Greece finally reached agreement today on its latest bailout deal, a $170 billion rescue package that will enable it to stagger along for a while longer.
Will it work? Who knows? I doubt the people who put it together have any better idea of that than you or I do. If they did, this wouldn’t be the second bailout, Greece wouldn’t have struggled along through five years of recession before getting to this point, and the EU wouldn’t be acting solely to save the euro and prevent its grand pan-European experiment from slipping down the old crapperoo. There has been an avalanche of opinion on this issue, much of the recent writing suggesting the other European countries don’t trust Greece as far as they could throw it, figure it will probably go bust in the end anyway, but haven’t got a better solution at the moment and want to avoid the problem spreading to other debt- and deficit-ridden countries, of which they have several.
Greeks, on their part, are livid, figuring they’ve been sold out by their elected leaders. Here’s Erasmia Dimoula, an unemployed nursery school teacher, quoted in The Telegraph:
“I don’t expect anything from any government, from any politician. I can only expect things from myself,” she said. “You have to take responsibility if you give your vote to these people. Then you’d have to shut up about what’s going on.”
But who is really to blame, the government or the people who kept putting venal, incompetent, self-serving politicians into office? It’s no secret that Greece has been run for years like a giant house of cards, just waiting for one mild breeze to come along and blow it all over. The public payroll was absurdly bloated, pay and benefits beyond common sense, tax collection was a joke, evasion rampant, and the willingness to confront the problem non-existent. Greeks of all description — elected or non-elected — preferred to ignore the situation, letting it balloon until it exploded around them. Now the people are angry and blaming the politicians, while vandalizing and burning the city in a display of senseless destruction that does nothing but worsen the environment they live in. It doesn’t make sense, but nothing about the way Greece has allowed itself to deteriorate makes much sense.
The Telegraph notes that many young Greeks put much of the blame on their elders, who, caught up in the wave of idealistic protest and utopian politics of the 1960s and 70s, ousted the military government and replaced it with a flawed democratic system in which successive administrations bowed to public demands for more and more spending, without ever installing a system to pay for it. In that Greece followed a path familiar throughout the West: the baby boomers and Sixties generation devoted itself far more to creating publicly financed programs that would meet their political whims without putting much thought into affordability or the effect on later generations. They got the welfare state they wanted, and are now in the process of sticking the next generation with the bill.
Greece is a particularly egregious case, but Canada, Britain, France, the U.S. and others are in the same boat. Diane Finley, the Human Resources Minister, is scheduled to deliver a speech today in which she puts the case for toughening access to Old Age Security even though it isn’t really facing the imminent crisis the government originally suggested. The reality (as Ottawa should have made clear from the beginning) is that the overall cost of government is more than we can afford, and will only get worse as the population ages and workforce shrinks. All spending has to be assessed in those terms, and — given that people live considerably longer than they used to — it makes sense to tighten up a program that was created for a different set of demographic assumptions.
Opposition to doing so has focused on the fact that the crisis hasn’t hit yet, so why act now? Why take preventative steps when it’s not strictly necessary? Why do anything at all if we can put it off?
That’s what Greeks did, and the government went along rather than offend voters. Now the voters are angry, and blaming the government. But they did it to themselves, and Canadians will be equally guilty of irresponsibility if we keep putting off the reckoning until crisis actually hits.