Today I am writing about child cruelty. We would all react to child cruelty in the same way – it is repugnant and undermines the chances of the child maturing into a fully functional adult replete with capacities that promote self esteem and allow meaningful and enduring relationships. So what would we think of child cruelty when a high level government agency is engaged in it? What would we think of a government that was poisoning the minds of the young? Many Americans write to me accusing me of being a communist sympathiser and claiming that freedom was subjugated under those regimes via brutal indoctrination mechanisms embedded in their societal infrastructure. Maybe it was. But the Americans don’t actually have to look very far nor resort to history to find regimes that use indoctrination to oppress their citizens’ free spirits, including the intellectual development of their children. On Thursday, June 3, the Director of the US Congressional Budget Office wrote his Letter to a Seventh Grader. It contains pure indoctrination designed to develop fears about budget deficits at an early age.

Today I was reflecting on a book I read a few weeks ago which has been picked up by progressives and the mainstream alike as a visionary construction of the latest crisis and its remedies. It is so comprehensively wrong that I am amazed celebrated. It reinforces another theme that the mainstream conservatives are increasingly rehearsing in the media and in policy debates – governments have exhausted their options and have to take fiscal austerity measures as the only way to bring their public debt ratios under control. The point is clear – there is very little concrete argument about how the proponents of austerity see growth returning. There is a lot on cutting peoples’ living standards via prolonged unemployment, the retrenchment of pension and health entitlements etc; transferring public assets via privatisations – but not a lot on how austerity promotes growth. Further, the idea that sovereign governments have exhausted their fiscal space is just a total fallacy. They may have exhausted their political space but that is quite a different matter requiring a different solution.