Austerity creates fascism

Austerity creates fascism

Cory Doctorow, April 12, 2026 [Pluralistic]
 

…”Austerity begets fascism” is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there’s a good empirical basis for believing it. In “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right” four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists: Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right – Evidence from England’s National Health Service (pdf) Here’s how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that “public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards.” Good public services are the basis for “the social contract between rulers and the ruled” – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served. When public services go wrong, people don’t always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they “withdraw their support” for the system. Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.”….

The Real Story of Crypto

 

.@ben_mckenzie on how crypto helps criminals and hostile states evade sanctions — and how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick profits from it. #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics pic.twitter.com/cVzlhiq5ST

— The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (@weeklyshowpod) April 15, 2026

 

So...besides enabling ransomware, and significantly contributing to global warming, crypto corrupts our government.

 JFYI, China has outlawed crypto mining. 

Update: Bitcoin Gets A Dark Money-Backed Assist In Congress

Veronica Riccobene, Apr 13, 2026 [The Lever]
 

Bitcoin’s secret backers celebrate a bonanza. A dark money pro-cryptocurrency influence group with deep ties to Trumpworld is lauding a new Senate bill codifying President Trump’s plans for a crypto-boosting strategic Bitcoin reserve and onshoring Bitcoin mining. The Lever’s Freddy Brewster reports that the Satoshi Action Fund — a 501(c)(4) group that does not disclose its donors — has shared top personnel with the Koch network of right-wing think tanks and dark money nonprofits. That includes the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 plan to overhaul the government under Trump. An executive with the pro-Bitcoin group even wrote the Project 2025 chapter on dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. A federal Bitcoin stockpile could boost the crypto token’s value to nearly $1 million a token, more than 10 times its current value — a massive giveaway to the largest Bitcoin owners, two percent of whom own more than 90 percent of all of the currency in circulation. The new bill was co-introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who is not seeking reelection after serving a sole term as a senator, during which she bestowed the title of “the Senate’s first and finest bitcoiner.”

  

MMT vs. Austrian Economics

Austrians want to make microeconomics the foundation of macroeconomics. Sonenshein, Mantel and Debreu proved, mathematically that micro is unsuitable as a foundation of macro. Two plus two would have to equal five before Austrians could be true.

Microeconomics: Savings is a good idea.

Macroeconomics: If everyone net saves, and your spending is my income, then we get the Great Depression. 

One other Austrian myth: Money supplanted barter, and credit ultimately replaced money. The sequence here: barter, then money, then credit.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of credit from ~3500 BCE, primarily marks on clay tablets for pay stubs, bar tabs and other obligations. Money (coins) arrived at ~800-600 BCE, literally millenia later. The correct sequence: credit, then money, and very, very rarely, barter.

David Graeber observes, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that there has never been economic money (not magical money) without a supervising authority like a temple, king, or state. Never!

States create markets like this: If the king wants to hire 1,000 soldiers, he has a logistical nightmare ahead. He has to pay, clothe, feed, train and supply the soldiers and their steeds. How does he do it? He pays them in the authorized currency--let's call it "crowns." Then he taxes the entire population in crowns. This is obviously a simple example, and real world markets are more complex, but you get the idea. The Austrian idea of markets originating with "free people" with "free exchanges" is not something supported by history. 
 

Why are things so expensive?

 

pic.twitter.com/DxQ6g4oY3x

— Thursday (@ennui365) April 7, 2026

The costs of war

 

China's high speed rail costs about $17-21 million per km to build.

China built over 1,000 km of high speed rail for the cost of US war on Iran so far https://t.co/CWy3p1Hfgp pic.twitter.com/A0i87Cvgrs

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) March 16, 2026

From Every Country That Lost It All Passed Through This Moment First — The U.S. Government Has Been Converted Into a Single Family’s Financial Instrument

Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose work on why nations fail identified the transition from inclusive to extractive institutions as the single most reliable predictor of national economic deterioration, documented this sequence across centuries of comparative history before this administration took office. Extractive institutions are those designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader population. Every country that completed this transition took the same path: oversight capture first, financial extraction second, institutional hollowing third, and population bearing the biological cost last….

The critical variable in every case is not the volume of theft. Plenty of governments have sustained corruption without producing failed states. The critical variable is the deliberate destruction of the institutional layer between the extraction and the population.

 

Business as usual

 

Watching the discourse around the plane crash in Iran.

Everyone’s arguing over the aircraft , the recovery operation, the timeline, the flight path, the debris, the radar data…

Meanwhile, nobody stops to ask the most obvious question — whether the entire ridiculous story is… pic.twitter.com/bB3KMP1kw0

— Morgan (@MorganC000) April 5, 2026

Houston...meh!

Houston is often touted as the apotheosis of the "abundance" agenda, and is revered by anti-government libertarians. Why? Because it has the most minimal zoning possible, specifying only minimum lot sizes and road design. If you live in a single family home and want to open a bar in your living room (and the private subdivision restrictions don't forbid it), you can. It's a libertarian paradise!

One other observation: if you look at cities (and counties) with complex zoning restrictions--e.g., Sacramento City or County--you will see they look almost identical to Houston. Zoning, at least as practiced in parts of California, is completely ineffective, and regularly ignored, especially if someone politically influential wants a zoning change. (I've discussed this before here.) 

A new bit of information is that Houston's lack of zoning does not lead to prosperity or more affordable housing.

 

Notice that three Texas cities populate in this poverty ranking, but only two California cities appear.  The ranking is even more one-sided when one compares the availability of affordable rentals.

 

From replies to the Tweet that is the source of the above:

What's the percentage of the population that is classified as rent burdened?

 Alicia Gerardo: According to Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, about 51% of renters in Houston are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on housing. Additionally, more than 25% of renters spend half of their income on rent.

 Philip: Any info on the right graph as to what was considered affordable?

Alicia Gerardo: The National Low Income Housing Coalition's The Gap Report defines affordable housing as "Housing units with rent and utilities that do not exceed 30% of a given income threshold."nlihc.org  

The U.S. has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income renter households. Find out more. #TheGap26

 Philip: Nice, thank you! I think what the “just build more housing!” crowd doesn’t get is that no amount of new housing is ever going to drive prices down to a price affordable to people making 30-40k a year, which is a gigantic chunk of people.