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...that "government is the problem", or because anti-regulator Alan Greenspan named Ayn Rand as his biggest political influence, it's time you did some reading.

Each year the Libertarian Alliance awards the Chris R Tame Memorial Prize (named for the late founder of the Libertarian Alliance) for the best essay on a title chosen by its Director, Dr Sean Gabb, and this year's winner was announced this weekend at the Libertarian Alliance annual conference at the National Liberal Club - more on which in upcoming posts.

The Libertarian Alliance is the biggest grouping of the broad church known as Libertarianism in the UK, and this year's essay title was set just ahead of the main round of recent financial market troubles but focussing on the common idea that Libertarians would demolish the state, leaving what we currently know as big corporate capitalism to run amok. The full brief for contestants ran as follows:

Essay Title: "Can a Libertarian Society be Described as 'Tesco minus the State'?"

Explanatory Note

Many socialists and conservatives regard libertarians as cheerleaders for big business. Our belief in free enterprise is understood as support for the bigger, and therefore the more successful, corporations - General Motors, Microsoft, HSBC, Tesco, and so forth - and for an international financial system centred on the City of London.

Some libertarians are happy to be so regarded. They dislike the way in which big government provides opportunities for big business to acquire privileges that shelter it from competition. Even so, they believe that a world without government, or a world with much less government, would be broadly similar in its patterns of enterprise to the world that we now have. It would be much improved, but not fundamentally dissimilar.

Other libertarians disagree. They regard big business as fundamentally a creation of big government. Incorporation laws free entrepreneurs from personal risk and personal responsibility, and allow the growth of large business organisations that are bureaucratically managed. These organisations then cartellise their markets and externalise many of their costs. The result is systematic distortion of market behaviour from the forms it would take without government intervention. These libertarians often go further in their analysis by denying the legitimacy of intellectual property rights and ownership rights in land beyond what any individual can directly use.

Where do you stand in this debate? Are you broadly comfortable with a global capitalism that is raising billions of people from starvation towards affluence. Or are you a radical with a vision of a society that has never yet been tried and is as alien and even frightening to most people as anything promised by the Marxists.

You tell us.

No go and read the winning essay. Congratulations go to Keith Preston, for his entry entitled "Free enterprise: the antidote to corporate plutocracy"

But if you are too lazy to read the whole lot (c 3000 words - so no more than one of my usual posts!), it concludes...

"An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries,peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy. "

Now, you may still not be convinced that "government is the problem", but do us the decency of not conflating "deregulation" with "evil right wing global corporatism" and blaming "libertarianism" for the great big pile of dog-doo the state and economy is in right now. Especially those of you who claim to be Liberals, fellow travelers of Libertarianism for the past 150 years.

The Oxford Mail today reports (City chief 'may back the burn') that:

Oxford City Council's new leader John Goddard has controversially not ruled out backing incineration to get rid of the city's waste in the future.

Now this argument is getting tired, with the so called "constructive opposition" folk from the city's Labour and Green groups being consistent only in their disingenuousness and spin.

I went to a conference in spring 2005 organised by the Oxford Inspires group - obviously they were already so knowledgeable that these political stalwarts of the environmental movement didn't need to go but hey. A young lady from the county council outlined a desire on their part to become a "zero waste county". Which is, of course, pretty much everyone's Elysian ideal I suppose.

On the other hand, there are practicalities to face. What if...

...oil goes to £300 a barrel inside the next decade as many of those same environmental activists claim will happen - at least the ones who fervently believe we are past peak oil?

...we find a technology that allows certain bulk waste to be used to create a local source of energy more cheaply than oil, or its less attractive alternatives such as shale, in a way that is clean and manageable and still gets the most from recycling what can be recycled economically?

Are you all going to thumb your noses at it?

I can understand the political gamesmanship that might make you want to rule a particular option out, an option that we all know has proven controversial almost anywhere it's been tried. Does it mean you rule out incineration specifically and uniquely? What about other mechanisms for getting energy from waste using heat, such as pyrolysis - which, to most people, one suspects, will actually mean the same as "incineration" even if it is subtly different?

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