Shrinking the Pie

Patricia Williams at The Nation, with one of the better descriptions of the wages of austerity, both budgetary and political:

this pitting of one against the other distracts from our failure to invest in all of our public institutions, lowering the quality of life for everyone. Fear of our most needy fellow citizens getting a bigger slice of the “preferential” pie has somehow driven us to bake smaller and smaller pies served at smaller and smaller tables. We seem locked in a fight over scraps, as though unaware of the banquet of generous possibilities we might, by reinvestment, choose to build for our world.