Goodness
me, Bernard Hickey is bleating on again. In today’s ‘top 10’, as ever he beats the
drum of crippling every company, and hence consumer, with more and more tax: I’ve
already answered to that this week.
But
worse, and a trend I’m seeing in the mainstream media, Bernard’s item number
one: looking at the continuing train wreck of Greece, he says:
“…the debt debacle is getting even worse in Greece, forcing the Germans to think about stumping up yet more money.The austerity medicine is clearly not working.”
Really? It took Greece, and all the
other Keynesian basket-cases, sixty and seventy years of irresponsible
government spending to, speaking of trains, the point where Greek state rail
had more employees than passengers, meaning it would have been cheaper for the
Greek taxpayer to simply give all Greek rail users taxi chits. In the face of
such long term insanity, who seriously believes that just one year of austerity
was going to change anything!?
Thinking that sixty or seventy years of over-spending can be fixed by one year (or even ten) of (true) austerity, is the sort of childish emoting that got the West into this mess in the first instance. Grow up!
And nothing will change,
regardless, until philosophy does, away from the big brother surveillance state
nightmares that have been created in people’s heads. If you’ve stuffed your
face with every sort of junk food crud, paid for with debt and fiat money, for the first fifty years of your life, you
don’t lose weight the first day of your diet, and you don’t lose weight and
return to health again until you’ve permanently changed your eating habits, and taken up
daily exercise. Real world discipline by any other name, which is not the name of Greek austerity which has been to increase taxes and cripple their economy even further, with no serious attempt at all to reduce the size of their state.
Finally, the MSM tends to approach this topic like austerity was optional: it's not.
Finally, the MSM tends to approach this topic like austerity was optional: it's not.
Bernard’s solution to the West’s
problems to be in bookstores in time to killjoy your Christmas: ‘Taxing Fat Cats’.
What austerity, I did not think they had reduced state spending much at all.
ReplyDeleteOver taxing is also one of the main problems, killing off wealth creation.
Good post, Mike.
Yes, there's been no concerted effort to whittle the Greek state back at all. And no different in New Zealand. Despite the farcical situation where National are having protests against them about a very few (un)civil service jobs having gone (and no one has checked to see how many of those workers were simply taken to contract), every English budget to date has involved a bigger dollar spend than the year before, which means he's still spending more than Cullen.
DeleteThe problem is the state just keeps grafting on 'bits' until such a level where austerity, to be politically acceptable, can only ever look at the margins, and it's so big underneath, that it just keeps growing organically. I wonder if we will find in another twenty years time if the world would have been better to let the basket cases go completely, and rebuild on a new classical liberal/laissez faire paradigm. There would be social chaos in the short term, but there is anyway, with the further prospect currently that Europe is heading for either another intra-country war, or a series of civil wars.
No matter what: the state has to be rolled back, and it's simply not happening. Austerity has simply become doublespeak, again.