It is almost 30 years since the incomparable Nico Colchester denoted the Mars Bar Unit as a means of comparing prices at a time of rising inflation and vast sums of money – the million, the billion, that were incomprehensible to the post-war generation.
The Mars Bar is a currency for our time: it is a long-established basket of staple commodities (cocoa, vegetable fats, milk solids, sugar) packaged with great consistency in the form of an ingot. As such it is a reliable unit of account certainly more reliable than gold, which is prone to speculation and it preserves a remarkably constant real value. I have measured my wealth in Mars Bars since an early age, though the motive for doing so has changed.
We are still bamboozled by figures, and most of all by Values. We are told that our indebtedness to the world is measured in trillions, that our grandchildren will inherit the vast debt, but we cannot visualise these sums.
Most of all, since we are constantly assailed by lists of trillions, billions, and millions, we have lost the ability to think in terms of our work, us, the common drones, that collectively pay our taxes, and supply the honey to Government, and the Queen.
Drones have no purpose other than to give to the Queen that which she desires. They never get to share the honey, they don’t even get a roof over their head in winter, theirs is just to give and die. Actually their penis generally drops off, but let’s not go there.
For our purposes they perfectly encapsulate the lot of the common working man, condemned to a lifetime of the minimum wage, a cold early start in the morning, a hard days toil, followed by the bare minimum of Bejam Chicken Nuggets to sustain him for the task ahead on the following day – oh, and X-factor. It is a thankless, sterile life.
It is easy to forget that apart from the occasional ‘lottery win’ – a windfall tax on a Banker’s Bonus for instance – that the bulk of the munificent billions and trillions that the government squander on our behalf, is made up of the tax they deduct from the honest toil from our humble drone.
So I am proposing a new unit of currency. The Drone. One Drone equals the amount the government can expect to rake in from one minimum wage worker in one year. It is currently, thanks to better brains than mine, £1,816.19.
Now we can see that an apparently innocuous item like, for instance, the cost of the flowers and pot plants doted around Northern Ireland Government Offices, something you have probably never even considered, actually represents the government’s share of the entire year’s work of 15 honest, God fearing, hard working family men. Assuming that none of them got sick, or lost their job, or had wives that claimed maternity benefit. All 15 of them got up every morning and slogged their hearts out every day frying chips in Macdonald’s so that the various government honey bees and other assorted piglets could go into work and find a pot plant on their window sill.
Now when you hear that your local council has given £100,000 of tax payers money to ‘police’ what you put in your rubbish bin, reflect on the 55 people who went to work for a year to allow the council to squander that money. Is that really the best use that their labour could be put to?
These are real people, doing real jobs, struggling to bring up real families, and to endlessly refill the government honey pot that they so thoughtlessly squander.
I give you – the Drone – to help you work out just how many people will have to work for just how many years to finance the fancies of the honey bees.
One Drone = £1,816.19p.
Now, who has a calculator powerful enough to give me the answer in Drones to the £2,200 billion current deficit – do we even have enough Drones in the country?
© Anna Raccoon
{ 17 comments }
Exellent anger, and great analogy.
My ire is however redoubled by the knowledge that drones don’t think and conclude – they work. That’s what drones do.
The X-Factor and a pint in the pub and a set of wheels….that’s it.
The two mistakes in this piece (for me) are:
1. The description of drones – far too noble and working class. Most of the drones wear white collars these days and are bullied by their section heads – so-called because their heads should be sectioned.
2. The calculation based on people doing work: as well as the government and its honey bees, there are also the wasps. Just like real wasps, they serve no purpose – and do nothing except scavenge off everyone else. This group includes everyone from Wayne Slob to your average hedge-fund manager.
A close friend runs a successful decorating business. Its success is based on hiring drones for £100 a day, and selling colour schemes to honey bees at £1500 a day. He’s a nice guy: he just sees what’s out there and then makes a living from it.
Almost everyone I know watches X-Factor….and then tells me they don’t have the time to think about politics, society, economics and banking.
This is nice work for the honey bees….they’re certainly never going to change things. Unfortunately, neither are the drones.
So who will?
?????
YM x
Anna,
Fabulous article.
I have long been angered that we are numbed by the millions, billions and trillions – so that we are no longer shocked by what should be seen as inexcusable waste or failure.
Anna,
I’ve done a calculation in Drones for the level of Debt Interest the country will be paying next year.
I make that nearly 2.5 million drones in harness.
I no longer call a billion, a billion.
It is MUCH more fun to call it one thousand million
Any measurement can be gamed. To fiddle the worth of a Drone all Government need do is tax us more, reducing the number of Drones per value of spending. Mars bars have got smaller. To combant obesity you understand…
blimey.people waking up?
i put this on my web page ages ago……….
Somebody pinch me please!
I have to wake up!
