So I think that vastly reduces the problem to those who would be much more obviously “deserving cases” -people who are penurous through no fault of their own. This is a much better. “target” for private charity.

But there are also identifiable economic incentives to help other voluntarily. Even when they have no direct connection with you. You may feel, as a local community acting voluntarily together, to set up a little fund to pay for schooling for the poorest kids because they damage the enjoyment of your neighbourhood if they turn feral.

I think there are lots of options that do not involve coercsion and the threat of violence.

Combine that with insurance based schemes and pension schemes and you have a workable solution; a big advantage to a CBI is it completely removes the benefits trap that the poorest fall into, you never lose it, so there’s an incentive to take and do what work you can, even if it’s only a few hours a week, and it also eliminates most of the black cash only economy, as it’s no longer necessary to avoid official oversight.

Long term pipe dreams, which is basically what we’re talking about in the whole thread–gotta love ‘em.

(Reading the above para over, I see it could be read as a snarky, I might even say Huntbachian attack. It’s not meant that way. I’m genuinely interested to know what you think.)

Thatcher-Reagan types *said* that the state was a bad thing because it *prevented* big business operating freely. Mutualists and many other libertarians, espcially historically, have believed that teh state is a bad thing because it *protects big business*. I believe the evidence is overwhelmingly on my side, including the evidence of the results of the “Thatcher-Reagan” flirtation with what they called “libertarianism” which was nothing of the sort in reality.

2. I’m sorry Matthew does not seem to understand the simple quotation I gave him as it sums up the Mutualist creed quite well and its historical antecedents.

3. In what way is Proudhon clear and forthright? Oh, it’s easy to take three words and say he is clear “property is robbery”, but even the work that comes from is quite a difficult read, if relatively short. In fact it’s a devastating critique of the state’s claims, in the context of revolutionary France, as to its role, and concludes that the state is a big destructive contradiction bound up with nice words – “Equality, Liberty, Property” – that are, in at least two of their cases, mutually exclusive. The state therefore is a waste of space, and “society” – the social power of our voluntary associations one with another – against which the state actually inevitably acts is the natural human-scale mechanism for support, happiness and so on in a *free* market.

4. I try and find a decent quote for you precisely because you basically ignore my own words and felt that someone with some acknowledged credibility might serve you better if it enunciates what it is I believe. Now you say I’m hiding behind quotes to mask my innate Thatcherism. It is clearrly a waste of time. You have made up your mind and you’re not budging, whatever I say or write. Or perhaps are incapable of doing so.

Gandhi seems to have pretty well got it, at the first attempt. I don’t think there’s anything needing correcting there.

I don’t need to indulge you with constant attacks on “big business”. The mutualist creed is that the abusive economic and social ppower of “big business” is because of the sate – that it is a problem subsidiary to the state. Get rid of the state, or at least so radically reform it that it would be beyond your statist understanding of its proper roles, and the problem of the abusive power of big business would disappear, workers would be the ones that took all, or at least the very great majority of, the returns from production, lifting workers out of dependency and pulling down capitalists from their privileged position to the extent that the hierarchical nature of big business would be largely overthrown as the economnic power of workers would be sufficient to give them co-operative controlling influence in economic life – way beyond what the state will ever be capable of through the “redistribution” cop-out.

Bigness is itself not a problem. A co-operative of fifty thousand empowered workers, such as Mondragon in Spain, is not abusive, coercive capitalism. The state and the capitalist both create, entrench and protect hierarchical coercive structures that impose on those (vast majority) near the bottom of the hierarchy.

In what dream world is *any* of this “right wing”? GO on. Tell me, Matthew. If you can’t tell me what your problem is with it I can’t help you to understand it. But, from our conversations, it seems you do not want to understand, but instead have your blinkers on about “libertarians” and nothing will move you. The intransigence demeans you, Matthew.

That’s an interesting choice, sticking my neck out here…

Mutualists are supposed to believe that a free market would not result in large land/property accumulation, that these effects are caused by State manipulation/privilege; their position is that property consists of your possessions: the things you are personally actively using (so buy-to-let is not supposed to happen).

The term “free market” has been wrongly used to describe the Thatcher/Reagan position, but they are capitalists (IE: capital accumulation and exploitationists), NOT free marketers in the sense understood by a mutualist/voluntarist/classical liberal etc. They are happy to leave the controls which cause capital accumulation. (Side point: if Thatcher had implemented Hayek’s ideas – that she claimed to hold to – rather than Friedman, this might not be the case at all!)

Jock describes himself as a geo-mutualist or geo-libertarian, which perhaps means mutualist who favours Land Value Tax (which is supposed to prevent land accumulation). This appears to me as a far left position motivated by a very strong desire to end land accumulation and rent exploitation (by implication); I assume he takes this position, because either a) he doesn’t have 100% confidence in the claims that mutualists make for land accumulation in a free market, or b) he sees LVT as a palliative or stop-gap in the meantime.

