Public debt, private responsibility

“The financial crisis saw governments step in to take over debts that had been incurred by private citizens. They could do this because their power to tax their citizens assured lenders that they were good for the money.”

As a prelude to my forthcoming piece on austerity and public debt, Daniel Finkelstein‘s account in today’s The Times is lucid, accurately informed by personal history, and cuts through much of the misinformation being propagated by both right- and left-leaning members of the commentariat¹.