Doofus With a Cause Planned to Walk from Britain to India, Dream Dies in France

You can't even feel sorry for saps like these. You've got some self-righteous pinhead who actually believes you can exist without money, and he sets off with two other dopes to walk 9000 miles from Britain to India without having to pay for anything along his way.

So the freeloader manages to get about 250 miles into the trek before abandoning the walk once he realizes the French in Calais aren't down with the cause.

Poor thing.

Ardent and idealistic, he calls himself a "community pilgrim".

But when Mark Boyle set out on a mission to show he could survive on peace and love instead cash, he was a pilgrim who didn't make much progress ... thanks to the tightwad French.

The aim of the firebrand anti-captialist was to walk 9,000 miles from Britain to India totally penniless, relying on the generosity of human beings in pursuit of his dream of a money-free global economy.

"Most of the problems in the world such as greed, fear and insecurity, manifest themselves in money," he declared.

"So I'm going out and instead putting my trust in the universe."

Just stop and soak that in for a bit. Some socialist schmuck thinks we can live without money.

Now he's stunned to find out he's a laughingstock.

However, just 250 miles later, when he got to Calais and asked the French if they shared his Utopian vision, the answer was a resounding 'Non'.

Instead, they accused him of being a "freeloading backpacker" and refused to help him and his two companions.

Eventually - cold, tired, bedraggled and hungry - they decided to call off the pilgrimage, less than a month into the planned two-and-a-half year trek.

To add insult to injury, the three were forced to use the hard currency they hate so that they could get back to the UK.

Naturally, this tool has a blog. I wonder how he managed to purchase his computer?

Writing on his blog, 28-year-old Mr Boyle, a member of the Freeconomy movement - which encourages barter instead of money - said of their French experience: "Not only did no one speak the language, they also see us as just a bunch of freeloading backpackers, which is the complete opposite of what the pilgrimage is really about."

That really scared us, and given that we now were pretty much out of food, hadn't slept in days and were really cold, we had to reassess the situation.

"We spoke to a few people who were willing to talk and they said that France would not go for this unless we could speak fluent French, which none of us could.

"The advice was to make a beeline for Belgium, as folk said they would be more likely to want to speak English.'

But the nearest big Belgian town was Bruges, 105 miles away.

"All we had was three tins of soup, a bag of trail mix and a chocolate bar to sustain us. As it was unlikely that we would get a chance to help or be helped by French people in the journey getting there, the task looked daunting to say the least.

"Deflated, we sat down and thought about what on Earth we were going to do - head off on the three-day hike to Bruges with practically no food and hope the situation there got better, or to call it all off."

How about wearing a sign saying you'll lecture people for food?

Mr Boyle, the former boss of an organic food company, left his job in July to concentrate on the Freeconomy movement and he and his companions set off on the India trip from Bristol on January 30.

Now they're three jobless nitwits who are going to have a tough time getting by.

Without money.

Read the comments after the story. You'll have tears in your eyes.

Update: Times Online also has an item on this moron. A reader comment:

Where do people like Mr Boyle get these mind-bogglingly moronic ideas?

Money is at its root a simple-to-understand and universally acceptable enabler of interchange among people; indeed, money liberates people all over the world to be able to live creatively, invent, and accomplish, instead of wasting the better part of their lives haggling, bartering, and laboriously carting around heavy goods on their backs.

This soft-head wants to project his own personal anxieties about "insecurity" and "fear" on all the rest of us, and in so doing, foist upon us a world in which any remaining smidgen of efficiency in both local and international trade is obliterated. Somebody please re-train this poor fellow and move him past the Pleistocene Age.