I am stuck in a nightmare where a mad Scots Communist working for an enemy state is systematically destroying the u.k and as we are all so timid he is getting away with it.
A Billion here- a Billion there…..thrown around like confetti….
So how much is a Billion Pounds?
Well we now seem to use the American version of One thousand million .
So nothing to worry about then.
A Million Pounds………
Is that a lot of money?
Over the last few years it would seem not.Some people i know bought £1million plus homes.
It was just ‘schrapnel.’
But let’s take amore sensible look.
For the sake of using easy numbers let’s say that the average salary in the country is £25,000 p.a. Therefore a million Pounds is A WHOLE LIFETIME OF A PERSONS WORKING INCOME.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(40X25,000) AND THAT IS OF COURSE BEFORE TAX!!!!!!!!!!
So the next time you hear of ‘a billionhere/a billion there, work out how many peoples WHOLE LIVES ARE BEING SACRIFICED !!!!!!!!
FOR ONE DEVIOUS SHITBAGS EGO………
………………………………………………………………………………….
http://ageofkali.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-02-03T23%3A22%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=7
What about the (EU) hornets’ share? If you add that gross theft, it must add another 2 million drones.
Like Old Holborn, I too call a ‘bankers’ billion one thousand million which is the correct way of saying it, after all we scientists and engineers were the first to use such numbers. The Americans like to be seen as bigger and better than everyone else so they degraded the billion from a million million to a thousand million which immediately made them look three orders of magnitude better off.
I still find myself having to remember to reduce the numbers given in ‘bankers figures’ to real world numbers to make what little sense there is in them.
How much of all this money actually exists in real terms?
Isn’t most of it based on empty toxic promises and agreements, unless some little chap in a Swiss vault is colouring in an endless supply of notes? So when we drones see our ‘money’ getting filtched in taxes etc. all that happens is that there are less black marks on our P6Os than we would have hoped for.
Before I go to meet the Grand Aardvark in the sky – I’m stocking up on Mars Bars – they might turn out to be the only currency to allow me to work, rest and play for the forseeable future when we realise money doesn’t actually exist.
Thanks for the article – it’s informative to see how much effort is used to fund individual items of public expenditure.
However I thought that the Mars Bar index had been replaced by the Economist’s ‘Big Mac index’ – as the latter are pretty much identical throughout most of the world, and are eaten in many countries whose residents have never heard of a Mars Bar.
I do believe that you may need something like 1,211,327,009 worker serf drones.
excellent analogy, and deeply shocking – plant pots as toil? makes you think. makes me fucking cross.
mr John Ward, the wasp and bee analogy needs revising.
european honey-bees are domesticated livestock – they get a hive built by their “government” – the bee-keeper, who plunders most of their hard-earned wealth. that’s the average UK citizen, of a Statist frame of mind. he takes the shafting for the imagined benefits.
the wasp, however, is not domesticated; she kills other insects to support her young, stings more painfully and readily than the honey-bee, and doesn’t produce honey. she is not therefore bribed or bribeable with free housing and services, then turned into a slave.
but the wasp does indeed have a function -she kills pests such as caterpillars (the Wayne Slobs of the garden) . she won’t sting unless provoked, but then does so, fearlessly and with great effect. a lesson is quickly learnt, by (take note!) anyone she perceives as a potential thief!
so then – what would you rather our politicians received? honey, or the undivided attention of wasps?
Berlosconi found out the hard way that people aren’t all drones.
Xcuse Me, I’d just like to say a few words for Wasps. They are very useful creatures. If people didn’t go around bumping them off everytime they have a little get together, then Farmers wouldn’t have to spend so much money on pesticides, which cause illnesses and another drain on the already defunct Health Service. This would, of course, release more Drones, therby devalueing the value of a Drone.
But we can’t have that now, can we.
John:
As I will not have a lobotomy box in my house, I’ve never actually seen X-Factor. I’ve read a bit about it though, here and there, and the overwhelming impression I have is of a revamped and much hyped (and paid) version of Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks … which we so derided all of forty years ago.
Does my impression require amendment?
I did actually once, a few years ago, watch an episode of Big Brother (at my sister’s house – my lobotomy box refusal is of many years standing). At the end of it, I was left puzzled – the question I asked myself was: what was I supposed to get out of that trash? Maybe I’m just thick?
And ITV’s Opportunity Knocks ripoff – New Faces … was it?
Utter trash then, and the latest incarnation is, I reckon, utter trash now.
But massively hyped.
what did Wat Tyler call this ?- a Standard Peasant Year? – something like that – anyway – I think it could be a really useful measure against which to calibrate all our state expenditure. We could also have an ADY – Average Drone Year – recognising that most of the work force is not on minimum wage.
Would certainly put things in perspective and allow us average Joes to tackle our so-called representatives.
I’m not waving but droning.
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