スティグリッツ、シバキ主義を駁する

Joseph Stiglitz*1 “Austerity has been an utter disaster for the eurozone” http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/01/austerity-eurozone-disaster-joseph-stiglitz

ジョセフ・スティグリッツ、緊縮政策（シバキ主義）を叱る。勿論初めてではないけど。

Austerity has failed. But its defenders are willing to claim victory on the basis of the weakest possible evidence: the economy is no longer collapsing, so austerity must be working! But if that is the benchmark, we could say that jumping off a cliff is the best way to get down from a mountain; after all, the descent has been stopped.
But every downturn comes to an end. Success should not be measured by the fact that recovery eventually occurs, but by how quickly it takes hold and how extensive the damage caused by the slump.
Viewed in these terms, austerity has been an utter and unmitigated disaster, which has become increasingly apparent as European Union economies once again face stagnation, if not a triple-dip recession, with unemployment persisting at record highs and per capita real (inflation-adjusted) GDP in many countries remaining below pre-recession levels. In even the best-performing economies, such as Germany, growth since the 2008 crisis has been so slow that, in any other circumstance, it would be rated as dismal.
The most afflicted countries are in a depression. There is no other word to describe an economy like that of Spain or Greece*2, where nearly one in four people – and more than 50% of young people – cannot find work. To say that the medicine is working because the unemployment rate has decreased by a couple of percentage points, or because one can see a glimmer of meager growth, is akin to a medieval barber saying that a bloodletting is working, because the patient has not died yet.

緊縮財政の最大で長期的な効果のひとつはヨーロッパの「潜在的な成長の低下」である；

Simply put, the long recession is lowering Europe’s potential growth. Young people who should be accumulating skills are not. There is overwhelming evidence that they face the prospect of significantly lower lifetime income than if they had come of age in a period of full employment.

独逸の罪；

Meanwhile, Germany is forcing other countries to follow policies that are weakening their economies – and their democracies. When citizens repeatedly vote for a change of policy – and few policies matter more to citizens than those that affect their standard of living – but are told that these matters are determined elsewhere or that they have no choice, both democracy and faith in the European project suffer.

仏蘭西社会党政権は法人税引き下げ政策を行っている。しかし、それはスティグリッツ先生によると、”a recipe almost guaranteed to weaken the economy”であるという。また、投資の増大にもあまり寄与しない；

The hope is that lower corporate taxes will stimulate investment. This is sheer nonsense. What is holding back investment (both in the United States and Europe) is lack of demand, not high taxes. Indeed, given that most investment is financed by debt, and that interest payments are tax-deductible, the level of corporate taxation has little effect on investment.

さらに「私有化＝民営化（privatisation）」の神話も、米国の民営医療保険の非効率性が挙げられ、駁される。

*2:See eg. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20111110/1320866674 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20130919/1379552629