Au contraire. I don’t come from any political background and I looked very hard at both the Conservative party and the Lib Dems when I was looking at a party to get involved with and came to the conclusions that the Conservative party represents individual freedom and responsibility considerably better than the Lib Dems.

So my instincts are, by most people’s definition, liberal enough, but I just don’t follow the perverted interpretation of the term that seems popular in many Lib Dem circles.

89 The net does give us enormous ability to speak in favour of freedom. I grant the LibDem part of it is pretty small & not particularly conducive to such debates.

If it is impossible to speak honestly in favour of freedom and liberty, then what are we doing now and why are we all wasting our time here?

The fact is that the eco-fascists don’t care a fig about the environment but do care about ending free markets & indeed freedom.

The formerly “Liberal” party’s commitment to “environment, environment, environment” means that it is now impossible for any member to honestly speak in favour of freedom & liberalism. The facts speak for themselves & cannot seriously be disputed.

Had EU emissions permits been auctioned on a 5 yearly basis a huge value could have been realised for the public purse, perhaps allowing regressive taxes like VAT to be replaced completely. Government would not have needed to ascribe a value beforehand. Indeed, the value placed on the atmosphere by member governments in the case of EU emissions permits was… virtually zero. The overwhelming majority have been handed out for free, effectively privatising the atmosphere! Not much judgement there.

The only judgement goverment really needs to make is which aspects of human activity should be subject to tax/user charges/license payments – preferably endeavours that remove value than ones that create it (like productive work). Unfortunately, most governments (and most oppositions – including our own party!) have yet to grasp the myriad socio-economic solutions that flow from understanding that fact.

Your instincts are liberal (or you wouldn’t be curious about us), but making the jump always requires an element of faith and determination, and that’s never the easiest choice.

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The question of apportioning value (inc the free-rider problem) is always insoluble unless you can account for the complete ecology of a system, which is why social breakdown, environmental failure etc are not market failures, but analytic failures of limitation, imperfection or bias either of conception or impact – nor are they absolute, since from no individual point of view can the totality of any system be appreciated.

‘Market’, because it infers the measurement of everything will overcome the problem of limitation, can also be overused rhetorically since it fails to address assumed expectations of bias involved in the selection of any metrics (no list is complete).

Since the idea of the market has become politicised, the different camps have begun fighting over ownership of it and are subtly evolving the meaning of ‘the market’ by differentiating emphases and usage to suit their ends. On the whole I currently find words like ‘arena’ and ‘ecology’ much more helpful as a complimentary form of conceptualisation.

But here we are again – creating arguments out of language, not out of ideas!

“I support individual freedom for its own sake and not only for instrumental/utilitarian reasons (that it produces a better outcome for society”

Yes I do disagree with you on this one. The fact is that we all curtail our freedoms for the benefit of society as a whole. For instance the right to kill each other, have sex without consent etc. These are inherrant abilities of people that we proscribe.

Incidentally this is why I have sever concern about the emphasis of individual rights over the rights of society in human rights legistlation (and yes, I realse the rights of society are expressed but they are MUCH more rarely cited, not least because they are pretty damned hard to assess). Such rights are maybe better considered a property of a society (i.e. we chose what rights we want to allocate people in order to define a strong society) than anything inherrent within people.

As a result you are correct that I take a utilitarian approach; I look for a set of rights that will make for a strong society rather than assuming that promoting indiviudal freedom is necessarily best in any given context.

I am also acutely aware of the power of evolution to mould systems that work well but that we do not understand. This is as true of the way societies evolve as it is of organisms or individual genes. Therefore I am extremely cautious about making change just for changes sake. I guess that may be why I feel more at home with the Tories than with Lib Dems.

On the drugs issue, I take your point about the taxpayer having to pick up the tab for the consequences of irresponsible use – but that is the case with smoking, alcohol etc and we don’t ban those. I suppose there could be a valid conservative argument about not adding to this ‘moral hazard’ problem merely for the sake of philosophical/legal consistency – were it not for the fact that the current policy of prohibition causes so many problems for which society as a whole pays the price (especially crime).

I agree about the importance of school choice as a means of driving up educational standards. It was unfortunate (as I commented on LDV at the time) that Nick disavowed the term ‘vouchers’ during the leadership campaign in an effort to prevent his position being caricatured by Chris Huhne.

But the policy he is now advocating (building on the work already done by David Laws when Ming Campbell was leader) has many of the features of a voucher scheme, notably funding following the pupil rather than being allocated to schools and the concept of ‘free schools’, supply-side liberalisation etc. Whether a voucher is actually used (which isn’t the case in Cameron/Gove’s policy either) is a fairly minor administrative question.

