That is not the point. The point is, whether it is facilitated by a town square meeting or 50 million internet connections, what you are suggesting is not a great deal different from the direct democracy of the Greek city states. And that it remains a tyranny.

The internet is a great liberator. Handled correctly it will break down national borders, render governments impotent and ultimately unnecessary. If I thought it was to be used to create the ultimate form of a populist tyranny I’d get that time machine and go back and try and ensure that Mr & Mrs Berners-Lee senior never met and produced young Timmy.

You can’t even get 2 fanatical Man U supporters to agree on who is their greatest player, Cantona, Bestie, Giggs etc. That doesn’t stop them from agreeing that Man U are the greatest football club on the planet. V4Y looks for common ground and doesn’t attempt to achieve the impossible. I’ve merely pointed out that the governments we’ve had and the one we might get aren’t capable of dealing with the social and economic issues that need to be addressed.

Cincinnatus may have been a citizen of a city state that had militant plebians, but he didn’t let that stop him from doing the right thing. It would be great if his example was regularly used as a yardstick to raise current standards in public life. His incredibly decent life may have ended over 2,000 years ago, but you’ve already allowed that the era of an idealist should not be a barrier to its current relevance.

But the point is, if you think everyone should be involved in their own governance, that’s fine. But you don’t, you want a majoritarian system in which the will of that majority trumps any other opinion however sincerely held or badly it affects their lives. If you think everyone should have “self-governance” and freedom, then promote it:

An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal. • Emile Faguet (1847-1916)

I apologise for my taunt about the LibDems not being the new kids on the block. You’re right that good ideas don’t have to be brand new. Thing is, there’s never been ANYTHING remotely like the Internet so suggesting that the Ancient Greeks with their men-only voting system (not the slaves of course) is relevant is ludicrous – it’s nice to be educated, but most people in this country don’t have a clue who Aristotle is and would erroneously guess that he was the guy who said You Reeker.

if you want to go all archaic on me, I’ll slap you back with Cincinnatus – now there was a guy who knew what dignity, integrity and public service were all about.

For example this – “The main idea is that we’re all entitled to have our own opinion on everything – it’s a fundamental freedom to be able to agree to disagree.” sounds lovely, but in actual fact direct democracy does not do that does it, it binds the minority disagreers to the decision of the majority agreers.

It is another form of one group ruling over the rest. The only difference being it will be a slightly different group doing so on each issue. It is certainly not a route to freedom. Of course, your taunt that the Lib Dems are not a new idea since they’ve been around for 200 years could be countered that direct democracy has been around since Aristotle!

Ideas need not be new to be “change” centuries after they were first being touted. They just might have been missed or dissed the first time around.

I don’t know if you actually looked at the http://www.VOTEFORYOURSELF.org.uk website, but if you had then you would have found that the campaign is on one issue only – to introduce new legislation to empower the public to engage directly in decision making. The precedent for this is basically beyond the need for provenance – the British people like to vote on things that interest them and the technology is also proven.

Where you get the idea that being 1/50 millionth of the decision making collective means that I, or anyone else, can “rule” over another person, neighbour or not, is quite a stretch. Still, as you’re capable of proposing Individualist Anarchism and claim that it’s not as pie-in-the-sky as V4Y, yo seem to be a person who likes to think after the debate.

Have the last word if you like, but in your case please DON’T VOTE FOR YOURSELF.

Direct democracy is even more pie-in-the-sky than my Individualist Anarchism appears to most on here. Thanks, but no thanks.

“Vote for Yourself” is a nice strapline, but what it means to me, and what it should mean, is that I am stating that I am a sovereign individual and do not need to be ruled, either by 646 representatives or by 50,000,000 in a direct democracy, and nor do I have any right to rule over anyone else, as part of a tyranny of the majority.

Why do *you* think you have a right to rule over your neighbour, David?

Less impressive is his inability to spot the fundamental flaw in the LibDems attempts to be the “new politics” specifically the lack of newness – you are an organisation that is at least 200 years old. Just because you have not been in government (apart from some brief and minor supporting roles) for about 100 years does not give you some DIVINE RIGHT to be “next”. By the way, the manifesto you recently produced is laughable.

