zompist wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 5:36 pm
rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 3:39 pm
Regarding the EU: Greeks say the EU's austerity measures have crippled its poorer members. Personally, I don't know enough details about EU politics.
So far as I know, they're right. Elites, and Germans, are still unwilling to understand Keynesian economics— they
love austerity, largely because other people feel the pain. Reading Adam Smith, you can find the same attitude 250 years ago: he had to make arguments that recessions are bad actually. After all, workers in good times tend to demand more money.
During the last set of crises Paul Krugman pointed out that the US avoids some of these problems because it's an actual country. If there's a recession, unemployment, Social Security, and other benefits go disproportionately to poor states; nobody thinks of this as "New York and California bailing out Louisiana and West Virginia". But the safety net is not federalized in the EU, so e.g. Germans don't want to subsidize Greece.
I half agree with this.
The part where I agree: Greece got some help from EU, but probably too little too late, and after years of useless bickering; and the demands for austerity measures were excessive.
It's not just Germans; EU leaders were happy to let Germany take the blame, but as I recall they weren't exactly in favor of generous help either.
The Greek crisis was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis; but there were deep underlying causes that would have eventually provoked a crisis no matter what. Basically, Greek didn't collect enough taxes and the Greek government overspent and took on debts that couldn't be repaid.
There weren't doing Keynesianism either, at least not as I understand it. Greece let its rich evade taxes and what it overspent on weren't social programs, but military expenses.
The narrative at the time was that this somewhat the EU's fault, or the Euro. I can't agree with that. As I said, the EU certainly didn't do enough to help (though it did help, eventually). But Greece would have gone through a crisis anyway.
I probably misrember, but I think Krugman suggested the Euro got in the way. I don't see how getting out of the Eurozone, or not being in it in the first place would have helped. The one thing that could have been done without the Euro was devaluate, which would have been a lot worse in the long run.
I do agree with Krugman to the extent that there should be more social programs on a European scale. And of course punishing austerity measure prolonged the crisis -- though these happen on a national level as well.
Arguably the problem with Keynesianism is that only a handful of countries can afford it. Everyone else, if they try it, will quickly run out of people willing to buy their bonds. If investors had been eager to buy Greek bonds, Greece would never have been so dependent on the Troika in the first place, and the Troika would never have been able to force austerity on Greece.
Investors were in fact a little too eager to buy Greek bonds. I'd say the problem with Keynesianism is that the basic principles are easy to figure out; but the money has to be directed in economically useful ways, which is not a trivial problem at all.
Shouldn't all democratic parties cooperate when democracy faces a major challenge from extremists and populists? I think that is what Macron attempts to achieve. I don't know whether Lecornu is the best choice for that, though; I know too little about French politics.
A new government has been announced (mostly people from Renaissance, so core Macron supporters.) We'll see what happens.
I agree that what Macron attemps to achieve is cooperation with non-populists. The problem is, he is very committed to certain centrist and/or conservative views -- blinded by them as a result. As a result, he and his party offer no concessions of their own. Our political parties stick to their gun and are unreasonable unwilling to compromise; but Macron isn't exactly setting an example either.
So what he's happening is that he's governing with a minority; this is something our constitution allows; but it raises issues of legitimacy.
Myself, I believe new elections would have been a better option. Or barring that, a technical government, as was done in Italy.
