We do know that historically, austerity does not work: you cannot cut government spending to a point where it revives the economy. Cutting is always destructive to the economic body, just as surgery is for the physical, and must be limited to the absolute minimum necessary, which least affects the economy's recovery. To remove something that is not diseased weakens the body of the nation more than it strengthens it. The proof is in the history of the attempts to cut government spending in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States during the Great Depression. (See my August 26, 2011 OpEdNews article, " Mayday! Mayday! , or my January 3, 2013 OpEdNews article "Human State," for more on this subject.)
But let us also look at it simply from a common sense viewpoint: If you take away a government employee's job, they are no longer paying any taxes, they are not spending as much money at the stores for food, clothing, gas, etc., which means that those places they went to are going to have to cut back on the hours and number of people that they employ; ad infinitum. It is a vicious circle that worsens the effect of an economic downswing, and only the "banksters"--who are hoarding their money rather than loaning it to people to help grow those people's business--come out ahead. (The Professional Sex Providers--prostitutes for those of you who are a bit slow--of Spain staged a boycott against that nation's bankers over just that subject last year. See " A national sex strike! Spain's 'high-class hookers refuse to sleep with bankers until they open up credit lines to cash-strapped families,' " by Lee Moran , in the March 27, 2012 issue of the UK's Daily Mail newspaper. As one on-line commenter stated, " I assume these women were inspired by Aristophanes' Lysistrata .")
A government job, despite what the conservatives say, helps the economy because it gives the new government worker at least a temporary job. This allows them to buy food and other items that helps maintain the local economy until the economic downturn is over. With the multiplier effect the income, sales, and other taxes realized out of that government job and the other jobs it supports, will, in theory, pay a significant portion of the revenues invested, if the tax system is established in such a way to provide the greatest benefit to the 80-85% of the population who do not qualify as "living in poverty" or "rich." This is one of the essential features of what is referred to as Keynesian economics, which is still the most correct and successful theory of economics for the majority of a nation's population in history.
The rich do not like Keynesian economics. They do not like any government interference in the economy, because it forces them to go against their natural inclination to hoard their money during an economic downturn. Professor Keynes economic system also acts to curb the more intemperate inclinations of the rich the rest of the time. This is accomplished by forcing the rich to pay, directly or indirectly (by investments that employ additional people), for an improved economy in the form of increased government revenue. The wealthiest among us would otherwise hoard their wealth, or squander far too much of their capital in personally profitable paper instruments, as V.I. Lenin described stocks, bonds, and derivatives. In the United States, thanks to the decision in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (170 N.W. 668; Mich. 1919), companies must pay their shareholders a reasonable dividend on their investment in stocks ahead of all other needs of the company, unless they have the permission of a majority of the stockholders. This includes the expansion or improvement and modernization of all existing physical plants, hiring new employees, and investments in research and development that will improve the corporation's long-term economic viability, as well as our nation's overall economic infrastructure.
The instrument of coercion that is most generally hated--at least by the wealthy--of all entities, is the government. As British author G.K. Chesterton once wrote, " The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all." ( The Man Who Was Thursday, chapter 11; 1908.) Until of course, they need to be bailed out for putting short-term profit ahead of long-term fiscal responsibility.
British critic and author John Berger wrote, "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied " but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing." ("The Soul and the Operator," in Expressen, Stockholm; March 19, 1990; reprinted in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992.)
Let us go back to that dialogue of Plato, Protagoras, and those two Greek words/concepts aidos and dike .
Let's first look at the Greek word aidos ( �����' ) . This word as I stated earlier means both responsibility and the shame which accompanies our failure to fulfill our responsibility. It is a form of responsibility that we have to and for ourselves and others. This responsibility is both explicit and implicit to ourselves, our neighbors, and our nation. If I understand ancient Athens, Zeus Agoras (Zeus of the Open Space) was the patron god of this aspect of Athenian democracy, the responsibility of citizens to gather together in an open public space, and make those decisions that affected their City and its people.
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