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In all the talk about cannabis and the oft repeated but rarely quantified assertions that today's drug is a different thing to that which our national leaders will have encountered in their heady youthful days when they clearly had a disregard for the law ill-befitting people who now want to tell us how to live our lives Matthew Norman in the Independent today relates his experience of having hallucinations on modern "skunk". Well don't believe it, or at least don't take it as definitive proof of the aforementioned unquantified assertion.

In the general spirit of confession that seems to be pervading this issue at the moment, I just want to say that the one and only time I have experienced any kind of hallucinogenic effect off cannabis was 22 years ago when I first tried the drug. After my first joint a friend came to take us to the pub. He was of a pale complexion and very white-blond hair. And in the car, in the dark, with street lights flashing overhead and listening to mid-eighties electro-dance music I became convinced that I was being kidnapped by a silvery skinned robotic alien! I didn't particularly enjoy that night, even once we got to the pub, but like any eighteen year old getting blind drunk I worked my way through it and tried again!

I've only really got back into the occasional spliff over the past couple of years - sometimes, for periods taking it quite a lot (though not, thanks to Thames Valley Police's zealous enforcement actions against local suppliers, at all this year). Yes, some of it feels stronger than others, but what it amounts to is similar to the difference between small beer and spirits in alcohol terms. You "feel" the "buzz" sooner. But I also find that the body has a self-regulating mechanism with cannabis. When the THC receptors are sated, or some such scientific explanation, you literally cannot smoke any more and I have had occasions when I have put out a half smoked reefer when that happens.

It seems to me a false differentiation to make, as Matthew Norman suggests, to attempt to categorize different strains as virtually different drugs. It would be far safer, and far better, to know the strength of what you are buying or taking before you do so, for sure. But just as with alcohol, there are times when you would like to have a quick snifter to take the edge off the stresses of the day, and other times when you would like to share a few lighter spliffs in company as with a few pints in the pub.

But in my experience, the most psycho-active cannabis I ever tried was twenty two years ago. Yes, as David Cameron related his experiences the other day, today's stuff sometimes smells stronger. But I have also noticed that that appears to be when the weed is fresh and slightly damp and as it dries properly that seems to diminish. Of far greater importance in terms of the harm it can do to you is the fact that more recently unscrupulous growers and dealers have been treating their cannabis with other substances, including, most dangerously, some kind of silicon spray to make it heavier and make more money out of a smaller quantity. This is an inevitable function of prohibition, and reclassification can only make this worse, and the effects on everyone involved more unpredictable and dangerous.

Transform has shown that despite reclassification to class C, use of the drug has continued a long term pattern of decline, not the unfettered growth the moral panic brigade would have you believe. Do not fall for it all. This is a politically motivated panic and one that does great discredit to the supposed intelligence of our "leaders".

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, liberty

I was pleasantly surprised today to see that on the southern regional slot on the Politics Show on BBC1 they had an article looking at how the Lib Dems would introduce Land Value Tax - portraying it indeed as a "silver bullet" (Paul, and the BBC, have a great deal more confidence than I have in this respect!). Cllr Paul Bizzell of Vale of White Horse, where they carried out a paper based exercise nearly two years ago now into how it would affect an area of about a ward to the west of Oxford city, was explaining it, and did quite a good job - as he should!

County Council leader, Conservative Keith Mitchell was the "anti-LVT" interviewee, castigating it as a "left wing tax" that is designed to blight our beautiful country and to redistribute wealth - something, he said, that "we are not all in agreement with". So I've fired off a nice letter to Kaiser Keith:

Keith,

Much as I respect your views I think you should perhaps investigate the history of Land Value Tax's supporters:

Adam Smith:

"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. ...Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.

"Ground rents seem in this respect a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. ...Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign. ...Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the stae should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds towards the support of that government."

Milton Friedman:

"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise -- and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."

William F Buckley:

"It's mostly because I'm beaten down by my right-wing theorists and intellectual friends. They always find something wrong with the Single-Tax idea. What I'm talking about Mr. Lamb is Henry George who said there is infinite capacity to increase capital and to increase labor, but none to increase land, and since wealth is a function of how they play against each other, land should be thought of as common property. The effect of this would be that if you have a parking lot and the Empire State Building next to it, the tax on the parking lot should be the same as the tax on the Empire State Building, because you shouldn't encourage land speculation. Anyway I've run into tons of situations were I think the Single-Tax theory would be applicable. We should remember also this about Henry George, he was sort of co-opted by the socialists in the 20s and the 30s, but he was not one at all. Alfred J. Nock's book on him makes that plain. Plus, also, he believes in only that tax. He believes in zero income tax."

