Posted on 07/03/2011 6:00:43 PM PDT by FreeKeys
I agree that socialism fails in the long run wherever it is tried, and we in this country can finally see the end game, and that we are out of other people’s money. I must take exception, though, to the statement in the article that Greeks pay 70% of their income or more to the government. That is not true. Whatever their legal obligations are, in actuality most pay less than 10%. Tax evasion is nearly universal. (see the articles by Victor Davis Hanson and others). If the Greeks actually had been paying 70% of their income to the government, they would be poor, but there would be no crisis.
Good input. Thanks.
The posted article says that Greeks have a “45% income tax rate, a 23% VAT tax (national sales tax) plus a host of other taxes”. That sounds like over 70 % to me.
Maybe Greece follows the Italian model(massive tax evasion). The last I heard (a long time ago), about 15 percent of the Italian economy was “underground”.
Because the Socialist/Democrat Party and federal bureaucracy will become a permanent government, immune to any occasional transient opposition win.
Socialism remains in power even when there is a Conservative government elected anywhere in Europe.
I prefer the Machiavellian answer, because it seems to me to be more powerfully explanatory of the career arcs of Lenin and Stalin, the two principal protagonists of Soviet "socialism" in the last 100 years, especially in the light of their numerous and notorious policy zigzags which Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, documents in The Gulag Archipelago.
It's a little less fully explanatory in the case of the Maoists but seems to be effective enough for the activities and policies of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Indonesian (PKI) parties.
I prefer the Machiavellian answer, because it seems to me to be more powerfully explanatory of the career arcs of Lenin and Stalin, the two principal protagonists of Soviet "socialism" in the last 100 years, especially in the light of their numerous and notorious policy zigzags which Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, documents in The Gulag Archipelago.Socialists, Communists and other Statists always think that even though everyone has failed in the past, THEY are the ones talented and smart enough to make it work “This Time”.
I split the difference and go with the psychological explanation - they want power, and they rationalize to themselves as well as others that they are going to use it wisely "this time." Conservatives know that "this time" - when the socialists get it right - can never come.
Power. Control.
Defund socialist collectives, foreign (Greece) and domestic.
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