The moral corruption of living permanently on borrowed money that will never be paid

“Talibans of Austerity”

by Theodore Dalrymple

A sentence in the French newspaper Le Monde recently caught my eye: Il y aura toujours des talibans de l’austérité, there will always be the Talibans of austerity. It was uttered by the economist Jean Pisani-Ferry in an interview in the newspaper about the crisis in the Euro zone, and it made me think at once of the Confucian dictum in the Analects that the first task necessary in restoring a polity to health is the rectification of language. Words must be used correctly, for if they are not moral collapse follows.

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But language has to be tethered to relatively fixed meanings in some way or other if words are not simply to be instruments of domination à la Humpty Dumpty. Let us then, consider the phrase “Talibans of austerity” and what it signifies.

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