Once gold was restored, the game changed and the application of any and all austerity policies simply made things worse—in some cases, as we shall see, with deadly results. The parallel to the Eurozone as a gold standard without gold (you can’t devalue, inflate, or default there either) is both obvious and vitally important. That is, if none of these countries managed to make austerity work when they were on the classical gold standard and were far more authoritarian, why would we expect anything different to occur today in the Eurozone—or even America—when they are far more democratic?

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 504