Joshua Sperber — Krugman’s Austerity Blinders

Yet what is critical here is Krugman and other liberals’ understanding of precisely what “work” in fact means. 

Liberals are of course correct that European austerity, as well as the US version, has not generated an immediate economic expansion. But to get a clearer idea of the actual purpose of austerity, it is far more useful to listen not to liberal economists but to the politicians who actually decide to implement it. Greek European Commissioner Maria Damanaki recently noted, “‘The strategy of the European Commission over the past year and a half or two has been to reduce the labour costs in all European countries in order to improve the competitiveness of European companies over the rivals from Eastern Europe and Asia.’”

Similarly, in her recent keynote speech at the World Economic Forum, Angela Merkel was admirably frank in asserting that high unemployment is, according to the Guardian, the “price Europe had to pay to become more competitive.” Merkel’s statement that austerity is intended to “ensure the prosperity of our people” is an oxymoron only to those liberal economists who do not see capitalism as a class-based system. For, Krugman’s contention that recessions are merely “technical malfunctions” ignores what both politicians and capitalists have long asserted: recessions are “correctives” that reduce the cost of the one commodity that is more adjustable and often more expensive than any other: labor. 

Austerity, via slashing social spending and expanding a surplus labor pool that is ever more desperate, achieves its aim via making labor cheap enough so that it can again be profitably exploited by capitalists. That is, our recession will come to an end, and the standard of living will be ever-lower, once business can again make a profit off of an ample number of workers, which of course is wage labor’s raison d’etre in capitalism in the first place. While the consequences of further impoverishing millions of people in order to more effectively profit off of them might engender political instability, this is not part of the economic equation. After all, political instability is what police states are for.