And not least that greatest son of Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill (albeit a Liberal at the time):

"I have made speeches by the yard on the subject of land value taxation, and you know what a supporter I am of that policy.

"It is quite true that the land monopoly is not the only monopoly which exists, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all forms of monopoly.

"Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of our monopolist opponents to prove that other forms of property and increment are exactly the same, and are similar in all respects to the unearned increment in land."

Henry George was himself no socialist. Remember that the aim of us "single taxers" is to abolish all taxes on incomes, capital, profit that arise from human effort and hard work. It is unashamedly classically liberal and owes far more to the work of people whom the "right", and especially the libertarian right, would now look on as their predecessors than the "left" would - people like John Locke, David Ricardo, Malthus.

It is possibly a common fate of a good idea that it gets rubbished by all-comers who don't understand it. Georgists are castigated by the "right" as dangerous socialists, even communists, and by the left as loony neo-liberals. We must be doing something right!

It's worth noting that one of the biggest current proponents of LVT in print, Fred Harrison, has been published on it by the IEA, hardly some left-wing think tank. Though I suppose within your own party it is the looney left Bow Group who are promoting the idea, after a fashion.

Sincerely,

Jock

Conference is coming, and I'll have an opportunity on Saturday evening to share a platform with Vince Cable and James Graham at the ALTER fringe event, entitled "Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n, for anyone interested - note the change of venue from the conference program). My task is to set out some more details of the book of essays we propose to publish in time for the Autumn Conference, entitled "The Liberal Alternative". And since I shall also be seeing Vince tomorrow evening at the Oxford East constituency dinner, I thought I ought to prepare what I am going to say on Saturday so I can let him have a copy tomorrow night. So here goes with a first draft...

Tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty!

By the next time most of us get together again at Bournemouth in September we will have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service and the centenary of the legislation that gave us the first Old Age Pension. Both of course were the triumph of political economists steeped in a tradition of liberal economics and concern for the least well off in society.

So we've decided that for our big project for the year, and to prepare for next year's centenary of David Lloyd-George's great 1909 People's Budget, we're going to publish a book of essays investigating some of the problems they faced both at the turn of the last century and in the widespread domestic poverty after World War Two that Beveridge sought to address through his "war on the five wants".

We want to show that despite throwing ever increasing resources at tackling the unequal outcomes of our economic system, successive socialist and conservative governments have completely failed to address the causes of inequality that Lloyd-George, drawing on that long tradition started to attempt in that budget.

And we want to persuade you, and the party more widely, that that tradition, never really given the chance to show its potential since then - a whole century ago, is just as relevant today. That it remains a precondition to creating an economically and therefore socially equitable society.

Prevention, in economics as much as in health, is always better than trying to cure or treat the symptoms once a malaise has taken hold. For as the cures become ever more expensive, and consume ever more of our productivity, so they also become steadily less liberal.

We are more, not less, dependent on the decisions of politicians where they deliver monopolistic public services. And the more of our labour they appropriate to pay for those services the less we are able to make our own choices anyway.

Talking of "choice", I know that some of us seem instinctively to shy away from choice, because we feel that it excludes the least well off. But I'll bet we all deep down believe that choice, unlimited choice, would be great if only we could ensure everyone was able to afford to participate in such a market place.

Well that's what we want to show you can happen when we address the central inequities of the economic system we have inherited. Taxing income and productive investment slows the creation of wealth for all of us. Failing properly to tax land allows those who happen to own or have inherited the best locations to absorb much of the value of our labour and productive investment, and especially the labour of the poorest. The wealthiest grow fabulously rich off the back of the labourer through land. And even, in this era of widespread home ownership, as it's called, many benefit unfairly, while paying, through their other taxes, for the attempts to relieve the poverty this system sustains!

If we took that tax shift seriously, our economy could be as much as a third bigger, and distribute that extra wealth more equitably according to what we put into it - our work and our savings. We would be better able to compete with the newly emerging economies of the world without retreating into hiding behind protectionism. We would be able to allow people more choice over their lives and the services that sustain them, whether that be health and education, housing, or basic needs like food.

I want to end with a brief quote from Herbert Spencer, who, writing in 1851 said:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

I suggest that 150 years later, we are still tinkering with laws, often ever more coercive laws to try and reach that nirvana of the "greatest happiness" through government intervention. We take more from everyone in the process and limit everyone's ability to decide for themselves. Addressing the central causes of our economic inequity has not been tried since 1909. 2009 is high time we put this, left, right and centre at the forefront of the new liberal political economy for the next century.

---

So, having read roughly what I'm going to say, you can now come along to theALTER fringe and hear Vince Cable (who will I hope by then have been formally adopted along with Nick Clegg as an ALTER Vice-President!) and James Graham as well!

"Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n - note the change of venue from the conference
program)