5 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Cattexas's avatar

Nope. What do you think would or could be authoritative and oppressive about a “right wing government”???? Close borders? Tough on crime? Smaller government? List what you are afraid of instead of just the usual fear of “right wing”.

Expand full comment
Julinthecrown's avatar

I think the definition of 'right wing government' needs to be more clearly defined before we start to discuss it.

Expand full comment
Tom McNabb's avatar

Well, take the recent Geert Wilders sort-of win. It leaves "conservative" Mark Rutte as part of the coalition. You may be thinking that's a good thing, but Rutte is one of them. And take Jean-Luc Melancon. He's supposed to be left wing, but by a rational categorization, we would call him populist right. Then, the National Rally, people describe them as populist right. But Le Pen's father was talking about the need in a democracy to rediscover the lost "kingly role" of the state, the role of the investor whose interests are aligned with that of the economy and society as-a-whole.

Finally: it is austerity that has been the punishment stick the European state uses, via the definition of the Euro, it's allowed quantity per member nation, as a ratio of fiscal spending to GDP, to control member nations. And austerity equates to right wing politics. So what you say makes sense on a surface level and has something to it, we need to be a bit precise here, as the other commenter said, about what we mean.

Expand full comment
DrGU's avatar

Austerity is one step removed from the Weimer Republic.

Expand full comment
Tom McNabb's avatar

There are strong parallels, right.

That said, in finally instituting austerity, Minister of Finance, Hjalmar Schacht, effectively ended the hyperinflation--Mosler, Armstrong (book abstract, Weimar...). That said there was significant unemployment, i.e., overshoot, resulting from Schacht's quantitative approach, Mosler and Armstrong suggest.

Putting aside Germany's response, as Allied victor, what how would you have set the Armistice terms? Ideally, the allies could have won a stronger victory, been left less nearly equally economically ruined, and so on and we could have the strong one-sided decision of a *proper hypothetical*.

The problem as I see it was that the major companies were still controlled by the same shareholders, so in back of the democratic Weimar government lay the same leadership of the economic strcture, with unchanged feudal era attitudes.

Expand full comment