BS, created for you by Dave

Politically, there's not been much good news in the past year, but I'm moderately cheered to find out that nobody seems that interested in Dave's DIY Flatpack Self-Assembly Society idea:

A good thing, too. In hard times, there are few things less cheerful than listening to the enormously well-off lecturing those struggling to get by about how there's more to life than money.

But the BS is something worse just than a return to the Victorian Values of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. It's nothing less than a government sponsored job-destruction programme. It's about throwing people who do useful work to support themselves and their families onto the scrapheap, in the hope that some mug will step in to do their job for free. The BS merchants have implicitly admitted that the jobs being destroyed to make way for their fantasy volunteer army are useful ones. If those being 'let go' were the holders of useless non-jobs who never would be missed, why the urgent need for volunteers to step in and take up the slack?

What really confuses me is that all this volunteering stuff doesn't even make sense from a conservative / libertarian / free market prospective. After all, every True Believer in The Almighty Market knows that where there's a need, the Invisible Hand will surely provide. A society stuffed with do-gooding volunteers can only interfere with the smooth operation of the market and the entrepreneurial incentive to cater for every need at the right price.

Mind you, from the point of view of the practical exploitation of labour, as opposed to right-wing ideological purity, BS volunteering is right up there with unpaid internships as a way of keeping opportunity out of the proles' grubby hands and normalising the idea that people should be grateful that they're doing something rather than nothing, without aspiring to any high-flown notions of actually being paid for doing a useful job.

It might be dressed up in vague, fluffy, communitarian-sounding language, but on closer examination, Dave's BS is one of the nastiest, most divisive and most cynical initiatives the Nasty Party has ever come up with and I'll be delighted to see it fester away to nothing on the muck heap of history.