It seems the Right’s echo chamber is alive and, well, not working very well. Both Guido Fawkes and Dan Hannan, the Muckraker in Chief and eminence grise of the Right, respectively, have make the same, and, in the Parallax Brief’s view, utterly ludicrous, point about the government’s pre-budget report.

Guido:

The Budget Britain Needs Was Delivered in Ireland

By coincidence here in Ireland it was also budget day, the Finance Minister Brian Lenihan delivered a 7% cut in public expenditure to match the 7.5% fall in GDP in 2009. To equal that Alastair Darling would need to have announced £40 billion in public expenditure cuts today.

Dan:

Ireland is trying to spend less, with cuts across the board. Everyone will share the pain, from cabinet ministers to benefits claimants. The Taoiseach, who is expected to take a 20 per cent salary reduction, reckons that the new budget will reduce Ireland’s deficit by 4 billion euros.

The United Kingdom, by contrast, wants to spend more. Alistair Darling will continue to expand the budget, and will raise taxes accordingly.

But, hang on a second: is the Parallax Brief the only one around here who has read some pretty disturbing things about the pernicious impact of all these cuts in Ireland and just what they’re doing to the economy?

LeftFootForward has the goods:

- Irish unemployment is 12.5 per cent

- the country is experiencing deflation at -6.6 per cent deflation

- GDP has fallen 7.4 per cent over the past year (and GNP by 11.6 per cent).

- And despite the cuts they have still had their credit rating downgraded.

Or, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard said about Ireland’s economic policy with his customary elan and effortless erudition in the Telegraph earlier this year:

Depression buffs will note the parallel with Britain’s infamous budget in September 1931, when Phillip Snowden cut the dole and child allowance to uphold the deflation orthodoxies of the Gold Standard – though in that case the flinty Pennine rather liked hair-shirts for their own sake.

Though few had any inkling at the time, Snowden’s austerity drive would soon push British society over the edge. It set off a mutiny – a Royal Navy mutiny at Invergordon over pay cuts, in turn triggering a run on sterling…

This is torture for a debtors’ economy. You can survive deflation; you can survive debt; but Irving Fisher taught us in his 1933 treatise “Debt Deflation causes of Great Depressions” that the two together will eat you alive.

Those with a libertarian bent on the right really would sacrifice the Lion and the Unicorn on the altar of erroneous orthodoxy.