Posted by
ApolloSpeaks on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 8:04:14 AM
The Greek Military Junta lasted seven years, during which the dictatorship abolished all political freedoms. Imprisonments, torture and exile became an everyday phenomenon for every Greek.
Apollo writes:
“Will Greece accept the draconian remedies necessary for its recovery from bankruptcy? The cure of desocializing, deprogressivizing, deliberalizing much of its huge welfare entitlement state? That is, dismantling and privatizing it: healthcare, energy and transportation? Can the Greeks rise to the occasion and free themselves from this soft, impoverishing leftist tyranny? Will the Greeks pave the way for the genesis of liberty, self-reliance, hard work and individual responsibility in Europe?”
Northern Patriot answers:
"Not likely because as you know, freedom from want and privation is a central theme in European Social Democracies. Ask yourself a question, these are all democracies in the E.U. If scrapping the social safety net is so popular or a likely winning platform for conservative parties to run on and win, then why don’t they run on repealing the social safety network? Why would a European society adopt a free market approach to health care when we just went through an eighty year experiment that proves that it does not work? In light of the catastrophe presently underway in the Gulf of Mexico do you think many people are going to be open to a lack of regulation in energy production? Privitazation of the European Welfare State is not a real option, if it was it would have been tried by now. That said, they do have to figure out how to make it work, therein lies their challenge."
Apollo writes:
“Don't be fooled by today's "good news" and market recovery.There's a dark cloud of gloom hanging over Greater Europe blown in from bankrupt Iceland another failed experiment in leftist lunacy economics perhaps foreshadowing the fate of Greece and the EU.”
Northern Patriot answers:
"Nice metaphor but the economic problems of Iceland are the result of unregulated financial markets as much as anything to do with social policies."
I reply:
I get it, DP: the Greeks need to find a way to make their profligate, out of control spending work for them. To pursue an unsustainable fiscal course; keep the party going and drinks flowing, without suffering financial and economic doom. Is that what you're saying? If it is this is the audacity of blind hope and utopian thinking based on wishful thinking; the very ideological idiocy driving the White House and Congress to political ruin and America to bankruptcy.
The EU is warning Greece: 'PRIVATIZE OR PERISH!.' There is no other option, no other way left for you to save yourself from calamity. Continue digging deeper into debt and you'll completely shred your social safety net and become an impoverished third world state.' Greece will become like Ghana, Guatemala or the Gobi Desert-a wasteland of poverty and squalor.
These aren't capitalists speaking, DP, they're European social democrats who share your leftist views. But unlike you they're facing reality. Unlike you they understand the extreme peril Greece is in; unlike you they see that only economic freedom and Capitalism can save Greece and themselves. If democratic Greece is to survive and continue in the EU it must rearrange its priorities and become a wealth producing state; not one that spends and consumes more than it produces living beyond its means in a drunken orgy of deficit spending and rising debt. In short, the equation must change and change now: the creation of wealth not its spending and spreading must rule.
Unless the Greeks unleash the power of economic liberty from the shackles of the socialist nanny state they are doomed. If the people of Greece refuse the necessity of austerity and self-discipline and continue the drunken orgy of borrowing and spending unmindful of reality they'll be expelled from the EU as a failed state; and an iron fisted military dictatorship will likely return to power disciplining the people, forcing them to change at gunpoint, at the threat of imprisonment, torture, terror and death.
In sum, for Greece the road to national solvency leads through hell: it's either the hell of self-discipline and cold turkey from the ruinous addiction to social utopianism (spending for paradise until the treasury goes bust), or the worse hell of oppression and tyranny: the hell of disappearances, imprisonment, torture chambers and exile; the hell of brutal, severe, unpitying military rule and justice. And what goes for Greece goes doubly for Europe over which hovers an ominous cloud of volcanic ash spewed from busted, bankrupt, broken Iceland, ominous of things to come.
Postscript: Expanding Government Endlessly?
Northern Patriot writes:
"Now what you denied was the facts that worldwide the economy is on the mend, of course government often grows during times of economic stress. It even grew under Ronald Reagan, who ran on cutting government back, yet he added a cabinet level department and expanded executive level functions so that federal employment was higher when he left Washington than it was under Jimmy Carter."
My reply:
You speak of government expansion as if it can go on endlessly, limitlessly, forever without ruinous consequences, without America turning into an economic basket case like socialist Greece- a warning to us all. Govenment grew under Reagan you say! It grew under Bush! It also grew under the socialist and conservative goverments of Greece; and now that country is flat on its back bankrupt, broken, bleeding to death needing to shrink the public sector and privatize to survive. I'll say it again: the Age of Big Government is over in America, it's finished with, done!: Big Government Liberalism, Big Government Conservatism and anything between.