The liquidationist logic makes austerity seem unavoidably necessary.

Evidence

Liquidationism therefore argues for an inevitability—the slump must happen—and also for intervention’s unintended consequences—if you get in the way of that inevitability you will end up making it worse. The consequence of this line of thinking is austerity—purging the system and cutting spending—which becomes the essence of recovery. Austerity may be painful, but it is unavoidable since undergoing such emetic periods is the essence of capitalism’s process of investment and discovery. There was, therefore, no alternative. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 324

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘there was no alternative’ framing prefigures the TINA discourse central to austerity critiques like Mattei’s. — connects to: Austerity was installed by deliberately confusing cause and correlation — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 204; Economics legitimizes austerity claims by pretending to value-free objectivity.; The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: the rhetorical archaeology of ‘There Is No Alternative’ — from Schumpeter’s liquidationism to Thatcher.

Broader Connections

• Austerity was installed by deliberately confusing cause and correlation #expands (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 204
• Economics legitimizes austerity claims by pretending to value-free objectivity. #corroborates (0.75)
• Technocrats used claims of objectivity to make austerity unopposable. #corroborates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 666
• Austerity’s intuitive logic fails once distributional and aggregate questions are asked #complicates (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 41
• The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity #complicates (0.70) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950
• Austerity operates as speculation that converts fiction into fact #responds-to (0.70) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 400