By George Will
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Now come Greeks bearing the gift of confirmation that
Margaret Thatcher was right about socialist governments: “They always run out
of other people’s money.” Greece, from whose ancient playwrights Western drama
descends, is in an absurdist melodrama about securing yet another cash infusion
from international creditors. This would add another boulder to a mountain of
debt almost twice the size of Greece’s gross domestic product. This protracted
dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a
constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable,
growth-suppressing entitlements.
In January, Greek voters gave power to the left-wing
Syriza party, one third of which, The Economist reports, consists of “Maoists,
Marxists and supporters of Che Guevara.” Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, 40, a
retired student radical, immediately denounced a European Union declaration
criticizing Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine. He chose only one Cabinet member
with prior government experience — a leader of Greece’s Stalinist Communist
party. Tsipras’s minister for culture and education says Greek education
“should not be governed by the principle of excellence . . . it is a warped
ambition.” Practicing what he preaches, he proposes abolishing university
entrance exams.
Voters chose Syriza because it promised to reverse
reforms, particularly of pensions and labor laws, demanded by creditors, and to
resist new demands for rationality. Tsipras immediately vowed to rehire 12,000
government employees. His shrillness increasing as his options contract, he
says the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund are trying to “humiliate” Greece.
How could one humiliate a nation that chooses governments
committed to Rumpelstiltskin economics, the belief that the straw of government
largesse can be spun into the gold of national wealth? Tsipras’s approach to
mollifying those who hold his nation’s fate in their hands is to say they must
respect his “mandate” to resist them. He thinks Greek voters, by making delusional
promises to themselves, obligate other European taxpayers to fund them.
Tsipras, who says the creditors are “pillaging” Greece, is trying to pillage
his local governments, which are resisting his extralegal demands that they
send him their cash reserves.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister, is an
academic admirer of Nobel laureate John Nash, the Princeton genius depicted in
the movie A Beautiful Mind, who recently died. Varoufakis is interested in
Nash’s work on game theory, especially the theory of cooperative games in which
two or more participants aim for a resolution better for all than would result
absent cooperation. Varoufakis’s idea of cooperation is to accuse the creditors
whose money Greece has been living on of “fiscal waterboarding.” Tsipras tells
Greece’s creditors to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s novel of
the Spanish Civil War. His passive-aggressive message? “Play nicely or we will
kill ourselves.”
Since joining the Eurozone in 2001, Greece has borrowed a
sum 1.7 times its 2013 GDP. Its 25 percent unemployment (50 percent among young
workers) results from a 25 percent shrinkage of GDP. It is a mendicant reduced
to hoping to “extend and pretend” forever. But extending the bailout and
pretending that creditors will someday be paid encourages other European
socialists to contemplate shedding debts — other people’s money that is no
longer fun.
Greece, with just 11 million people and 2 percent of the
Eurozone’s GDP, is unlikely to cause a contagion by leaving the zone. If it
also leaves the misbegotten European Union, this evidence of the EU’s
mutability might encourage Britain’s “Euro-skeptics” when, later this year,
that nation has a referendum on reclaiming national sovereignty by withdrawing
from the EU. If Greece so cherishes its sovereignty that it bristles at
conditions imposed by creditors, why is it in the EU, the perverse point of
which is to “pool” nations’ sovereignties in order to dilute national
consciousness?
The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings,
a president no one can name, a parliament whose powers subtract from those of
national legislatures, a bureaucracy no one admires or controls, and rules of
fiscal rectitude that no member is penalized for ignoring. It does, however,
have in Greece a member whose difficulties are wonderfully didactic.
It cannot be said too often: There cannot be too many
socialist smashups. The best of these punish reckless creditors whose lending
enables socialists to live, for a while, off other people’s money. The world,
which owes much to ancient Athens’s legacy, including the idea of democracy, is
indebted to today’s Athens for the reminder that reality does not respect a
democracy’s delusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment