die each day die of these conditions, which can be and usually are extremely unpleasant, often very painful and upsetting both for the sufferers and those who witness it - loved ones and carers.

One "school" of dealing with aging, "geriatrics" focuses on trying to prevent that damage becoming pathology ie developing the illnesses that will kill us. But it is ultimately futile. It is not repairing or removing the damage, just holding back the time it takes to become dangerous to us. And we cannot do that indefinitely.

The other traditional approach, "gerontology", focusses on trying to stop metabolism creating the damage in the first place. It sounds more promising, until you realise how little we actually know about metabolism. There is just so much that we cannot yet understand enough to prevent it causing damage, and therefore eventually pathology.

But there is a third, emerging approach that focuses on maintenance. De Gray made the analogy of a car - if you maintain it rigourously you can make it last more or less forever. And so this approach to aging focuses on repairing and eradicating the damage and maintaining cells. Repairing the damage means it does not build up enough to become pathology. As science, mostly microbiology, is constantly evolving, the types of damage we can repair increase. And because we are acting on the observable damage, there are a finite number of types of damage to focus on. We can see the damage metabolism creates much better than we understand the processes that lead to the damage.

De Gray and his team believe that at a very conservative estimate of the rate of development of the techniques required to repair various types of damage (some are easier, some still distant dreams of course) within 42 years we could have the ability to extend life by thirty years by repairing half of the types of damage we observe. So the current assumption is that the first person who will be able to live to 150 years old is already alive today and people currently in their thirties may be in time to have their lives extended by about thirty years over heir current life expectancy.

But as we move forward and discover mechanisms to deal with more types of damage, so we can repeat the "full body service" and begin to extend life out beyond the 150 years, indeed almost indefinitely. Again, given the rate of discovery, De Gray calculates that the first person to be able to live to 1,000 years will only be twenty years younger than the first person that will live to 150.

Such a prospect of course raises all sorts of issues, ethical, cost, policy and so on. But De Gray's conclusion was that given the amount of suffering that aging causes, and the costs to society of dealing with that suffering, we should not be put off from pursuing it. If, eventually, we have to answer some of the more difficult questions - what will the world's population look like if we can live effectively forever, and should we create ways in which someone can choose to end their otherwise perfectly healthy lives, that's something for the future.

And the cost of developing these techniques would appear to be minimal compared with even the cost of health care currently just in the UK. You can find out more, and importantly about how to help, financially and otherwise, at the "Methuselah Foundation" website.

Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers

I'm rather afraid that my relying on memory rather than taking copious notes will not do this session justice and it will be best to get the full picture from the recording of the session when it comes online. The speakers focussed on the many new ways in which our freedoms are being attacked and compromised, but more importantly on our apparent willingness to allow it to happen and unwillingness to protest against it. Even though theoretically, in a democracy, we are, sheep like in most cases, simply obeying and finding reasons to excuse the actions of those who would curtail our freedoms.

As I say, watch the video when it comes out.

After a very pleasant lunch with Tristan in the fascinating Ship & Shovell Pub just up the road in Craven Passage I'm afraid I was a few minutes late for the start of the session after lunch, "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield , and decided to sit it out rather than disturb the room clattering in late, so both you and I will need to wait for the video! Or, there's a very good synopsis courtesy of the Oxford Libertarian Society blog .

Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Then came one of the great highlights of the whole weekend, a hugely entertaining session of futurology and technological ideas by David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, and professor of Law at Santa Clara University. I just cannot do this fast paced entertaining session the justice it deserves in a few lines. It was based on the ideas in his new book, Future Imperfect, which you can get at Amazon, or if you are too mean, or just plain penurious, he has put it all online.

He covered areas I will probably blog about individually (when I have read the book), including privacy technology, law enforcement technology and how to get around it, reproductive technology (think Gattaca) and, most indelibly etched in my mind, nano technology. The main thought I came away with out of a myriad of interesting possibilities was "should we actually be worried about climate change if, within a few decades, we will have produced nanobots and artificial intelligence such that we will have obsoleted the human race!" - as Friedman put it, turned us into gerbils in the laboratories or even the Matrix, of self-aware super intelligent 'droids.

I chose to miss out the final, additional session of the day to meet up with Lib Dem activist from Ealing Toran Shaw for a drink before we all went into the dinner, but I will definately want to watch the video of the session and the Libertarian Alliance DVD on the subject of "The Great British Road Pricing Debate: Free Market Incrementalism or Just More State Control?" which is obviously currently a hugely important policy issue that has caused a lot of debate within the Lib Dems.

And so ended the main business of day one. I shall return to cover the very sociable dinner and day two, including such controversial issues as Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the idea of the "Private Law society" and Guy Herbert from NO2ID soon.

