It's not about profit, it's about ENOUGH profit. And I've seen a lot of Keynesians who wail about austerity leading to recessions and complaining that it doesn't make sense to follow policies that lead to recessions. This explains that it DOES make sense to the big bourgeoisie.

Most petit bourgeois who rely on retail point of sale for their profit are satisfied with making anything, especially if they can pay themselves a salary to go along with making that profit. But the REAL owners in society aren't satisfied with just making a profit on top of their giant salaries. They have to make ENOUGH profit. And that rate of profit has gone down since 1999 according to some economists I trust who track that kind of thing.

That's a nutshell of why they'll push austerity even if it leads to a recession. Because it's not a recession for them, it's an opportunity to acquire and consolidate.

Hard-sell loans and bogus derivatives to countries - like Greece - then demand to be paid back regardless of their own criminality when their bets blow up in their faces. So where does the money come from? Out of the hides of the people. All to bail out the banksters who made the risky bets in the first place. Socialism for the rich, the sharpest end of capitalism for all others. Guillotines are looking better every day for those fuckers.

During and after the Crash of 2008 the banksters pocketed more than $13 TRILLION from TARP, the Fed and the Treasury according to Nomi Prins, and who would know better than she? It all went into the banksters' pockets. The rabble didn't see a dime of it.

by top-down thinkers like bankers. The opine that if capital is distributed during times of economic stress, there won't be enough around to rebuild. What they don't realize is that distributed capital is necessary to stimulate demand so that massive rebuilding is not necessary.

They have no concept of how much they absolutely depend on the demand side.

Not only that, but capital in the absence of demand never rebuilds anything.

No rich man ever created a job unless there were a lot of poor folks with money in their pockets who wanted to buy what that job would produce.

the truth that Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1861:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

For the big bourgeoisie, demand is not as important as the rate of profit and austerity is what restores that rate of profit and, as the article posits, has the added benefit of breaking the power of the seller of labor, the worker.

From that top-down perspective demand comes later.

As a more or less subscriber to MMT and post-Keynesians generally, I find Kalecki's analysis the most persuasive. It's a question of who holds the power over employment and the economy: private actors or the government that's supposed to represent the citizenry.

Now I'll go read the article and see what it says.

I do believe that it's a question of who holds the power in the workplace. But I don't think it's between private actors or the government because the government in end-stage capitalism is owned BY the private actors. It's between private actors, aka owners, or the workers.