This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll see an entirely different thing. /1 https://t.co/8RDk27ASrb

One of the main reasons humans invented government was to distribute resources more equally in a society. You see, we had a ‘free market’ already, before we had governments. It didn’t work, the most ruthless people hogged everything for themselves. We forget that government…/2 https://t.co/bdQhSYvp3F

…was a SOLUTION to terrible problems. The idea that it’s some tyranny imposed on people is offensively stupid. People invented governments because they solved problems they were unable to solve themselves. Find a country without a government, it can’t be done. /3 https://t.co/a7gYlfT8O4

I often invite political libertarians to go and find a country free of government, rather than trying to strip away government in the comfortable and peaceful societies they’re already living in. They don’t, because they can’t. But enough on those morons, the reframing? /4 https://t.co/YedxmQRcZX

What happened in the pandemic here in Australia, in 2020-21, wasn’t government assistance. It was a redistribution of government priority in Australia, back towards ordinary people. The sort of thing governments were invented to do. Hundreds of thousands of people who’d…/5

…been living below the poverty line, suddenly weren’t for the first time in their lives. Excess deaths were negative, we were the healthiest we’d ever been. We need to see the pandemic not as an interruption to normal life, but as the ongoing collapse…/6 https://t.co/zFa3QQvPY3

…*of* that ‘economic’ life. Of the fantasies that sustain it, of markets and individuals. Of the idea that society is a budget, and that what’s in the bank determines what we can do. ‘We’ can do anything we bloody well like, including without using money at all. That was the…/7

…heist of the past 50 years, to remake society as millions of ‘jobs’, so that peoples’ lives were completely dependent on an income from those jobs to even survive. Living, basic living, suddenly had a ‘cost’. Why don’t we laugh more at the phrase ‘the cost of living’? /8

Who are we all paying, to be allowed to live? Simple question, the answer explodes the whole farcical set of myths ‘the economy’ hides behind. By stripping away collective things and making us all beholden to hundreds of thousands of employers, in jobs, making rubber ducks…/9

…and toilet deodorisers, the whole immensity of life is shrunken down to a weekly pay packet, without which you’re destitute. You can’t all stay home to shelter from a threat, because then nobody makes the rubber ducks and toilet deodoriser. The humanity! /10

Covid is a repeat of the the late-19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, as I’ve Tweeted about a lot. Not just a pesky virus come to visit, but the fundamental breakdown of a social structure run on idiot ideas that were always going to collapse. The economy. Markets. /11

‘There is no such thing as society’ idiocy. All blatant smash and grabs by old elites who have never recovered from the invention of public life, through government. They want their peasants back. /end