Posted on 07/03/2015 8:10:40 PM PDT by Rockitz
Greece in teetering on the brink of ruin - and it is hard not to feel sympathy for the pensioners crying in the street and the mothers facing empty supermarket shelves.
Yet those reading a new book may find themselves feeling a little less compassionate towards the Greeks. It reveals an eye-popping catalogue of benefits scams and tax avoidance schemes that have robbed the public purse.
James Angelos' The Full Catastrophe: Travels among the New Greek Ruins lays bare the corruption which filtered through all levels of society - from the islanders who pretended to be blind, to the families who forgot to register their parents' death and the doctors who 'earn' just 12,000 a year - yet live in Athens' most exclusive neighbourhood.
It was the rumours of an 'island of the blind' which first bought Angelos, a journalist, to Greece in 2011.
He had heard that on Zakynthos, something like two per cent of the population were registered blind.
All was not quite how it seemed, however, and it transpired that 61 of the 680 'blind' residents were quite happily driving around the island.
In fact, an astonishing 498 of those 680 were not blind at all - or even partially sighted.
But being 'blind' had its advantages - in particular, the 724 paid in benefits once every two months, and a reduction in utility bills.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
you still live in Satan’s domain too bubba........
You’re online.....on a computer.....developed by the free market. You’re using electricity, paid for by the free market.
What a phony you are.
Yep, but that's an indictment of those people, not the system. You must really be mad at God for giving people free will, because you would have done it so much better. You hide behind your scriptures (never use them in context anyway) and yet you're eat up with more pride than the next 50 men.
HLP is a Marxist who doesn’t understand the difference between technocrat and technology. He’s confused about a lot of things.
A technocrat would be like the “free market” fraud who uses dishonest scales described in Hoseah 12:7 — Someone facilitated by Alan Greenspan, whose postmodern “free market” FAILturds get polished by MSM-wanabe talking heads.
We are just as guilty for taking the bait as the Greeks. Our debt is not sustainable either and eventually the debtors are going to come a' calling either by way of taking assets, hyper-inflation, currency collapse, etc.
The Greeks, at least, weren't a balkanized nation of brain dead easily led sheep. We don't have that going for us.
We were blessed by our Creator to be able to provided for each other.
Do you know any coding languages other than bullshytese?
>>But the roads and the garden implements and the vehicles and the buildings and so on that you count on are products of a system that you claim to despise.
I don't despise the system. I just don't worship it.
I've observed that Socialists often worship roads, and airports, and the internet, and the electrical grids, and their shiny trains and various other public/collective infrastructure. Pointing their attention to the fact that Toilet paper was a "public utility" in the USSR usually either shuts them up or sends them into a spittle-flinging rage. Facts do that.
You remind me of them.
Some of the Greeks...
"Greek communities have age-old survival tactics that allow them to weather storms such as World War II deprivation and natural disasters."
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Despite the collective sense that a catastrophe of some type stares Greece in the face, the countrys strong tradition of hospitality remains intact. Mathes wont let a visitor leave without a bundle of fresh vegetables and some trachanas and chilopites, types of local pasta his family makes by hand. Many believe the ability to help one another with food gives Karitaina, with about 30 year-round residents and 100 in the long, drowsy summer, a better chance of surviving than city dwellers coping with the same anxieties. Rural Greek communities have age-old survival tactics that allow them to weather storms such as World War II deprivation and natural disasters. They will need to draw on them deeply, as Greeces current problems are unlikely to go away soon...
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Given that the Appetite of Tyranny is never far removed from the Tyranny of the Appetite, I think it would be useful to understand how those survival tactics work and might be applied in the process of reforming our American Republic back into something that resembles its originally specified purpose: "TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, governments are instituted among men".
Liberals simply cannot comprehend this, and that markets distribute information as well as goods.
Which raises the question, Who is truly the idiot?
I guess it's the taxpayers who pay to support the fool governments and central banks that prop up failed socialist states.
I dont know enought about the situation in the US to accurately say, but at a guess the honest and stable borrowers are upper working class/lower middle class and the delinquents and wasters are most of the people who took a fannie mae freddy mac mortgage and those middle class who think that it is more important to look rich than be financially stable.
So it is the responsibility of a free market to act on information to select those ventures which will succeed and to deprive those ventures which will fail from wasting precious resources. When the government intervenes into the marketplace it does so with a whole different set of motives. The government is not concerned with whether a business succeeds from a profit point of view but whether it generates positive political feedback or generates campaign contributions or even graft.
So government distorts the marketplace, distorts the information coming out of the marketplace, distorts the incentives for going into the marketplace, and ultimately creates a whole new marketplace in which the entrepreneur comes to understand that success comes not from risk and reward in a fair and free market but from crony relationships with the government.
Once that process gains momentum it is very difficult to reform because both capital and political power coalesce against loan entrepreneurs and voters deprived of information
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