the knoblr: Austerity, Then and Now
Postwar austerity in Britain was driven by real, obvious limits on resources. In particular, foreign exchange was in short supply. At a basic level, people knew why things were rationed — Britain had spent heavily on the war, it had to scrimp to pay its bills.
Today, by contrast, austerity is being imposed because men in suits say that it’s necessary to satisfy the invisible gods of the financial market. It’s understandable that the public is beginning to have its doubts, and not just because those invisible gods somehow demand sacrifices only from workers, never from the wealthy. For the fact is that those men in suits have no idea what they’re doing — a fact that was apparent to some of us early on, but it now becoming common knowledge.
