Assaulting Austerity

Austerity & Neo-Nazis, oh my!

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News-in-a-Nutshell is back, this time taking a closer look at the latest elections and austerity battles in Europe. Why should people in the United States care what happens in elections in Europe? Just ask those budget-minded Republicans! A Mark Fiore political animation

• Category

  News & Politics

[loqiloqi]

Wealth is destroyed in war, natural disaster, or consumption. It is produced the first time or replaced the second time by production from human labor and natural processes.

You are right. An economic downturn is a large-scale wealth transfer from somebody (poor) to somebody else (rich).

[loqiloqi]

Rebuilding our economy to kick our addiction to hydrocarbon fuels and planetary destruction?

Sounds like a large-scale, labor-intensive project to me.

[judgen]

Greece is showing signs of turning back upwards. Austerity might have been harsh, but in hindsight it kinda worked.

[loqiloqi]

Wealth is destroyed in war when a bomb blows up a bridge. Both the bomb and the bridge were there in the evening, and then gone in the morning. Wealth is destroyed by consumption when someone eats a sandwich. The sandwich was there, and then it was gone.

[waffleabc]

Wealth isn't necessarily destroyed by consumption and physical destruction. Leakages in the Business Cycle occur from savings. The wealth destroyed in wars is wealth that was invested and saved, and then failed.

[loqiloqi]

I was using the term 'wealth' to refer to actual things of actual value.

It is true that the concept of wealth might include things like financial instruments. That stuff is all fictional wealth. Its value is derived from what someone can convince somebody else to pay for it; or even, what someone can baldly assert he can convince some fictional character to pay.

Money is not wealth. Useful things are wealth. Luxuries are wealth too, but only when people are well fed enough to care about them.

[litwriter100]

Addendum to my last response: If we had a nuclear apocalypse with survivors, then only basic commodities such as food, water, clothing and perhaps a few other things would have any value. Our contemporary economy is largely geared to producing things we want to consume, not things we actually need to survive.

[litwriter100]

Your simple analysis fails to take into account that wealth translated into fiat currency (or even gold) is to a large extent subjective and illusory. For example, when the stock market crashes, vast paper wealth that never existed in reality is “destroyed” largely without it being transferred to anyone. It never existed. Bill Gates, for example, is not worth anywhere near as much in reality as he is on paper. He could never unload all his MS stock at once without the price nose-diving.

[Antioxidantt]

Apparently this video was made to prey on the uneducated. Austerity does work like Hungry in the 1980's and Sweden in the 1990's. It leads too bad times but that is kinda what austerity does given 10 years or so of TRUE austerity it works every time. Not once in history has austerity not worked.

[LordOrlock]

You know Hollande, the french 'Socialist', is doing an Austerity program right?...

[Fort976]

Read some proper media outlets and inform yourself before making ignorant assertions.