Socialism is reaping the usual results in Greece:
Airliners will be grounded, trains halted and tax offices shut when Greek state workers strike against austerity measures on Wednesday, defying a plea by the government to rally behind its effort to fend off national bankruptcy.
Most probably don’t really understand what is happening. They think they can just demand the government hire people and people will have jobs. What their simple model doesn’t take into account is that they are no different than looters with the government doing the actual theft. The one level of indirection and the facade of respectability allows them to believe they are not engaged in immoral behavior.
The truth is that while economic laws are less well understood and probably more subtle than the laws of physics they are no less certain. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. They have been looting the people who produce for so long the producers have either left the country, given up, or have simply run out of wealth to loot.
I’ve often wondered what it looks like when those who know no life outside of looting run out of places to loot. We sort of saw what happened in the USSR in the ‘80s but that was before the Internet and they were a much more closed society than Greece.
Popcorn anyone?
Thank you for the offer, Joseph, but I find I am not inclined to ghoulishly celebrate and enjoy the prospect of innocent children suffering and possibly dying because of the stupidity and solipsism of supposed adults, so you may have all the popcorn for yourself.
/ironic patriarchal mentoring
I would join you in your popcorn frenzy, Joe, except that anyone who can read realizes that Greece is just the US writ small. Not a big cause for celebration, that.
Joe: I’ve often wondered what it looks like when those who know no life outside of looting run out of places to loot.
They immigrated to “greener pastures” i.e. Canada, USA, & European NATO nations. It is sad to say this but the cold war really never ended, the COMMBLOC never had to fire a shot either, they simply let the “sappers” leave the COMMBLOC with the seed of socialism/communism firmly planted in their minds. Once they get to their new looting grounds they use the systems in those countries to socially engineer their neighbors and their children.
I’m hoping the greater visibility of the lessons being giving in Greece will allow a sufficient number of people to see the issue sufficiently clearly such that we can avoid the lesson being retaught in the U.S.
Joe,
You seem to have this quaint notion that currency is finite. It’s not. Read this: http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed.htm
ubu,
Really?
Currency is merely a medium of exchange, it has to be pegged to things that have value, to have value, and therefore meaning, as a unit of exchange.
Printing more currency, which has no inherent value of its own, simply devalues it in terms of things that actually have value. I can be a “millionaire” in Zimbabwe and have less actual purchasing power, the ability to exchange currency for things of value, than the people in the lowest economic tiers of American society.
Greece is running out of things of value and the people who actually create the things that create more things of value. Printing more currency will exacerbate that problem.
However, it is true that “wealth”, things of value, are not finite even though limited at any given point in time, so disparities of wealth are not necessarily a “bad thing” in a society geared to produce more than enough wealth, things of value, to go around.
Which is not Greece.
Ah, ubu is among the “just hand out pixie dust and unicorn farts” theory of Progressive thought. That explains much.
Even if we were to ignore the excellent points that Matthew made, one of the unique problems that Greece and the other PIIGS nations face is that they don’t have control of their money supply. Being on the Euro, they can’t just fire up the printing presses and devalue their currency, as it would also devalue the currency of Germany, France and everyone else in the Euro-zone.