How do we prevent oligarchs from running our lives while avoiding state overreach? - Andy Brown

Neither philosophy works when pushed to the limit. The history of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China should be enough to teach any of us that too much state planning has a nasty tendency to become clumsy and oppressive. One decision by Mao enforced with top down ruthlessness killed around 30 million people in a famine.

Over enthusiastic reliance on deregulation and the power of market forces produces its own set of problems.

Getting rid of too many supposedly pesky building regulations gave us the Grenfell Tower fire that saw 72 people horribly burned to death and has left us with an enormous bill for correcting shoddy building work.

Loose financial regulations gave us the 2008 crash in which more money was gambled on obscure financial instruments than the value of what is produced in the world in an entire year. Britain’s national debt doubled as the government spent money it didn’t have trying to bail out irresponsible traders and prevent mass unemployment as banks failed.

Any wise government needs to achieve a balance and use whatever tools work best in any given situation. When decision making is becoming sluggish and creative energy is needed there is often a good case for removing controls over innovators and letting them do what they are best at. Find ways of doing things differently.

When too much wealth and power ends up in the hands of a few very powerful billionaires who own licences that give them monopoly power over the rest of us the lever needs to be pulled in the other direction. Governments and international organisations need to step in and limit the power of the oligarchs to dominate our lives.

We live in an era when technology makes it almost inevitable that significant aspects of our life will be dominated by one or two companies who are able to exercise monopoly power over us.

Every business and every home computer tends to use the same software because there is no point in producing a document that others can’t read even if the word processor you use is brilliantly innovative. Almost everyone uses the same search engines, sees what friends are up to via Facebook, and makes purchases via Amazon.

That puts incredible power in the hands of those who own the licences. Microsoft can up the price of buying their software to eye watering levels and still sell it. Amazon can charge businesses a fortune to sell their goods on its platform and companies still need to pay up.

The result is that money is being sucked up into the hands of a few exceptionally rich individuals who are exercising power over markets and over smaller businesses that exceeds the power of national governments. Every year the ultra-rich licence holders acquire more wealth and power whilst every year the ordinary citizen seems to find it harder to make a comfortable living.

Attempts to tax the very wealthy simply result in skilled accountants hiding more of that wealth in offshore accounts, more companies being registered in lightly regulated tax havens and more money being squirrelled away in obscure forms of bitcoin that have been devised solely to enable criminals and tax dodgers to hide and move their fortunes.

Much the same monopoly power resides with the rulers of a few countries that happen to be sitting on valuable raw materials, some of which are putting the future of all of us at risk as they are burned and release carbon.

The introduction of AI risks sucking even more money into the hands of the oligarchs and wiping out job opportunities for a whole series of once secure professions such as lawyers.

Those oligarchs are becoming powerful enough to pour money into election campaigns and to acquire control over the sources of information and ideas that we receive that enables them to tell us we need to let them control more of our lives.

That changes the dynamic of the economy and politics. The old art of trying to balance the right amount of state control with a sensible degree of free enterprise is being replaced by a new challenge.

How can we keep either democratic freedoms or space for business innovation if the system is increasingly held within the power of an elite that operates beyond the control of electors or governments?

We learned the hard way how much damage can be done if governments dominate our economy and control our sources of information. One of the biggest challenges of our times is to prevent oligarchs from ruling our lives almost as completely.

We could start by fining Elon Musk heavily for enabling British users to pay to publish fake pictures of naked celebrities.

Andy Brown is the Green Party Councillor for Aire Valley.