Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: May 23, 2010 10:46:07 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?

SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2010
Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?
By Yves Smith
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/05/schama-are-the-guillotines-being-sharpened.html>

Simon Schama tonight warns in the Financial Times that revolutionary rage is close to the boiling point in Europe and 
the US :

Historians will tell you there is often a time-lag between the onset of economic disaster and the accumulation of 
social fury. In act one, the shock of a crisis initially triggers fearful disorientation; the rush for political 
saviours; instinctive responses of self-protection, but not the organised mobilisation of outrage…

Act two is trickier. Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a 
breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising 
expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation 
will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of 
grievance that “Someone Else” must have engineered the common misfortune….At the very least, the survival of a crisis 
demands ensuring that the fiscal pain is equitably distributed. In the France of 1789, the erstwhile nobility became 
regular citizens, ended their exemption from the land tax, made a show of abolishing their own privileges, turned in 
jewellery for the public treasury; while the clergy’s immense estates were auctioned for La Nation. It is too much to 
expect a bonfire of the bling but in 2010 a pragmatic steward of the nation’s economy needs to beware relying unduly on 
regressive indirect taxes, especially if levied to impress a bond market with which regular folk feel little 
connection. At the very least, any emergency budget needs to take stock of this raw sense of popular victimisation and 
deliver a convincing story about the sharing of burdens. To do otherwise is to guarantee that a bad situation gets very 
ugly, very fast.

Schama knows this terrain cold; his chronicle of the French Revolution, Citizens, made clear what a bloody affair it 
was. Even so, his account in the Financial Times in some key respects understates the degree of dislocation suffered by 
many in advanced economies. Schama depicts the crisis-induced change as merely the end of rising expectations, but the 
shock is deeper than that.

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