printThe following excerpt is from this week’s column, “Save the People; Kill the European Superstate”:
“An honest man,” wrote Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged,” “is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.” Where does this leave the Greeks?
For the second time since 2010, Eurozone finance ministers threw Greece a “financial lifeline,” this time to the tune of $172 billion. The European banks have agreed to write-off more than 50 percent of the money owed by Greece, forgiving a $100 billion in debt.
Still, Athens, like Washington, is corrupt to the core. It continues to spend more than it takes in. Greek labor markets have yet to be liberalized. A high minimum wage impedes hiring. And, by BBC News’s accounting, “a habit of paying a ‘holiday bonus’ equal to one or two months’ extra pay” persists. One need not be a Delphic oracle to divine the next stage in Greece’s unraveling: a downgrading of the country’s credit rating to junk status.
“Austerity,” however, is a euphemism among politicians and their media pack animals for “long term retrenchment and reform” in the public sector. Implicit in their critique of “austerity” is that inflicting pain on the Greek state apparatus will inevitably destroy Greek society.
Au Contraire. State and society should never be conflated.
Try explaining to our president that the bigger the state, the smaller the civil society. …
Read the complete column, “Save the People; Kill the European Superstate.”
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I often wonder how Greek these modern “Greeks” really are. By the time the USA celebrates the 300 anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, over one half of the population will have become unrecognizable to our Founders. And this has occurred without the benefit of a foreign army invading and occupying the land.
Given it’s been about 8 times as long since Alexander, one wonders how much of Greece is unrecognizable to the Ancients given all the invasions and occupations that have occurred the last 2400 years.
I guess this is the only way I can square the present state of Greece against its great history, by believing these present occupants have nothing in common with the Ancients.
Greece is so far gone down the path of the European union (a terrifying chimera of welfare, warfare, corporatism, dirigisme, postmodernism and erosion of morals), that I no longer believe it can fix its problems without a violent uprising by the people followed by a failure of whatever government they instal.
Derek – one need not go so far as to compare the modern Greeks with the ancient Greeks as to just compare the American Moocher-hideen (the welfare-warfare addicts) with the American Founders. And that is just 200 or so years. Speaking of the welfare state, Patrick Buchanan has an excellent analysis on POVERTY in America:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/did-the-great-society-ruin-society/
with apparently many of the poor living better (in some ways) than I do. That half the country thinks that I should be taxed for such essentials as improving their sex life shows the complete degeneracy of the society.
Size seems to be a way to cover up economic irresponsibility. What a small bank cannot do, Fannie Mae can. There is no way that a small town could set up a welfare state while its neighbors practiced sound economics but scale up the government and corruption metastasizes. What a Wyoming or a Denmark could not do on its own, an America or a Europa can. There is little that a Peter Thiel can get out of a Continent-sized Megastate but there is much for the welfare-warfare consumers.
We should be more like Liechtenstein – small and free.
In Revolt Of The Masses Ortega y Gasset expounds on the modern process of making a cannon: “you take a hole, wrap some steel wire tightly round it, and that’s your cannon.”
It’s breathtaking how far we’ve come and how much we can now make of a hole.
“Athens, like Washington, is corrupt to the core.” You boiled it down to the basic. Washington’s corruption is the main reason for the myriad of dilemmas we face.
I quite enjoy watching Greek Socialists and Euro Banksters reaming each other out. Even the CDS’s aren’t being allowed to kick in; poor hedge-funders. Suckers, all. And this is just the beginning: Portugal, Spain, Italy…finally the anglosphere. Beached, statist whales.
All of the bailouts, stimulus, zero interest rate policies, trillion dollar deficits, QE and the like, is proof positive that there is no free lunch.
The bill must be paid.