Posted on 06/04/2012 8:07:12 AM PDT by CharlesMartelsGhost
...One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that whats happening is cyclical a downturn that will eventually correct itself rather than profoundly structural. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. Shes right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But thats easy for her to say: Mme. Lagardes half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.
In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: Theyve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Excellent. You cannot have a functioning society in which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.
ping
Gotterdamerung vor da vest! Ja ve are wery close meine fruends!
econ bump for later.....
The Germans were part of the problem too because they wanted those countries in the EU so they could export to them and so they ignored how bad their finances were to let them in and loan them Euros, much like the banks and bad loans here. Now there is no good way out for any of them.
You’re right, sick - in the short run they were all getting something. All of ‘em. In the long run, they’ve earned a disaster... but that’s a future story...
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