According to a "Guardian exclusive" the Labour party has plans to get land for housing on the cheap by making landowners sell it at a price before planning consent is given, eliminating most of the so-called "hope value" and enabling new council housing to be built at lower cost land: Labour plans to make landowners…
...as he was described by George Bernard Shaw, apparently. I missed his birthday the other day: Born #onthisday in 1850, our founder, Sir Ebenezer Howard, a true pioneer whose ideas on housing and social reform sparked a global movement which is still celebrated today. Read about his life's work here: https://t.co/jSsWDLbV6F Picture credit: Garden City…
Okay, so I make no bones about my disdain for the festival of rent-seeking and lobbying that is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos. The top of the worlds hierarchies, governments, their corporate whores and bastard children the lobbyists meet, and, as Adam Smith wrote nearly 250 years ago now: "People…
The sharp eyed among you may have noticed that no sooner had I launched this blog as the "Voluntaryist Review" than I decided to change it to the "Geomutualist Review". In writing the indtroductory post on "voluntaryism" I decided I wasn't, in fact, what is known today as a "voluntaryist". But I don't know why I…
[It's been a while since I've written anything, which is not for the want of subjects to write about - Israel, Ukraine, Surveillance Laws, and I've been thinking about my community land trust project a lot too. Anyway, tonight I got into a discussion about intellectual property, and more specifically about copyright and patents. I…
I had sat down to write a piece trying to respond to Jonathan Calder's call for a stronger Liberal Democrat "ideology". But as, in the process, I was reading and rereading various ways in which people in the party had responded to last week's election results, I began once again to wonder whether I had…
I pulled no punches at the time that the university fees decision was an awful one, satisfying nobody. With the results in and most universities deciding to charge at the top end of the artificially narrow window personally I think the trouble is only beginning. And it's going to be serious both for universities and…
So, for a bit of R&R at the weekend, and prompted by a few requests from fellow students on the Mises Academy course I've been doing on Libertarian Legal Theory, I decided to sit down and do an audiobook version of David D Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom". Or at least of most of it.…
The latest instalment in my tour round the libertarian/anarchist "classics" brings me to a work very appropriate for today's messed up world. In "Mutual Banking" American Individualist Anarchist William Batchelder Greene explains clearly what is wrong with the current banking system (now, just as much as then) and proposes a non-profit mutual bank as a…
Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists. Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to…