The Elegant Simplicity Of The Greek Conundrum
- This topic has 10 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 2 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
John M. Fox WCBS studios, 49 East 52nd Street, NYC 1948 It’s really not that hard. It’s even elegantly simple. But that still requires you’re willing
[See the full post at: The Elegant Simplicity Of The Greek Conundrum]The “dumb” Greeks are living beyond their means, under the bridge because the smart E U people are living in palaces financed by Greek debt payments.
Perhaps that old one liner has some truth in it after all. “Germany is trying to do with Banks what it couldn’t do with tanks””
The ones who put up the money are the ones who make the rules. If the home boys don’t care about the well being of its citizens why should we expect Europe to care?
“Lost in this discussion is that modern Greece, formed in 1830, has never really been required to stand on its own. Generations of support from abroad, typically given for strategic reasons, has created a false sense of prosperity in the country and has prevented the Greeks from accepting the realities of their current situation.” – John Browne, Monday February 9, 2015
Every European country has its own set of spooks, their own CIA’s, who are aligned with and as often as not junior partners with Americas burgeoning secret state. These entities also have their own military arms, mostly secret again, integrated to one degree or another with NATO and so the US. Surely Greece must have these also.
I wonder where they stand in the current situation. I am going to guess Tsipras doesn’t know either. Such things are beyond politicians, even in America. Even American presidents must know their place and leave the secret elites and institutions alone for the most part. If they didn’t know that they wouldn’t be president.
I don’t think the US as fiscal union analogy works well. Two separate counterarguments:
1. Greece and the richer parts of Europe were running exactly the same games in 1947, before the EU was formed.
https://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2012/05/latest-from-greece.html
2. Most of the time the federal system DOESN’T smooth out the differences between New York and Nebraska.
This happened only once, under FDR. He saw that New York speculators had created not only the industrial depression but the agricultural Dust Bowl. From 1914 to 1929, NYC had been driving businesses and farmers elsewhere into unsustainable debt so NYC could own everything. Good old LBO as always, just like Germany and Greece.
FDR stopped the speculators and rebuilt the agricultural areas so they could be self-sustaining again.
After FDR, the national admin reverted to the old practice of starving everyone else to fatten NYC. Fortunately, some of the bureaucracies that FDR had built to protect farmers remained in place, but other types of business lost their protections.
Off-topic, but germane to some of the concluding articles posted here:
Unsurprisingly, “climate change” continues to be exposed as a (solely) political issue.
Calling it “science” was pure, premeditated fraud from the get-go:Enjoy the coming socialist, oligarchical, kleptocratic feudalism (with a taste of “democracy” thrown in to keep you inert). And remain calm. That should keep the CO2 in your exhale within the legal limits.
“In the interest of the Greek people and in view of the difficult situation, Prime Minister Tsipras should consider to replace Mr Varoufakis with a political experienced, realistic-efficient person.” Joachim Poß
The hubris of Poß is illustrative of the west’s political class and especially the west’s leaders.
These people get lost in their spin-world of reality.
BRICS and PIIGS are breaking the mythical world view fostered by the U.S. and followed by Briton, Australia, and Germany. Good dogs, want a dog biscuit?Again, what makes you think that Germany doesn’t want to make Greece responsible for breaking the Union? And Varoufakis is certainly making it hard on them. At this rate, Germany will have to take some responsibility too.
It’s an interesting question what holds the U.S. together, I’ve thought of many times. Primarily, the U.S. is an IDEA, not a geographical place, and absolutely, positively not a fiscal union. The “Idea” is the principles encoded in our founding documents about the rights and responsibilities of men and their governments, which is why we get so schizophrenic when those beliefs are contradicted.
We can be pretty sure it’s not a fiscal union because from the Treaty of Paris right through the Constitution, Civil War, and on, there was no transfer of taxes from rich to poor. In fact, “social justice” and the “redistribution of wealth” is completely against the founding principles of the nation, and indeed the covenant between people, states, and federals, which is why in 1913 they had to pass an Amendment to change the Constitution: it was flat-out illegal before, for better or worse. This also broke the U.S. as a collection of independent national governments, ie the States, and finalized their servitude to the Federal level instead of their collective cooperation in creating that level–a thing which also was not originally intended and not seen until then. Only then did the Federals have even the foreshadow of “redistributing,” because roughly until then, they WERE the states, sitting in self-council. Remember until this time Senators were not directly elected but representatives of their State governments.
Governments are not founded on the principle of stealing from me to give to you because they don’t last long on a foundation of every man/group/state being out for themselves to steal from the other guy, and this is exactly what we see in Europe today. As Bastiat would say, this is the illusion of everybody living at everybody else’s expense.
But to be productive in this argument, what makes non-distribution work, when intuitively, socialism, redistribution “to each according to their needs,” SHOULD work so much better, but absolutely never, ever has? The U.S. was founded on opportunity. They didn’t just hand money from N.Y. for Nebraskans to take Carnival Cruises with, day after day for 100 years: the money was invested into barren wasteland because they believed it could be make productive and sustain itself. Turns out, with a lot of hard work, totally new inventions, innovation, and development, it could. Not everywhere, as much of the U.S. remains a beautiful wasteland for now, but far more than anyone ever imagined in 1804 looking at the “Great American Desert” of the Great Plains, today the world’s richest land. Someday R.E. mining, solar, wind, who-knows-what may transform Death Valley, who knows? But the money wasn’t “transferred” to provide welfare to indigent populations, it was invested to explore if more could be created from a little, and when it could, to see how much more. If it couldn’t, wealth was withdrawn with an arcane and outdated thing we used to call “bankruptcy.”
This is simple EIEO accounting, thermodynamics. If more energy isn’t returned than is invested, the activity is not sustainable. The Sisyphean task is then halted as being stupid and counterproductive. We don’t just keep offering free houses and health care in Death Valley or the bottom of the ocean because it doesn’t make sense. People then gravitate to places where they can be productive, as evidenced by their own prosperity. All this is the OPPOSITE of wealth transfers from N.Y. to Utah, from Boston to W. Virginia, which having passed the 16th Amendment, set up a Central bank, and post-WWI and II, and a large enough Federal Government to intervene in everything, is what we do today. Everywhere. And especially Canada. But by doing so we prevent the States from working and adjusting because it’s easier to steal from neighboring states, which causes bad will, social disintegration and the dissolution and/or civil war of the country. That’s what we see today. The OPPOSITE of America, the original intent, and the end of what made us strong.
So prescribing to Europe what is causing the U.S. itself to disintegrate into violence may not be wise. However, Europe’s solution is the same as ours: not wealth transfers, the long habit of robbing neighbors, but to STOP robbing neighbors and let each stand on their own merits. If they believe there is opportunity, they can lend money on the chance.
And if it fails, they can lose that money without crying like a bunch of pantywaisted sissies before crying to mommy and stealing it back from the people.
Berlin was willing to spend billions and billions to join West and East Germany after the wall came down. After all, they were spending it on their own tribe. They starved many thousands of Greeks in WW II to feed their own tribe. Europe is tribal in spite of all the forced immigration.
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: https://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/021015-738779-climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism.htm#ixzz3S3Wb3zmd
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.