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Comment by lyudmil | Hacker News Reader

Since you'll likely be directly involved politically in this issue (by protesting and/or voting), I urge you to read the comment I left as a reply to another comment further down the thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2558318

It's important to understand the reasons for the crisis. Your leadership should take responsibility for what happened, but the voting public should develop and demand different policies from their successors. I think it's crucial to realize austerity could only make things worse and that it's currently being forced upon a number of the poorer EU countries (I'm also a citizen of one). I'm sure corruption is a problem, but in this case it goes much deeper and runs right into the almost religious adherence to neoliberal economics throughout Europe and the US.

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While fine-targeted spending can foster growth and productivity, that thing you've thought of about having one person digging and other one filling holes is completely wrong.

How do I know? The idiot in charge in my country spent thousands of millions of euros developing that near-sighted idea to no avail. He just kept the housing-bubble men busy for a while longer.

And then along came deficit.

It's clearly a dumb thing to do, I agree. I'm just arguing it's better than austerity.

I'm sorry, but that is completely irrelevant to the situation in Spain, which among other things just suffered a housing bubble that almost makes the one in the US look like child's play.

The employment market and other aspects of the Spanish economy are stuck in the middle ages.

Surprisingly, the big Spanish banks were mostly responsible and have done better than banks in other countries, but the rest of the economy is bust because half was in the construction sector and the other half was is the government sector, you can't have a viable economy like that, you need private productive industries, and for that you need to make it possible for people to start new business and properly run existing business.

Well the construction sector is nothing like half of the economy (16% of GDP, 12% of employment before the crash). Still, if you have 16% of your economy collapse, you will have severe problems. However, the reason why it collapsed is the same reason it collapsed everywhere else in Europe - there was no financing. Your point simply doesn't contradict mine, except for your assertion that the private sector is the only way out.

The private sector cannot currently be the solution because the money it depends on are in banks as I pointed out before. Banks aren't lending because of the problems on their balance sheets. The government, on the other hand, can print money and is the only institution that can do so, so it is your only option.

My evidence in support of what I'm arguing is Germany, whose government intervened to stimulate the economy and currently has had less of a drop in employment than the US even though its GDP fell more. Work-sharing is the most prominent, and probably most successful, program in that regard.

NOTE: I'm not arguing this is sustainable forever. What I'm arguing only applies to the current situation, which is anything but normal.

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