Hopefully JC will correct me because I have not read Henry George (LVT man) and as I say, don’t know much about mutualism.

“The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, ‘This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.’ Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these multiply, and soon the people . . . will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birth-right; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, ‘So perish idlers and vagrants.’”

which says almost what I have been saying, and for which both Jock and Sara, and others of their like such as Charlotte Gore, have accused me variously of being “odd” or “polluting” or not being really human, or other such insults, and definitely not being any kind of liberal, for saying. If people like Jock could be as forthright in their language on this issue as Proudhon was, I’d be very happy with them. But they are not. They are much more forthright when spouting out the “evil gummint” stuff that I could just as well get from Sarah Palin and other extreme right-wing Americans.

As for the article you link to, well if Jock was really so keen on this sort of stuff he wouldn’t be so keen on cozying-up to vulgar libertarianism in the way he does. He might actually think of regarding me as an ally against it, rather than an enemy who opposes him because he is in coalition with it.

Sara Scarlett may have some “sophisticated understanding” but her article looked to me like typical right-wing rubbish dressed up as leftism. Just like David Cameron – they hit the easy targets and let big business of the hook. In David Cameron’s case it’s because he’s a clueless millionaire and his organisation is financed by big business, in Sara Scarlett’s case, well I don’t know her background and I don’t know who funds this organisation she is “Director” of.

I don’t regard the “Liberal” party which merged with the SDP to have been liberal, FYI. I mention the current Liberal Party because they take some real principled liberal positions: they are flatly opposed to the bank bailouts, EG. Vince “Jesus” Cable take note.

It seems to me that in calling for a coalition with the Co-op… Sara has demonstrated a rather more sophisticated understanding than you give her credit for.

If you won’t read any lofty tomes, then at least read some of this: Wikipedia :: Mutualism
…I’m sure it doesn’t fairly represent Jock’s position, but it will give you an idea if you haven’t investigated mutualism at all. I can’t call myself a mutualist (for now anyway, due mainly to ignorance?) but being against “parasitism” – by rich or poor – has always been central to my thinking also.

I am well aware that a party calling itself “The Liberal Party” exists. As a member of the old Liberal Party who voted against merger with the SDP, I knew well some of its founder members. I know that quite a big reason many of them didn’t join the merged party is because they disliked the gung-ho free-marketeerism that was building up in the SDP, and didn’t feel that’s what liberalism was about. Note for example, the Leader’s statement or “Dead Parrot” document, where Robert Maclennan left it to a couple of young SDP keenies, 1980s Sara Scarlett types full of the latest trendy free market ideology (then a bit more fresh than today), to write the SDP bit. Its extreme free market line, now just the sort of thing “Liberal Vision” is pushing, put a lot of Liberal Party members off joining and almost wrecked the new party. The media were always more in support of the SDP and less in support of the Liberal Party partly because the SDP was more supportive of the conventional pro-business ideology.

So anyone who puts across the line now that in the merger it was the Liberal Party which was mad keen extreme free market, and the SDP was not, is either ignorant or lying.

Regarding reading from Jock’s reading list, well. All I am asking him to do is answer some simple little questions, and all he ever does in reply is not answer them but instead blather on saying things like “read classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner”. Well, perhaps he ought to try canvassing a council estate and see where gets if his answer to any question is “go away and read classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner”. I’ve come to the conclusion that the guy’s a flake, to use an Americanism, so his sort of language.

I certainly agree that the State and corporations are one-and-the-same, as far as I’m concerned this has been the case ever since the first businesses were “incorporated” in Britain. The unjustified privilege of incorporation (which is what it is) was removed once or twice afterwards since those corporations tended to go bust and cause much harm in the process. Ultimately, they got their way and so followed their long and proud tradition of utterly screwing the public.

The Liberal Party still exists, and is almost liberal. Not quite though really, there really hasn’t been a significant liberal movement in this country for 100+ years.

I do find it incredible that a self-proclaimed liberal seems oblivious to the 2-dimensional nature of politics (left-right/authoritarian-libertarian).

Yes Reagan and Thatcher were more right-wing than they were liberal, I can’t speak for Sara, but my experience of Mark Littlewood (Liberal Vision) is that he sits somewhere between the liberal and “neo-liberal” Thatcherite position.

As for Jock, well Matthew, I think you need to stop battering him and start reading some of the things he suggests; in the meantime I’m afraid you are making a fool of yourself.

Matthew,
I agree that it does strike a note of dissonance that an arch-libertarian would depend so strongly on the authority of references rather than the clarity of logic alone, but I put that down to personal style.

However, reacting to the opponents of our partys’ black-and-white arguments and drawing guilt by association with them is a trap which is all too easy to fall into.

We’ve already established that everybody here does agree to some extent that it is more a matter of degree than one of absolutes, so lets hang on to the constructive side of the contributions and be a bit less negative about what we don’t want and a bit more positive about what we do want. We know we don’t want Tory or Labour in government or we wouldn’t be here, so let’s take it as a given that we want something different.

