Guard Labour : Guarding the Garden

I seem to have scrambled recollections of this economic theory / parable thing – which was invented in France in the 18thC or somewhere… where people theorised that going out and breaking all the windows in Paris would be good for the economy, because all the glaziers etc would have something to do.

Then some other people got busy with their abacuses. Abaci… and figured out that this actually represents a net loss to the entire system. Breaking windows does not create net-value.

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So this thing turned up the other day (in the um… WSJ)… the idea of Guard Labour… and the idea that the more extreme the social iniquity, the more Guard Labour is needed…. social inequality actually creates a drag on the economy.

Apparently some people have gone away with their abaci, and managed to figure out that about 26% of the US workforce is employed as Guard Labour – some of the measurements (ie: unemployed / prison, but not lawyers) are a bit dodgy in my opinion… but it’s an interesting idea… and once you get it inside your head, you see it everywhere. Especially on TV… because almost every TV drama either seems to be based in a hospital, or involves some sort of guard labour. No value is being created.

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So the picture at the top is a system of robotic water-cannons for fending off pirates.

Now you know whenever you hear the word “Pirate” there’s more going on than meets the eye – and this has always been the case. Back in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” days (and earlier), pirates were often covertly state-sanctioned entities. Often they were little floating islands of democracy escaping from a the brutalising hierarchy of the military of the day… today they’re people who’s livelihoods have been destroyed by Western over-fishing, and who feel at least some justification for what they do due to Western dumping of toxic and nuclear waste in their backyards.

And then there are digital pirates as well, but that phrase is a semantic misappropriation… specious propaganda produced by… well, the Guard Labour hired by the old copyright cartels.

So that’s the perspective that I tend to see the list of wonderful weapons that the UK police are planning/considering attaching to unmanned drones, paid for with our taxes, and used to “guard” us. To guard one section of society from another.

That’s the perspective that I tend to see the news that although crime is falling, people generally think it’s getting worse.

And ACTA is just Guard Labour lobbying governments to bypass the democratic process and turn the entire fucking planet into… archipelagos of walled gardens, so tightly controlled and locked down that they actually look more like catacombs. Selling daylight by the pound.

The walled world

and the distance kids are allowed to roam…

And so on and so on… Guard Labour… The Guard Economy appears to be this massive collective delusion…

(Gets Nasty? Get down to business)

… that has been to a greater or lesser extent, internalised by society at large.

So that’s my thought for the day.

Stop guarding stuff (especially other people’s stuff) and start giving it away. We’re all going to die anyway. We might as well die happy.