debunking malthus, link from ranprieur page

haven't read one of these in a while - a piece of writing that hits so hard ,  makes for elated reading. 

Jared Diamond tapped mass agriculture as the start of 'his-story', and it was just as exhilarating to read (although Graeber doesn't seem to agree with him on this )

the central idea is that the 'tragedy of the commons ' is a myth, and that the commons were well protected and maintained under earlier folk law, and that Malthus and Hardin pushed their 'theories' in order to facilitate a takeover of commons by the private sector - a virus that has spread much more than Jared's agriculture, or IBM's open PC architecture.

Today, no community living off of it's own resources and land is safe, because it's just a matter of time before a GDP gang soft-infiltrates and sets up revenue producing 'enterprise' , throwing money at first in the form of wages, that destroy all local enterprise, then pare down those wages until no one can make a living decently, and then BOOM! cheap land to acquire and cheap labour, and a joyless deathless lifeless drudgery from then on for the original residents .

The GDP gang could be BIG industry, or even the startup hordes, throwing seemingly infinite amounts of cash on a local economy whose fragile bonds cannot stand the mindless deluge

I say GDP gang, but it could just as easily be called the Malthus-Gardin-Adamsmith gang

As more and more decisions get taken by the Capital, and not those with direct connection to the land, as McLuhan says, the numbness sets in and spreads to all those within the system.  It follows, as an example, that a large number of 'modern' people consider packed items as food, when it only cursorily adheres to that description.

And here we come to the crux of the matter, the flaw in the system - the abstraction. A culture that spans worlds is possible only because all share the same abstractions, but this also results in diabetes-cancer-crohns causative agents being disguised as food. If food were people, modern food would be criminals.  

another story that illustrates this disconnect  

my mother had bad headaches. the doctor in the swanky sophisticated modern hospital prescribed paracetamol and said if they didn't work she'd start my mother off on migraine meds.

a foaf family traditional doctor recommended neck and head massage as a solution, and it seems to be working

why this apathy in the former case ?  One could say they have to push pills after all where did the money for the swanky sophisticated hospital come from ? and my answer is that this is economic fascism, and must be dealt with with all possible means at our disposal

also see greenspun's post on how ancient germanic law protected commons and commoners ( para 2 titled Government Regulation Protecting You' )