I for one think it is a fallacy for the primary measure of welfare to be as a proportion of the economy, since this directs our attention towards the accountants and bureaucrats rather than the people and patients, thereby making everyone unhappy.

However much welfare we decide we need it will always be unaffordable if we spend all day counting the cost and none of it reaping the rewards. And if we do we just create a circular argument going back and forth at crossed purposes.

It is possible to have more better services and pay less both in nominal terms and as a proportion of the total – this is politics, and we must create that choice. If we don’t then what is the point of our party?

I have no idea what is the best final outcome between state, private, mutual and mixed options, but I do know we need to have an opportunity to find the correct balance and that this requires us to allow for some flexibility according to conditions.

Which brings me back to the Coop party’s political strategy – they currently have no flexibility in their relationship with Labour, and it would be massively positive for the national politics if they found some.

Niklas,
I’ll buy you that drink later.

So this is why “The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner” is not an answer to “why will what you propose – cutting taxation and welfare – not lead to what it already has led to when tried in a less extreme form than you propose?”. If I can’t even see an understanding of the point I am making, it gives me little confidence that they have thought these things through. If I am just insulted for raising these points, well, I am afraid the conclusion I will draw is that these people aren’t real liberals, because to me at the heart of real liberalism is the ability to be self-critical, and to be able to look at a political position from a viewpoint other than one’s own, and to accept that free debate in which all arguments are put forward is the way to establish how we should proceed.

My line initially with Sara is not that I oppose co-operatives, because I don’t. It was just to ask how are we going to move towards having more of them when what we had of them already has dwindled. The “private enterprise is best” ideology, which Sara and the group she is associated with push, has led to the end of institutions like Building Societies which once were co-operative – most have been converted to plcs. In the free market, which Sara and her group so value and make no criticisms of, co-operative and friendly societies are available and selling their services, but the consumer has not tended to favour them. Is it or is it not against Sara’s ideology to force the consumer to use them?

Sara may say she is not on anyone’s payroll. Well, maybe. But she seems pretty thoroughly to have absorbed the dominant political ideology of the past 30 years in a very uncritical way. The lines she is giving about the evil state, and the lack also of balancing criticism of big business and its domination of people’s lives (which to me is as much the cause of the soul being ripped out of working class communities as anything done by the state) suggests to me she is a child of her times. She has been fooled into thinking she is a radical free-thinker, when she is just repeating tired old political orthodoxy in the manner of David Cameron. There’s a superficial liberal dressing to it, but no real understanding of how the poor or even the average live, so only the flakiest of solutions, and you feel all along it’s really just “leave it to the big businessman, he knows best”.

So if I could really see that this was the driving factor of people like Jock and Scarlett, I’d be with them. So far as I can see, they are using much the same sort of language as the supporters of big business arguing why they should be left free to become very, very rich, and stuff the rest of us. The recent economic collapse has shown how empty those people were – much of what they called “wealth creation” was just sitting in the right place at the right time with the right contacts, not the work of real geniuses who could not be replaced by millions of others. Their lies have been exposed, the people of this country are angry and in many cases in really miserable situations, since it is the innocent who have suffered through things such as loss of jobs. But along come these economic right-wingers like Jock and Sara, repeating the old Thatcherite/Reaganite lines that the main political issue of today is the state and its services. Can you see why I am angry that what I believe could be the chance of our party, he party I have worked for for 30 years, is being wrecked because it has to keep appeasing the economic right-wingers in it? There aren’t many of these people, but they seem to be more interested in pushing the debate their way than working to get the party elected, and they are trying hard to appear more influential than they really are, and have been working to hijack the word “liberal” to mean their sort of politics – as shown by someone using the name “Gandhi”.

Jock is playing his usual game of blathering along trying to look very clever by quoting obscure 19th century Americans, but not actually giving straight answers to the very simple points I have raised here and raise continually in my discussions with him and his fellow “libertarians”. A lot has changed since the 19th century. Private enterprise was then mainly small scale, so it could be put as liberating against the power of the state – which then would be supposed to comprise not just the Crown, but also the established church and the aristocracy. In short, our ancestors recognised in a way that modern “libertarians” do not, that the division between what they call “state” and non-state is artificial. It would be better to consider the government and the big corporations as part of one thing. In the 19th century too, particularly in the USA where there was still a western frontier, one could still suppose that many resources were essentially infinite, so the problem of being squeezed out of liberty because one owned nothing was less – simply become a pioneer and go into those virgin lands. Hence too the contempt for those who did not do such things, that mentality explains very much why the economic right is so strong in the USA. I don’t know if Jock is American, but he seems to be very much influenced by American thinking, hence his writing is full of Americanisms (note, for example, his spelling of “labour”). A lot of what he says IS the sort of language used by the US extreme right, Reaganists, supporters of Sarah Palin and the like. It seems to me therefore to be hardly unfair to ask him to disambiguate himself from those.

On reflection … yes you’re right I guess!