Correct, we do need “new politics”, BUT IT ISN’T YOU. If you want something new check out http://www.v4y.org.uk

Don’t vote for me, don’t vote for them, VOTE FOR YOURSELF!

However, this was a case of a sale that need not have been made. The competition commission were targeting the wrong monopoly. There was no need for the break-up of BAA/Ferrovial, just that we should have collected the publicly created economic rent embodied in landing slots.

I fail to see where I mention Friedman in any of my analysis. Nor can I understand why you are raising the spectre of the American boogieman in this forum. (Oh no. Wait. I can!).

Friedman was quite comfortable with the manipulation of the money supply, which hardly puts him on the side of the angels when one notes the correlation between broad money expansion and asset prices. The money supply was increasing by double digits in the UK and the US during the last decade, as were house prices. If Mikeconomics can explain that away as coincidence do please crack on.

As for your reference to ” the US, which wields “Buy American” and self-beneficial free trade with great cynicism”, I hardly see how pointing the finger at bad practice across the pond justifies bad practice at home. If Obama wants to flirt with protectionism then that’s for the Americans to worry about; Roosevelt showed how effective that was with his decade-long failure to lift the US out of recession. I’d rather the UK remained open and prosperous, and that politicians didn’t interfere with citizens choices about whom they cooperate with and how they dispose of their property.

Nonetheless, there are one or two critics who hold that Friedman may have been a “monetarist-Keynsian” – i.e. that all he had abandoned of Keynesianism was that it should be fiscal mechanisms that injected demand and instead held that it was better that monetary mechanisms that should do so.

But assuming you don’t accept the idea of a “Keynsian-monetarist” surely the main point about monetarism was tight *control* of money supply, whereas the events leading up to and around 2001-2 were anything but tight control of the money supply. Indeed we were barely even conscious of monetary aggregates, and the NuLab policy of targeting inflation instead of money supply (based on a fundamentally flawed belief that they are not, in fact, one and the same) had actually killed it off anyway.

So how one can possibly say that the loose stool money policy of 2001-2, which in this country at least was at least as much about securing re-election for a political party rather than whether it was good for us, was based on any policy promoted by Friedman is beyond me.

Nonetheless, I am not a Friedmanite, so I don’t owe him anything by way of defence.

But even if central banks and politicians were entirely blameless for the growth in credit (which they were not), then a failure to react to that growth in credit was most definitely their fault. M4 has been rising more or less exponentially compared with other economic indicators for a decade. If *I* was aware of that, unschooled, uninfluential and not in touch with the great and the good, then so too should have been the banking and treasury authorities. Indeed of course the figures continue to be produced by those authorities, so one can only conclude that they don’t read their own output, or they didn’t care, or they couldn’t do anything.

Which was it I wonder? Since it assisted them politically at the time, and all the while sensible economics pundits (and yes I definitely do include the Austrians in that) were calling time on the inflationary profligacy, one can only assume the second – they didn’t care.

Would Eddie George have called himself a Friedman monetarist?

Yes, the commercial banking interests lent with gusto – and why not, that is how they make their money, but to whom did they look for a signal to continue lending even when asset prices were falling? The central banks. And in the case of the UK, notwithstanding the supposedly independent Monetary Policy Committee, that signal, according to Lord George, came from the underlings of the great clunking fist himself in Whitehall.

I was writing about this three and four years ago now, this is not a post hoc analysis.

If people are only just realising that bankers can “turn the world upside down” vindicating what monetary reformers for two centuries have been saying – from Jefferson’s objections to a central bank, M A Rothschild’s claim that if he can create a nation’s credit he cares not who makes its laws, or our own, liberal Josiah Stamp’s 1930s warning that bankers have this power, then they are, literally, only just waking up to this C19th anarchist-left critique.

Just at the very moment where what true free traders have been saying for two centuries becomes blindingly obvious to all you all want to dismiss then as anachronistic. They could hardly be more relevant today.