Again, I'm starting a new post to respond to some very interesting comments by Tim Carpenter. My inept attempt at a Drupal template means it's almost possible to follow a thread of comments and especially given this is going to be another long response I think it deserves an airing on its own.

For anyone coming new to this debate, it follows on from my original "three point plan" for equity and economic justice and some clarifications and responses I gave yesterday to comments on that original by Tim Carpenter, Head of Policy at the Libertarian Party UK.

Tim, thanks for taking the time to respond. However I think we are, as a colleague used to say to me "talking past each one another". Paul Lockett has put it all a deal more eloquently than myself , and for that, and if I have caused any confusion, apologies.

I am a geo-libertarian (of the "geo-mutualist" variety if you will). The main thing you seem not to have appreciated is that in calling for the "Single Tax" I mean just that - the community/state can only take economic rent on the land resources within its jurisdiction and has no call on incomes or trade. As I understand it this is the "purist Georgist" position.

The ideal 'state' would be limited to collecting the rent and distributing it all as a dividend to citizens for the reasons Paul outlined. "Commonwealth" - you are right, it's lazy, I should put a space between "common" and "wealth"! Economic rent from the finite natural resources we all require to share is "common wealth" and should be collected as such and distributed as fully as possible whilst every other tax is a tariff.

Tim: "1. When I say who defines the value of your land, you say "why does anyone need to decide", yet immediately go on to talk about collecting the tax! Someone DOES decide the taxable value and that affects the actual value. Can you not see that?"

No, the market sets a location's value. It does it all the time at the moment. And it will continue to do so in an LVT system. Even in a "100% LVT" system. If a location is appreciating in value, buyers will be prepared to pay a premium over last year's rent bill and vice versa, in a falling market sellers will effectively have to be prepared to pay someone to take the rent bill off them. The following year's rent bill will reflect that premium or discount by going up or down respectively.

Tim: "2. As you should know, we aim to eradicate income tax., so the comparison does not hold."

See above - I'm a single taxer. No income tax here either. It is a tariff on employment and trade. Though I would say that if a local community decided mutually to have a local tax on incomes or sales to finance some mutually agreed local project it would be doing so in competition with neighbouring communities that perhaps were not or were charging a different rate or a different tax. Tax competition is good, in itself, isn't it? Also I am aware of some "single" taxers who would justify retaining some income tax at least temporarily in order to try to address the "embedded" historical advantages of monopoly ownership. I don't.

Tim: "The problem comes when some local area under the influence of whomsoever, adjusts taxation on land they wish to gain access to because a new development is coming. So, building a road, whack up the value of land next to it. Farmer has no CAPITAL to develop it, so has to sell it for a knock-down price because he HAS to sell to meet the tax bill. If this does not concentrate land into a few hands, I do no know what would. This is just one example of the potential risks."

This appears to be Churchill's "market gardener" bogey, or, to others, the "poor widow" bogey. If you look at it under the current system, that same farmer, in similar circumstances is perfectly able, regardless of the squalor growing around, to sit on that land, not paying anything and watch its value "ripen" until the value, created merely by excluding others from what they need to use, is so great it becomes irrational not to sell. That process is outright extortion.

In fact, under an LVT system, land values at the margin would tend to move much more incrementally in any case. In the absence of other restrictions - zoning, green belts etc (it is your policy to remove those restrictions once an LVT system proves practical isn't it?) - you would not get these large leaps in hope value. I would actually retain green belts and such like for a while after LVT was implemented so that it can have its greatest effect in turning existing urban land to its most efficient use before going for sprawl. But I am prepared to be convinced on that. After all, we know that at relatively low densities compared with what planning guidance seeks nowadays, it would take up less than three quarters of one per cent of the non urbanized land in England to build the three million new homes predicted to be necessary over the next twenty years.

But once a point of equilibrium was reached between supply and demand rents at the margins of production would move slowly and via the democratic influence of the market. If that market and the community that makes up its participants eventually get as far as that farmer's land and all that remains to bring it in from the margin to profitable development is to develop a road, the farmer will have had plenty of opportunity to see it coming long before the tax bill becomes an issue for him.

Tim: "3. Living costs - if you have CBI as described you would still keep the most expensive parts of the Welfare bureaucracy - the entire means-testing apparatus. Housing benefit would probably remain in all but name."

I disagree. But I don't think what you understand me to have described is what I think I have! ie, in particular, that I am not paying for CBI out of income taxes, but out of the community collected rent on economic land. Land at the margins tends as I said towards a nil value. More people will be able to own their home because they will not be borrowing twice as much as the value of the capital good (the building) in order to pay the land value in up front capital. Renting a basic home at the margins ought to be achievable out of the Citizens Income.

