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I've always taken a slightly different view of the inbuilt age discrimination in the minimum wage legislation for under 21 year olds than many it would appear. When I was a councillor in Oxford we had a few instances of employers of young people - mostly restaurants - pushing the limits of the legislation anyway. I never did approve for example of including tips in the minimum wage. If someone's working they get paid, if their customers think they've done a good job they should feel free to enhance that, not make up the employer's shortfall.

But mostly, I felt that young people, people starting out on life's employment journey, are the very ones that need a bit of a boost. They're the ones potentially with the expenses of setting up home and so on, living independently for the first time. So I really never liked the differential wage for under 21s. I can, just about, accept that 16-18 year olds, who if I recall correctly were not even protected by the initial legislation (which was a total outrage if I'm remembering it correctly), may be paid less in order to encourage them to stay in education, and to encourage employers to give them added training related benefits.

So I'm quite pleased to see the quandary apparently being created by this weekend's implementation of anti-ageism legislation:

Age law 'threat to minimum wage':

Young people get a lower minimum wage than the over-21s

Laws being introduced on Sunday, which ban age discrimination at work, could endanger the minimum wage system, a business group has warned.

Workers aged under 21 can currently be paid less than their older colleagues.

But the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) said this may be considered discriminatory and be open to legal challenge under the new legislation.

I hope there are some test cases, and I hope personally they win. Eighteen to twenty-one year olds are adults. Why should they have any fewer rights than anyone else?

A few weeks ago this ten year old article by Fred E Folvary was brought to my attention. I thought I had blogged about it before, but in the light of what I said in 'Revolutionary Liberalism: 5 - The "Sovereign Individual"' the other day and the welter of stories of party funding corruption this week it's worth reprinting today I think:

Democracy Needs Reforming

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, The Progress Report

Ever since the 1996 elections, we have had wave after wave of revelations about improper or suspicious political campaign finances. Campaign contributions from Asia, soliciting contributions from government offices, overnight stays at the White House, diversion of "soft" money to political parties -- all this money sloshing and influence peddling points to the corruption of government, whether it was strictly legal or not.

The finance reform bill now being considered may be blocked by Democratic opposition to the "paycheck protection act" that would bar unions from using dues for political contributions without the members' approval. Even if it passes, the problem will remain. We've had campaign finance reforms every few years, and 114 votes on the issue by the Senate during the last ten years, but nothing really changes.

The basic problem is the way we elect our representatives. Our system is mass democracy: a large mass of voters elect a Congressman or Senator, or the President. The voters' don't know the candidate personally, so the candidate relies on advertising in the media to project a favorable image. This costs money, and the special interests are happy to contribute the funds.

No matter what laws are passed, the special interests will find ways around them, because of the tremendous gains they can get. Government financing of campaigns only gives more power to the two major parties, reducing even further the opportunity for smaller political parties to challenge the system and come up with new ideas. The problem is the corrupt incentives built into the system. To solve the problem, the whole voting system has to be changed.

Since the key problem is mass democracy, the only remedy is to change it to small-group democracy. Have every election take place in a small group. That would eliminate the need for mass media, and therefore the need for mass campaign funds, and thus the opportunity for special interests to buy out the election. Also, wealthy candidates would no longer have such an advantage.

But if a Congressional district has several hundred thousand people, how can we elect the representatives with small groups? The solution is multi-level voting. Divide cities and counties into small neighborhood districts. Each district elects a council. Then the council members elect one of their members to a higher- level council made up of a dozen neighborhood districts. These then elect members to the next higher level, and this continues on up to the representatives to the city council, state legislatures and Congress. One of the rules is that a lower-level council may recall a representative at any time if they are not satisfied.

Now you the voter are electing someone from your neighborhood for the neighborhood council, somebody you might know or easily have access to. Instead of mass mailings and TV commercials, the candidates would hold neighborhood meetings. All the higher-level elections would also be personal, since only a dozen or so councils would elect representatives to the next higher level council. The President himself would be elected by Congress, and the House of Representatives would only have, say, some 60 members instead of 435. And let's cut the Senate to 50 members, while we're at it. We want smaller groups, right?

