You have to be sensationally stupid – or wicked - to believe that austerity is a matter of choice

Any Western politician who pretends that cutting public spending is somehow an optional extra is either very stupid or a bare-faced liar – or both. But then, saying stupid things or lying through your teeth seem to be working a treat with the electorate.

The French, bless their little dirigiste, socialist socks, have voted for a man who has promised them that their economic woes can be magicked away without anyone apart from a few rich bastards feeling any pain whatsoever. The Greeks have rejected all the political parties foolish enough to tell them anything approaching the truth. Last week, the British electorate voted decisively for the Labour Party, whose leaders have taken to lying about the need for cuts.

Of course, as always, the lies are all coming from the Left. Recently, I wrote a post in which I asked whether left-liberals actually know that they’re lying (you can read it here). In an American Thinker article published yesterday, Steven Plaut  comes up with an intriguing answer to the same question. There are two “Lefts” – the Stupid and the Satanic. Representatives of the former actually do believe that all the deranged policies they come up with will work a treat, while the Satanic tendency know that the policies they advocate would be disastrous – which is the whole point of them:

The Stupid Left hates America because it thinks America promotes evil, oppressive regimes around the world.  The Satanic Left hates America because America gets in the way of the evil, oppressive regimes that the Satanic Left promotes.  

The Stupid Left denounces capitalism and globalization and supports communism because it really believes that people are poor and oppressed under capitalism but free and happy under socialism.  The Satanic Left denounces capitalism and supports communism precisely because it knows that the opposite is the case.  

The Stupid Left does not know that communism produces gulags.  The Satanic Left supports communism precisely because it produces gulags, and also because members of the Satanic Leftists presume that they will be placed in charge of the gulags. 

Similarly, the Satanic Left know full well that not slashing public spending will lead to even worse economic disaster down the road – and that’s exactly what they want! They want to see freedom, capitalism and democracy destroyed. As Nick Cohen argued in his superb book, What’s Left?, the sort of lefties who support Islamofascism and glory in terrorism and hate America are essentially nihilists.

Steven Plaut claims there are only two Lefts, but I believe there’s a third tendency – the Conscienceless Left – whose membership consist mainly of high-rankling politicians. In this country, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are its leading lights: as two of the architects of this country’s current economic woes, they know full well that the last Labour government's sucking up to the banks and its deranged levels of public spending brought Britain to the brink. They’ve turned against the bankers whose fecklessness they once encouraged, but when it comes to spending cuts – which they know to be utterly necessary – they’re now telling two big lies, namely that there have been vicious cuts from which we are all suffering (whereas public spending’s still rising) and that the economy would roar back to life if only planned cuts were deferred to some unspecified future date. They know these claims are false, but they’re making them in order to gain short-term electoral advantage – and because they don’t have a clue how to turn the economy around.

Miliband and Balls don’t want the whole system to come crashing down – so they’re not Satanic – but they’re happy for Britain’s economy to grow even weaker in the hopes that that would help them win the 2015 election.

All Liberal Democrats are, of course, members of the Stupid Left.