The brutal experiment

[communicator]

Here's an article in the New York Times expressing pity for the UK as the subject of a 'brutal' experiment to prove that austerity does not work. Anyone with any claim to economic savvy who said it might ever work should hang their head in shame

Comments

[del_c]

I think recessions aren't accidents, they're strategies. After the manic bubble, the asset-owning minority pull as much of their wealth out of labour employment as they can, and put it somewhere else for a while. Their hope is that this will force wages down. Put that way, it's obvious the last thing they would want is for the government to spoil their private recession with public employment, so of course they want a public recession at the same time as the private one. Lucky for them, by the time the bubble bursts, they've been praised for years as being the engine of growth, and can simply tell the government what to do. Rarely does a Roosevelt come along to say "Rich people hate me; I welcome their hate."

I got up this morning hearing George Osborne or somebody middle class in a suit (could have been Cameron or Clegg, or a Milliband but for the fact that it was defending the Coalition budget). He was shouting about "hard work!" That's all they want hard work, hard hard work, hard working families working hard! New Labour are no better, they think hard work is what everything's about, too, you never stop hearing it. Call me a lazy prole, I don't actually think hard work should be a goal in life. But I think they, the minority, want other people's hard work, cheap. Don't you know there's a labour shortage, and all that?

[communicator]

I totally agree with you. When I complain about people being lead astray I am talking about proles who get duped into supporting this awful process. The rich people who are doing very nicely out of this are not behaving irrationally I suppose.

Though I would say this time I think they are sailing close to the wind, and perhaps letting short term greed overwhelm them, because if the whole system goes down, they go with it.