Propaganda and its Guises

"Dear Sir,
As expected, a key election issue concerns how much to cut government expenditure in 2010/11.   The main opposition party now proposes to cut an extra £6 billion, on top of the measures already planned by the government.   This cut is described as efficiency savings.   But in macroeconomic terms it is just a cut by another name.   It will lead directly to job losses and indirectly to further falls in spending through the standard multiplier process. This is not the time for such a destabilising action.   The recovery is still fragile.   Firms and households are saving more to rebuild their balance sheets, so that firms are investing less and households are spending less.   Only when the recovery is well underway, will it be safe to have extra cuts in government expenditure.   The first step is to make sure that growth returns, and thus that tax receipts recover.   Rash action now could imperil not only jobs but also the prospects for reducing the deficit."

Reading that letter makes me sigh.   Of course it would be nice not to cut, particularly if you look at the world with keynesian eyes, as Skidelsky does.  But  others, with other eyes,  do not intend to cut out of sheer viciousness -  though the temptation to remove 'jobs' which are nothing more than client-state sinecures is strong.

The economic incompetence, nay true economic illiteracy of Brown, left festering at the heart of our country's economic governance for far too long by the New Labour power compromise, requires immediate cuts. International creditors have held off until May, after that, the deluge if inappropriate keynsian partisanship attempts to encourage the big state, anti-democratic, 'progressive' authoritarian rule.  

The attitude displayed in this letter is nothing to do with economic truth, or even economic best practice. Old men seeking self-justification for an intellectual stance they have held all their lives and cannot bear to recognise now is inadequate for dealing with the economic circumstances to which our country has been reduced,  should be aware that letters of this kind to the newspapers are nothing more than propaganda dressed as technical judgment.  They are propaganda for a discreditable, corrupt, anti-democratic bully and his party, posing as defenders of the poor and providers of equality and a fair chance for all.

Keynes is an Angels hero. This, however, is not about economics. It's about democracy and the assault being mounted on it by the usual suspects: by those who think they are qualified and equipped to tell us what to do and constrain us, attack us, wage war on some of us, if we won't.

After  thirteen years of anti-democratic government, some have wondered if a  kind of Truth and Reconciliation commission might be needed to mend the damage done by self-styled and appointed-among-themselves shepherds of us the poor people, and bring them to book.   Angels recommends the measures adopted in Italy after the overthrow of Fascism - another, if cruder,  exemplar of economic corporatism, social bullying, and war-mongering.

UPDATE

The letter has been published in the Times.  Among others, after Skidelsky, it is signed as you would expect by: Richard Layard, David Blanchflower, Victoria Chick, Partha Dasgupta, Richard Portes and,
in collaboration with,  Aubrey Silberston!