By John Fund
Sunday, July 05, 2015
‘Today’s referendum doesn’t have winners and losers,”
claimed Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipris. That’s absurd. I can name one
clear loser.
It should now be obvious to the Eurocrats in Brussels
that their grand project of an increasingly centralized and integrated European
super-state will be rejected every time that ordinary people are somehow given
a chance to vote on it. If they represented a normal national government, the
Eurocrats would resign in shame and embarrassment.
The Dutch, French, and Irish all voted against European
super-state treaties, although the Irish were bribed into voting a second time
and eking out a yes. The Danes, Swiss, and Norwegians all voted to not join the
European Union. Now the Greek people, although many of them profess that they
still want to be part of the EU, have effectively blown up any chance they can
continue using the euro, the linchpin of the EU’s monetary policy.
I fear that this track record will not sway European
Union die-hards. Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of liberal forces in the
European parliament, has already called for giving Greeks “a second chance” to
stay with the euro.
There will be other calls to forgive Greece its debt in
order to keep the troubled country within the euro zone. Doing so would set a
terrible precedent for other countries and be patently unfair to the Italians,
Spanish, and Portuguese who have suffered under austerity measures over the
last five years to pay off their debts.
The rhetoric of Greek’s far-left leaders has been so
outrageous and over-the-top in recent months as to invent a new chapter in
“non-diplomacy.” Tsipris has already warned Brussels in the aftermath of
Sunday’s vote that Greece is going through a “humanitarian crisis,” the clear
implication being that if euro-zone ministers don’t acquiesce to his demands
for debt forgiveness and more loans, any human suffering will be on their
conscience.
His colleagues have been worse. Greek finance minister
Yanis Varoufakis — who has called European finance ministers terrorists and
admitted to having secretly taped official deliberations with them – is now
promising Greeks that the country’s banks will reopen by this Tuesday and
claiming that a new agreement will be reached within 48 hours of Sunday night.
When Sky News asked Varoufakis Sunday why people should believe him, since the
banks are running out of money, he snapped, “You’re spoiling a celebration of
democracy with impertinent questions.”
Greek foreign minister Nikos Kotzias warned in March that
if Greece was denied the nostrings-attached loans it is seeking, his country
would retaliate by sending Third World migrants and jihadists to Germany.
Meanwhile, Greek justice minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos said that if Germany
didn’t pay World War II reparations to Greece, his ministry would confiscate
German properties in Greece.
It would be completely irresponsible for European leaders
to reward such men by meeting their demands for loan extensions — especially
given that Greece would probably fail to meet any new rules Europeans might
propose in exchange for loan extensions.
So what should Brussels do? “For years Europe has been
placing sticking plaster over the euro’s open wound,” Seyed Kamall, the British
leader of the euroskeptic wing of the European Parliament, said today. “The
Greeks have just torn it off.” It might be time, he suggested, for the Greeks
to “take advantage of devaluation and become a more attractive destination for
investment and tourism.”
Peter Kazimir, the finance minister of Slovakia, tweeted
after the referendum results came in that “the nightmare of the euro-architects
that a country could leave the club seems like a realistic scenario after
Greece voted no today.”
Humility has never come easy to the Eurocrats in
Brussels. After all, no matter how many mistakes they’ve made, they seem to
stay in office and simply pay for their errors with the money of Europe’s
taxpayers. But in the middle of the Greek crisis, they should realize that this
is no time to continue headlong over a cliff. Most analysts agree that Greece’s
exiting from the euro today wouldn’t be the danger to the rest of Europe it
might have been five years ago.
And Europe would definitely be better off without Greece
as a constant thorn in its side. As for Greece, without Europe to blame for its
problems, perhaps it will finally kick out its populist and incompetent
government and do the right thing: adopt a new currency, create a simplified
tax system that people don’t feel obliged to evade, and abandon the crony capitalism
that is strangling its economy and people.
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