Subsidies, especially those extended to poor people in Western and developed states, have always been resented by free market advocates who argue they amount to encouraging people to be sluggish, lazy and parasitical. They hate the very idea of extending help and succour to people from the bottom layer of social stratification.

Market fundamentalists, therefore, fiercely support the idea of a brutal austerity programme, urging the governments to slash social welfare budgets to strike a fiscal balance. It is perhaps the influence of these followers of laissez-faire that forced many countries, known for their social welfare projects, to cut down on such spending, which spells a disaster for people in several Western states, leading to the rise of far-right demagogues.

While subsidies given to the people in the form of benefits or social welfare are much talked about, other invisible forms of favours go unnoticed or largely ignored by the mainstream corporate media. Anti-austerity critics point out the hypocrisy of free market thinkers who do not want any government intervention and want to see a society where capitalists are fiercely competing with each other and letting the market decide their fate, but whenever a crisis hits a capitalist country, these advocates of unbridled capital want the government to inject money from the public taxes in a bid to clear the mess created by the anarchy of production and blind competition between capitalists.

Many advocates of capitalism – from liberal economic thinker John Maynard Keynes to free market fanatic Milton Friedman – wanted the hard-earned money of the people to be spent for the benefit of the capitalist economy, especially when it is on the verge of a financial or economic meltdown. Keynes strongly supported lavish spending of public money on worthless infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy which might also benefit people in one or another way. At the same time, Friedman........

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