Chris Dillow: Conservatives & austerity

Chris Dillow ponders the strange relationship between Conservatives & austerity.

There’s a second way. Once we acknowledge that people’s incomes depend upon fiscal policy it follows that poverty is a failure of government rather than of individuals. Conservatives can then no longer regard it as a moral failing.

Fiscal austerity, therefore, is needed in order to maintain the “natural” hierarchy in which the rich are entitled to power because they are virtuous heroes whilst the poor must be stigmatized as lazy and feckless.

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Secondly, American rightists have no problem with the prospect of rising government debt if it means tax cuts for the rich. They value inequality and hierarchy over fiscal prudence.

Yes, support for austerity is an intellectual error. But it might be one founded in a peculiarity of the Conservative psyche. Keynesians, I fear, under-rate this point.

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George Orwell expressed the same sentiments in his book, 1984.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

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And I cannot resist including Adam Suttler's rant about why the people need the rulers:

People need hierarchy to protect them from all of those threats that the hierarchy created.