I get a kick out of people being so judgmental about the Greeks. Do you think, for even a second, that any western country would have done anything differently in terms of getting into the mess they are in, and do you think that any western country wouldn’t be doing everything they could to borrow their way out of the problem? If anything, countries like the United States show even less fiscal discipline, and are even more prone to simply ignoring any burgeoning crisis.
The problem isn’t Greece, or Greeks. They happen to be a very poor country in a rich “union”, so they hit the point of crisis earlier than most. The problem is really universal at this point. No culture (at least, no culture of any prominence) embraces concepts like risk-aversion and risk management. People who point out real, substantive dangers are dismissed from the political and social landscape. Every modern culture is susceptible to demagoguery and pseudo-science like global warming, Keynesian economics, and any other scientific fraud that expresses what people want to hear.
The Greeks may have chosen poorly. That puts them on equal footing with just about every western country, including the United States.
Um, you really need to read a bit more about the Greeks.
They’ve voted for Socialism for 50 years. They are broke. They are geniuses at bleeding the social services and also finding every way possible from refusing to admit to tax liabilities that are needed to fund those very same services.