What do we believe?

For many of us, naturally coming from the ALTER campaign group, the visible policy we "believe in" is Land Value Tax. The various land taxes, of which LVT formed part of several, proposed by Lloyd-George in his People's Budget, were the things he had to sacrifice to gain the eventual grudging approval of the vested interests in the House of Lords. And we believe that his inability to implement them and subsequent governments' failures to implement them have left a fundamental inequity in society that continues to give us social and economic problems today.

If you're not already convinced about the merits of Land Value Tax, or even if you already think it's a good idea but don't quite know why or how it might affect far reaching areas of public policy, we hope these pages will convince you.

Monopoly

But it's what causes that fundamental inequity that lies behind the zealous pursuit of Land Value Tax. Churchill went on relentlessly about it. He exclaimed that it was the defining difference between Socialists (of which that government were often accused by the Tories) and Liberals: "Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly." And he went on to explain eloquently the monopoly the 1909 budget was trying to deal with:

"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 other forms of monopoly. It is quite true that unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit which individuals are able to secure; but it is the principal form of unearned increment, derived from processes, which are not merely not beneficial, but which are positively detrimental to the general public."

But it goes further still. Why is the land monopoly so crucial to human well being? Churchill goes on: "Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position—land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions." And in this he is drawing on the most ancient of liberal thinking. Going right back to Locke in the political realm, but also back to the very foundations of the Judeo Christian and Muslim faiths is the notion that we all, by dint simply of being born onto a planet whose resources are finite and has to support us all, have a common right of access to the common wealth of that planet - somewhere to live, some means of keeping ourselves alive.

Free Trade

Yet we still have to go one step further to find the "ideology" that leads to that abhorrence of monopoly. The argument over how best to improve the conditions of the poor for the forty years or so prior to the People's Budget centered around the debate between Protectionist and Free Trade policies. It was pretty well unanimously agreed amongst Liberals (and subsequently for a while Labour politicians such as Phillip Snowden) that Free Trade was the way to improve the lot of the worker and that Protection always entrenched privilege in the hands of the already powerful.

Free Trade of course today sometimes has awkward connotations. We think of Seattle WTO riots, of GATS agreements that, we are told, will mean us surrendering our education system to "Johnny foreigner", and that puts school books advertising western lifestyle products into African schools in return for exclusive rights to sell Coke to the kids for three days' worth of their parents' earnings. But this is the free trade that has, ironically, been nurtured by the protectionism of the rest of the twentieth century, complete with unresolved monopolies and powerful cartels, with rent-seeking lobbyists buying (some of) our politicians to gain advantage for their clients.

Even more relevant with 21st century concerns

The Free Trade our Liberal forebears espoused relentlessly sought to eradicate tariffs - and not just those at borders but those internal tariffs like income and capital taxes that provide disincentives to enterprise and hard work - and either break up or compensate for monopoly power. Add to all this the more contemporary concerns of environmental stewardship which demands much greater attention to using our common wealth more efficiently and global competition that demands we be more efficient in our production and control of our costs and we can have a Liberalism that combines the benefits of Free Trade and the public revenues to help those in our societies that are least able to participate in those benefits however hard they try.

The basis of our manifesto

So our manifesto should be "true" Free Trade, anti-monopoly action, and a fair revenue stream in Land Value Tax that directly compensates for the exclusion of those who cannot compete and provides us with the means to finance the social policies and welfare provision that people have come to expect. And it will be as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.