Austerity is the wrong answer

The only thing that seriously threatens the European Union (and the West in general) is the totally wrong attitude adopted to face the crisis: by supporting and feeding the elements that caused it.

The crisis has been caused by:
- toxic credits and we are supporting the banks who have been giving them
- speculation and we are posing the bases for more volatility
- decrease of the spending capability of the great population and we are imposing austerity on the lower incomes
- ...

What really puts Europe at risk now is the unsustainable economic liberalist nature of the Treaty of the Union and the irresponsible imposition of austerity measures that will only have as a outcome less spending power, more speculation, more bankruptcies, more concentration of wealth into the hands of a smaller fraction of the population...

If we go on like this, not only the EU is at risk (over all the euro) but we risk to slip back into soviet union! The moment the population can't feed their kids anymore, they will follow the first Mussolini, Hitler or Lenin that promises food in their dishes.

On the contrary we should walk the other way:
- higher progressive income and capital taxes rates,
- high taxes on short term financial investments,
- stronger (not weaker) protection of the social state and less "mobility"= more stability of work; less facility to lay off people
- slower growth, but more stable and more widely shared (there's no real progress if it's not for all, said Henry Ford)

Today the propaganda still keeps the population behind his leaders (over all in the US, where they lock disagreement with periodic conflicts that cause patriotism (= the refuge of the scoundrel, according to Samuel Johnson) but that will work less and less with the progressive reduction of the share of wealth that falls under the table of the richest.

This austerity mantra that everyone looks taking seriously is bringing us backwards of decades.
If we don't reverse gear now we'll get closer and closer to the France of Luis XVI or the Russia of the Zars.
And if you push a population to behead the wealthiest... what follows is Robespierre, Lenin or Hitler.
Do we want to get there?

I don't like to be a catastrophist, but each time I am my worries punctually happen.
You can call me Granny Cassandra and laugh of my worries ... or consider what might be correct in it and maybe for once help to avoid they become true.

http://www.letteradeglieconomisti.it/english.htm