Freecycle, the GDP subversives

As I’m sure you know, Freecycle is an email listing service whereby you offer or request goods for free.  No payment or swapping allowed; the etiquette is that your first post should be an offer rather than a request.

We are about to move to a smaller place and are taking the opportunity to reduce our clutter.  We took two Tesco delivery crates worth of books to Oxfam.  Some things have gone on Amazon and sold very quickly, some things have gone on Freecycle and have also gone quickly – everything had been claimed within 1 hour, and only one of the items was even in full working order.

I’m feeling a bit subversive about the financial system at the moment – fiat money, wasted taxes, the works – perhaps I’m reading the tinfoil-hatters too much; so Freecycle appeals to me.  I like the fact that people’s needs are met, but it doesn’t show up in the statistics – no GDP growth, no jobs growth, no whatever.  But surely it is our patriotic duty to go out and spend, to “create jobs”?  It is not.  Your duty, to you and your dependants if you have them, is to make sure your needs are met (without breaking the law, obviously), and that is it.  If you can do that for free, so much the better.  Jobs are a cost of production, not a benefit.  Beware a government “creating jobs”, they can only do this by taking money from the bits of the economy that were already creating jobs, thank you very much.

But if we get more things for free, and use fewer people to make the things we DO buy, won’t that “cost jobs”?  No, it won’t. Consider the Industrial Revolution.  In one sense you could look on this as one long succession of inventions of labour-saving (that is, job destroying) devices.  Surely after all that there must be no jobs left by now?  In round numbers, the industrial revolution started in the UK in 1750.  At this time, the population of England was around 6 million. It is now around 50 million.  Lots of jobs then, lots of jobs now.