DEBATING IRISH FISCAL AUSTERITY.

Tom Smith writes: “If say three years from now, the Irish economy is humming along, I think it should get a Nobel Prize and everybody should listen to it in fawning adulation.” Not likely. The answer is always bigger government and more spending — except maybe spending on the military. Only the questions change . . . .

UPDATE: Related: Feeling like 1932?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vox Day, author of The Return Of The Great Depression, emails:

Just to correct Mr. Evans-Pritchard, 2010 corresponds to 1930, not 1932. He doesn’t grasp the significance of the debt issue: “Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster.”

That is naive. The central banks don’t have the tools to head off disaster. They CREATED the disaster. You might be amused by an anecdote. A friend of mine who was until recently the CEO of a very large multinational came back from a meeting in London bitching about what utter fools he’d been forced to suffer. When I asked him with whom he’d been meeting, he told me “the Bank of England”.

Gulp.