Somebody might object that he or she wants to be able to elect the President directly. But one vote out of tens of millions does not amount to much. One vote in a neighborhood election of about 200 voters does count for something, plus your voice will be heard, and those who want to be representatives don't need to raise money.

This bottom-up multi-level voting system would also profoundly change the incentives for taxation. Power would shift dramatically to the neighborhood councils. Decentralized voting would lead to decentralized government and decentralized taxation. With local funding that gets sent to higher-levels of government, income and sales taxes would not longer be practical. Taxation would shift to real estate, especially to land, which does not flee when taxed.

Small-group democracy would be a radical change, but if we want to eliminate special-interest influence and the corruption of government, campaign-finance laws alone won't do it, because of the incentives built into the system. Either we change the voting system, or we will continue to let the special interests have their way.

One of the great benefits of working at Oxford Brookes University is that, perhaps unlike more snooty institutions, we IT Guys do get to mingle with the egg-heads and boffins at lunchtimes and so on because we can only afford one staff dining room! And summer vacations are usually better for such opportunities as the academics seem to be less rushed between lectures and so on. So Friday was such an interesting occasion, and we were lunching with a particular friend from International Relations.

She can never understand, when I get talking about my political outlook, why I am not a Green (she is). And I glibly said well I'm a libertarian at heart. And I certainly believe that people should be able to make what they can and keep it, so long as it was fairly earned and not earned by coercion of others. And so off we went on a critique of various "schools" of libertarianism and anarchism. So was I an anarchist or a libertarian? Are "anarcho-capitalists" real anarchists or does their support for capitalism mean that they support inherently hierarchical and coercive social structures, especially in the sphere of economics? Are "anarcho-syndicalists" real libertarians or do their suggested post-revolutionary governance structures amount to localised tyrannies?

And what about "left libertarian" and "right libertarian" - can you be a libertarian and left leaning at all? Or is a libertarian really a right wing anarchist and an anarchist a left wing libertarian? If this is all beginning to sound like the various nomenclatures beloved of seventies marxist groups, that's what I thought too. I even found one person describing themselves as an "Anti-capitalist anti-communist individualist anarchist" which I am sure must adequately describes what he feels but is quite a mouthful you must admit!

So I got back to my desk and did a bit of digging around on the web in what was left of my lunch time. Am I closer to Murray Rothbard or to Kevin Carson? And how do either of them relate to nineteenth century anarchists/libertarians such as Benjamin Tucker? It seems I might have to decide whether I believe in the "labour theory of value" or in "marginal utility". But also, I believe, with Tucker, that the root cause of a lack of equity for the poor, and especially the working poor, is the four great monopolies maintained through state coercion: money and its creation, land, trade tariffs and patents.

And if you accept land as a factor of production I don't see how either of these other theories of value can be the whole story. I have, for a while now, described my position as "geo-libertarian". Geo-libertarians eschew, like other libertarians, state interference in economic and social aspects of life. But we add a rider, after Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Mill I & II and most obviously Henry George, that in order to set a level playing field the value of land must be distributed equitably amongst the whole community. So we believe that through Land Value Tax, or as Locke called it more accurately I believe, the Community Collection of Rent, all occupiers of economic land pay the value of that to the community which, in its purest form, simply distributes that as a dividend to all citizens but which also, if you do not want to go the whole hog an abolish the state, should set an absolute limit on the amount the state can raise and spend.

So anyway, I think I have nailed myself down. I will henceforth call myself an "anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist"! Are there any others out there? Maybe we can meet in an obscure public house somewhere one day and form a faction?

Technorati Tags: anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, Benjamin Tucker, Carson, geo-libertarianism, libertarianism, mutualism, radicalism, Rothbard

The Tories seem up in arms about the prospect of new valuations for council tax...

Tories warn over home inspections:

MPs are discussing new powers for inspectors in Northern Ireland, as part of the revaluation of its rates system.

It could pave the way for English tax payers to be forced to admit inspectors who want to check features which could increase house values, the Tories say.

Of course, if they simply changed over to taxing land values nobody would ever have to even open the garden gate.