In fact, the Lib Dems and Tories do now have quite similar education policies except that we don’t want the government to involve itself in the minutiae of school discipline/uniforms etc…

But often the reason the problem arises is that is very difficult or impractical to individually define property rights to these things and to purchase them individually (at least in some cases, eg clean air). The inherently collective nature of the air gives rise to negative externalities like pollution in the same way that positive externalities arise because of the difficulty of exercising property rights (eg over basic research).

The question is how to tackle the free rider problem by ascribing some value to inherently collective goods. This can be done in a variety of market-based ways (land taxes, Pigou taxes, carbon trading schemes etc) but there is inescapably a political judgment involved when it comes to quantifying the value.

Some on the Right see environmental externalities as nebulous, value-laden or somehow non-existent rather than ‘real’ economic costs. But as Adair Turner has pointed out, such dismissal flies in the face of price evidence, and in a market economy prices always incorporate information. Houses further away from road noise in cities, suburbs or the countryside sell for higher prices: the price differential is a measure of value destroyed. Build a road through beautiful countryside and house prices nearby collapse. It is bad market economics to refuse to place a value on consumer preferences simply because they are expressed collectively rather than via individual purchase.

In that case it is not a market failure but a failure of our allegedly democratic system. Anybody who doubts this is happening should watch the BBC news any night & see how much of it is devoted to eco-fascist propaganda.

I think you’d be very surprised how many people in this party actually do!

…and as to your own speech in Paisley in 1923:

“The value of land rises as population grows and national necessities increase, not in proportion to the application of capital and labour, but through the development of the community itself. You have a form of value, therefore, which is conveniently called ‘site value,’ entirely independent of buildings and improvements and of other things which non-owners and occupiers have done to increase its value – a source of value created by the community, which the community is entitled to appropriate to itself. …In almost every aspect of our social and industrial problem you are brought back sooner or later to that fundamental fact.”
[Mr. H.H. Asquith, 7th June 1923]

…and again in the delightful Buxton:

“We hold, as we always have held, that, so far as practicable, local and national taxes which are necessary for public purposes should fall on the publicly-created value rather than on that which is the product of individual enterprise and industry. That does not involve a new or additional burden on taxation, but it would produce these two consequences – first of all, that we should cease to be imposing a burden upon successful enterprise and industry; and next, that the land would come more readily and cheaply into the best use for which it is fitted. These two things would be two potent promoters of industry and progress.”
[Mr. H.H. Asquith, 1st June 1923]

…classics of the Liberal Economic Tradition! I still have the wax cylinders smewhere!

What often passes for market failure, like environmental degradation, is simply the result of a failure by government to ascribe any kind of meaningful value to natural resources.

The tax system is key to addressing this of course but, with so many politicians personally benefitting from the status quo (MPs housing subsidies being just the latest example) the myth of market failure and the need for interventionist sticking plaster solutions and/or howls of protest from the private appropriators of public wealth will no doubt continue.

I sometimes get the feeling that Clegg is on the brink of articulating a fiscal agenda that will lead us out of this impasse. We may have a 21st Century People’s Budget in us yet!

Broadly speaking I look for an approach that optimises the average quality of life for a population (albeit that ‘Quality of life’ is, of course, a rather nebulous concept and notoriously hard to measure). Although I take a fairly pragmatic view about how this should be achieved, it is likely to involve handing control down to individuals as much as possible and minimising the state apparatus. I believe that individuals spend their own money much more wisely than the state and so we should endevour, where practical, to enable people to do this (as a result of which I believe in keeping taxation down so money gets spent directly rather than indirectly through the state).

However, we do not start from a blank sheet of paper and so the problem is not always where we want to go as much as how we are going to get there. For instance, I like the ideal of Grammar schools (in terms of pursuing excellence and respecting education); although the system may have problems today there is considerable evidence that in the past it has helped a huge number of kids to realise their potential irrespective of their backgrounds. However, I completely buy into the Willetts/Gove argument that the best way of improving things in the current context would not be to build more Grammar schools but to put in place a system that can be optimised by the “invisible hand” of market pressures.

Such changes, combined with a school voucher system, seems like a very solid approach and it staggers me that during the leadership campaign Clegg was hounded into saying that he didn’t support such a scheme. It is hard to square with his desire to be seen as an economic liberal.

Realities on the ground also have an influence. For instance, I would also love to see a country in which drug use was legalised (although I am horribly boring and would abstain myself). However, under the correct conditions it is not hard to understand the chaos that would ensue (and not least because people are used to the state underwriting their activities, so there would be little incentive to use drugs responsibly because the taxpayer would be expected to stump up for every individual that goes off the rails), so in practical terms I would be against such easing of the rules.

I could go on, but I fear I would start to bore most readers (who are probably dozing gently above their coffee already).