Saturday, March 7, 2015

J. W. Mason — The Enduring Logic of Austerity


Weekend reading if you didn't get to it before. Originally published at The Slack Wire and posted here at MNE.
Austerity won’t collapse under its own contradictions. We’ll need a movement for that.
Neoliberalism is more a political theory based on an economic program than an economic theory become the basis for policy. It's basic assumption, presumed to be self-evident, is that market fundamentalism (economic liberalism) is the basis for a free society (social and political liberalism). A free country is a market state. A welfare state is unfree. There is no escape from that system from within the system because it is based on social Darwinism and regards the casualties of efficiency as natural and even positive — corrective other than punitive.
But more importantly, the lesson of the Europe-wide shift toward trade surpluses is that austerity can succeed on its own terms. I think there’s a tendency for liberal critics of austerity to assume that the people on the other side are just confused, or blinkered by ideology, and that there’s something incoherent or self-contradictory about competitiveness as a Europe-wide organizing principle. There’s a hope, I think, that economic logic will eventually compel policymakers to do what’s right for everyone. 
Personally, I don’t think that the masters of the euro care too much about the outcome of the struggle for competitiveness; it’s the struggle itself — and the constraints it imposes on public and private choices — that matters. But insofar as the test of the success of austerity is the trade balance, I suspect austerity can succeed indefinitely.
What is required is political action rather than economic reform.

Jacobin
The Enduring Logic of Austerity
J. W. Mason

Originally published at The Slack Wire and posted here at MNE.

No comments: