Austerity

Austerity is a morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds. Not satisfied with the Greeks‘, the Spaniards‘, their own people’s submission to their authority, the troika demanded also that the other weaklings of Europe, including the many Germans struggling against poverty, take the guilt and the blame for the crisis too.

—Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room, (London: Vintage, 2017), 40.