I myself am a supporter of LVT, and would certainly agree with the idea of shifting taxation from income, particularly at the lower levels, to land values.

I would not, however, fool myself into thinking it is “easy to explain on the doorsteps”. Any shift of taxation away from income tends to be met with “but income tax is the fairest tax - it’s based on ability to pay”. Not helped by the fact that our party went big on that argument when it (very wrongly in my view) went for local income tax to replace the community charge (which for all its faults had faint vestiges of the idea of paying tax on land value).

The “little old lady in the big house” is a very tough one to face, I’ve been there and I bear the scars (letters reading “How dare you - I used to vote for your party, but never again after I saw what you wrote”). While I know the answers to it in theory, they are hard to get across, particularly as we have had heavily pushed on us the idea that owning untaxed property and leaving it to your children is what life should be all about. Even though a direct result of that policy is adult children unable to get housing of their own when they actually need it most.

I speak of “thinking” libertarians or market anarchists - the ones that write the books and work on the theory rather than the Clarksons of this world. Indeed, I am finding myself quite in demand at the moment to speak to various such groups of libertarians and anarchists about Carson’s type of Mutualism, as I hinted at in my first comment on here.

The top ten countries in the share of 5-14 year olds working between 1999-2004 are Niger (over 65%!), Togo, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Chad (all over 50%), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Uganda and Somalia. None of these countries can be described as well-connected with global markets.

About 70% of child labour is in agriculture, and countries with large “sweatshop” export sectors like Bangladesh and Indonesia have low rates of child labour (both under 10%).

(I hope the link works but it may be subscribers only.)

@Geoff Payne: it depends how you define “good for the poor”. If “good” means that the poor get a larger share of national income, some of the SE Asian countries fit the bill (though equally other fast-growing developing countries have seen increasing income inequality).

If “good” means a large and sustained increase in absolute living standards (not just income but also life expectancy), then any globalised market economy would fit the bill. In his book In Defense of Global Capitalism, Johan Norberg summarised that economies that open up to trade and the market tend to see redistribution of income from the rich to the middle class. The poor are no better (or worse) off relative to their compatriots but are absolutely much better off than in closed economies. In Rawlsian (”minimax”) terms this is an improvement.

On a different matter, my guess is the Michael Meadowcroft has an affection for Liberal free marketeers as he probably remembers them in the early 1960s. No doubt some kept the party alive in difficult times. Even so, the pamphlets he wrote in 1980-4 had a huge influence on the Young Liberals at the time but did not turn us into Libertarians, who more or less existed only in the Tory party. He had a strong critque of the state back then, but he wanted to decentralise it rather than privatise it.
A great idea for a fringe meeting at Lib Dem conference would be for you to organise a debate with him on Libertarianism. I would imagine you would fill the largest room.