When the Conservative-led government in Britain announced a budget plan in 2010 based on dramatic austerity measures designed to lower that country’s budget deficit, the news was greeted by many U.S.-based pundits with enthusiasm: Finally, a major economy was going to apply the sort of medicine that Very Serious People agreed was needed. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (5/9/10) quoted Economist editor John Micklethwait as saying the British vote of 2010 was the first Western election “based on pain”—and it’s hard not to feel Friedman was taking pleasure in the London-based Financial Times’ declaration (4/26/10) that “the next government [...]