The state maintains the money system through a set of commercial interests to whose ranks it maintains the barriers, creating huge economic rent in the banking sector, guaranteeing their tinkering around the money that appears to have the state’s backing on it, and therefore having to bail them out when it comes down to it.

More proximately, the current problem has been caused by loose monetary policy in 2001-2 at the end of the dot.com boom on both sides of the Atlantic.

You don’t have to believe me. The late Eddie George said so, to the Treasury Select Committee, in February 2007, who went on completely to ignore the importance of what he had said. That monetary policy is effected by private interests is the way it was set up – to benefit those private interests. Who initiated the start up of the Federal Reserve system? Cui bono?

That people think this supreme example of crony capitalism – one may even suggest Fascism in the sense that an ostensibly state function is sub-contracted to private interests but guaranteed by the public – equates to “free markets” is astonishing.

The Austrians have been predicting exactly this sort of crash for years.

That’s exactly the point, Mike. The bankers can only turn the whole world upside down because they are enabled – by government – to create credit bubbles. And it is the fact that the state supports the oligopoly that enables them to call on state support. The fac that “those bankers were pleased to call public money to the rescue” and that is it was duly handed over proves that the so-called “free market” is in fact still marred by government intervention. As you will undoubtedy recall, Adam Smith (who didn’t live in the 19th Century either) was mainly concerned with the abiligy of companies to extract favours from government at the expense of the general public. Plus ca change!

I don’t see how your earlier suggestion that the UK should “Not leav[e] “Made in Britain” or “Buy British” to the rightists and never mind the accusations of protectionism coming from free-trade zealots” and that we should “Give incentives for more national and regional value added… [and] Keep… as many decision centres as possible in the UK” is compatible with your statement that you “agree that “national interest”” it is best served by keeping our economy as open as possible.”

I think within Lib Dem circles Geoff Payne refers to the Vice Chair of the Federal Conference Committee, whereas Geoffrey Payne refers to the secretary of Hackney Liberal Democrats. I may be mistaken but I think that Geoffrey has said before that he is not Geoff. Okay, they were probably both Christened Geoffrey and may both be Geoff to their mates, but it’s important to distinguish between them. Unless I’ve got the totally wrong end of the stick, of course.

Geoffrey: “the internet exchanges we have and which you seem paranoid about”

Is Jock paranoid about internet exchanges. He always seems willing to engage. Remember the new don’t-get-personal policy!!

Robert C: “The fact is that no other nation in the world avoids intervening in the market and some commentators here seem to be ignoring this as a result of doctrinally-induced fact blindness.” Are you saying that non-intervention is clearly flawed because it is not practiced anywhere, Robert? I’m glad you were not involved in the arguments about female suffrage or parliamentary democracy! Change has to begin somewhere.

Indeed, your dismissal of the suggestion that “free market economies do not suffer booms and busts” is belied by your statement that “no other nation in the world avoids intervening in the market”. We don’t have free market economics; we have a government monopoly provision of the medium of exchange (money) which is continually manipulated by politicians (keeping interest rates low) to create booms during which they can spend like drunks and convince us all they are geniuses whom we should thank, and then disclaim all responsibility when the boom they made turns to bust. As Jock notes, the “banking oligopoly” are their willing accomplices in this, but it is the government that makes it possible.

However, most of this was about free trade rather than intervention in the domestic economy. You suggest that foreign direct investment leaves the UK “relegated to a bit part at the end of the value chain”, but the bit that the UK plays is in the high-value-added end. We make the engines on aircraft! You may wish to look at reports by EDF, the manufacturers association, on this issue. Global supply chains are extremely valuable to the UK, which is why (at least until the recession) UK manufacturing had been producing more year on year for a decade despite (actually, because of) this investment.

“being more open than other countries to foreign acquisitions, we are therefore more open to destruction of value”. We are second in FDI to the United States, still the world’s largest economy. We are also a big exporter of investment – we buy companies across the world. I cannot understand the logic behind the suggestion that it is okay for a company based in Edinburgh to buy up one based in Manchester, but it is not okay if the company is based in Sao Paolo.

If we do “still have a “national interest”” it is best served by keeping our economy as open as possible.