With so many pulled out of poverty anyway by not having punitive benefits withdrawal regimes that reduce the marginal value of doing even the smallest amount of paid work and by the reduced costs of living owing to tariff eradication and the better off keeping more of their own money, the capacity of private charity or local mutualism to assist the much smaller number of people that would be needing top up hand outs above their CBI would be much increased.

Tim: "4. Income. You need to clarify here - are you saying that COMPANIES have 40% more or that wage earners do? Be under no illusions, if you have CBI, income tax will be enormous. I worked out once that if we went for CBI with no other tax changes but a cull of QANGOs, income tax would need to be about 64% flat from the very first penny (IT is currently £140bln, 7k x 50m = £350bln pa). A HUGE disincentive to working especially at the lower end. Result: black economy, unproductive citizens, more companies shutting down and a growth in imports (and do not say "cheap imports make us richer" because that only holds if we are simultaneously exporting a greater amount of higher value exports)."

I hope you'll agree that that objection is moot given I am not talking about income taxes at all. My calculation of the CBI cost at £5200 pa for adults and a decreasing proportion for under-18s to 20% for 2 year olds is around £285bn. £245bn if only the adults. I reckon there was about £200bn a year's worth of economic rent in residential land alone at the recent peak of the market. I don't think it is beyond belief that there's another £85bn in commercial, industrial, retail and, possibly, agricultural economic rents.

Tim: "5. Movement to low tax areas: A company will consider workforce supply as a prime consideration, not just rental costs. If that were not the case, expensive London would be empty. People pay top dollar for London rents because of a massive pool of labour - they can gain access to many cheap or more chance of snaring the best. To think LVT would make a company move out to a depressed area? Those places are already cheap. Why doesn't it happen now? Limited skilled labour pool. As you say the Government does it now and did it in the past (remember the Hillman Imp?) and it creates quasi-soviets. If LVT has an influence, it might IMHO move a few companies, deter some from even setting up where they need to and the rest of the companies will be bled paying higher rates just to keep near the labour pool they require. In the case of London, the move will be to New York or Hong Kong and we all lose out."

There are so many issues in this paragraph I can only assume again that I have failed adequately to have explained my position. At the moment businesses pay rents, yes? In an LVT system they will still pay rents. The only difference is that whereas currently the entire rent, that which accrues to both the building and the site or location goes to the current landowner, ie it is enclosed, privatized. Under an LVT system, the same rent is due (assuming they were paying the market rent originally), only the portion of it that accrues to the location goes to the community and that attributable to the building to the building owner. There's no corporation taxes, no more employee taxes. There's no increasing of rent or rates; there's no bleeding anyone. Except those, as landowners, who have bled the rest of us for centuries.

Areas of low land value will also be areas in which it is cheaper for employees to live (lower LVT for them too). For a business operating at the edge of profit it would seem to me to be quite an attractive move. But one that remains in London because their key skills are there is not penalised by that. Indeed, if sufficient other businesses do it who do not need to be in London for optimal profitability do move, costs will also likely fall for those left behind, increasing their profit, distributable to capital and labour.

I think there is, in particular, one form of LVT that could have a significant effect in this regard...the auctioning of air-space, via "landing slots" at airports. Making more efficient use of regional airports would draw business into those areas. I'm likely to propose this to our regional conference this autumn as part of an "anti third runway at Heathrow" motion. Interesting choices of examples though - Hong Kong of course is famous for having state owned land - everything except the Anglican Cathedral is leasehold and that has been used to raise revenue in a form of LVT and keep income taxes low. Modern valuation tracking and billing systems would make that far more efficient and not prone to some of the problems Hong Kong suffered by having too infrequent valuations.

In China before Mao took over, I understand that Chiang Kai Chek's regime looked into LVT as a way of staving off the rise of Mao's totalitarian collectivism. And in the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev I believe looked into LVT as a way of capturing the value of natural resources and in not implementing it allowed the so called "oligarchs" (really "kleptocrats" in my opinion) to enclose the revenue from that vast pool of common wealth.

I'm getting a bit tired here! I'm going to call it quite at this point and maybe think some more about the issue of mutualism. I think Paul answered the point about the "state as landlord" objections quite satisfactorily and there's no need for me to repeat it. But for fairness, other readers can read Tim's further points in the comments on the previous post.

Tim: "p.s. your page has a script that my browser asks me to kill due to risk of resource hogging."

Yes - I only notice this on older machines or slower network connections - I never experience the problem at home or at work. I think it must have been an advertising panel I have just removed, but if others still experience the problem let me know and I'll have another look.