Greece: Is This Where We’re Headed?
But this is Athens, the epicenter of the protests. Surely things are more placid in smaller cities and towns. In a sense that is so, for there is less in the way of brazen property destruction going on with the police standing by and watching. Not as much spray paint, not so many promenades that reek of urine. Yet all is not well in Greek “flyover” country. If anything, in the hinterlands one can more readily observe the pernicious effects of the government’s irresponsible policies.
The View from Greek “Flyover Country”
Most of our time in Greece has been spent not in Athens but on an island in the north Aegean. It bears a striking resemblance to the fictional isle in the film Mamma Mia. Getting there requires a healthy drive from Athens or Thessaloniki to a port town, followed by a few hours on a Flying Cat or one of the other passenger ships that ply the Aegean.
Steeply mountainous and heavily forested, the island’s beautiful beaches are complemented by orchards and olive groves along its roads and on its many hillsides. There are modern conveniences of the usual sorts, but inland one can find monasteries and churches that are centuries old, and terrain challenging enough that it provided concealment for resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation. It is not uncommon to see traffic on the country roads blocked by herds of goats.
The permanent population of the island is around 5,000, so it’s really a small town that happens to be in the middle of the Aegean. From our annual visits we know scores of residents, spanning the generations and socioeconomic strata. Over the past couple of years we’ve talked with many of them about the situation in Greece. We’ve learned a great deal from discussions with a diverse group that includes a retired and formerly very successful businessman about 70 years of age, several small business proprietors, and an assortment of locals who work in various restaurants, hotels, and other enterprises.
On the island we’re far from the tear gas and spray paint of the nation’s capital. The wind brings us smells of pine, dill, mountain oregano, and the sea — not the urine and tear gas of central Athens.
Yet, although the pace is slower, we hear echoed some of the same themes sounded by friends in Athens. Chief among them, and often stated with exasperation, is the complaint that “nobody wants to work.” The young adults, it is said, have ambition only for “public function” jobs, which offer (at least before this year!) great security and benefits and are not so demanding as to interfere with going to the clubs at night.
Thus, a small business proprietor we know says he is unable to hire young Greeks when he and his wife want to harvest their olives. As a result, the jobs and the pay go to Albanian immigrants. Incidentally, these are not illegal immigrants (that’s another story and a serious one for Greece). Rather, these are legal immigrants, generally already working at other jobs the local Greeks have spurned. So, the Albanians who “moonlight” picking olives for our friends are doing jobs that could be done by young Greeks on the island.
Similarly, many of the servers and other employees at the local hotels and restaurants are not Greek. Most of them come from other and less affluent Balkan countries. A young woman who supervises the wait staff at a very fine local restaurant tells us she finds this frustrating. Given the local character and cuisine of the restaurant, she would prefer to have a Greek staff. She tells us she cannot find Greeks who want the work, especially with the lure of “public” jobs and government benefits.
Some other friends own a taverna at one of the island’s beautiful beaches. This past summer they told us that the Greek economy is stagnant in part because of overwhelming uncertainty. No one will hire. Employers are paralyzed by uncertainty — about new regulations, new taxes and fees as the result of austerity measures. No one can predict the cost of taking on new employees. People are “depressed” and “feel helpless” about the situation. As a result, they say (while acknowledging that the work ethic is not robust) for those who want to work, “there is no work.”
Another acquaintance, a very successful businessman from Athens who has retired to the island, says frankly that for much of his adult life he was on “the left” and “very anti-American.” Now, however, he confides that if he and others had learned from America in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Greece would be in a different and better place. Of course, he smiles and chides us that we Americans seem not to have learned from the sad experience of Greece in recent years.
Excellent article coming from first hand knowledge and observations. I note your hopeful tone at the end too. Unfortunately Greece is a good example of the socialist toxic brew of government unions, unfulfilled promisse of the EU, huge unproductive government, and the insidious degradation of a country losing it’s core values and work ethic. This is no accident. This is a disease that has been diagnosed years ago but for some strange reason modern man seems incapabable of recognizing that socialism is the enemy and if eventually leads to facisim. Europeans have been so buy pissing on everyone over the past decade about how great their society was, when in reality the rot had already begun and the cascading impact of a hollowed out economy, unions, thugs, and leftists creeps and communists etc etc etc No wonder they are going down the tubes. What is left is not pretty nor is the future at all bright. Greece cannot be saved even if they go off the Euro and back to the drachma. Why? They are NON COMPETITVE in the real marketplace. Except for the accident of geography who gives a crap about Greece and then who would want to visit a polluted place like Athens now in the grip of these pathetic fools. They have no products which the world wants at any price. All you socialists go figure this out and report back. I say it looks like North Africa will be occupying Greece too in about a decade. The Greece who invented the great Athenian democracy and the Spartan warrior is dead.
“It pains me to share these observations about daily life in a country where the government has long since doubled down on unsustainable spending complemented by cronyism, corruption, and a pervasive and out-of-control sense of entitlement. Now the party is ending, as it becomes apparent to all — both those who wish it to stop and those who want it to continue, consequences be damned — that the Greek government has, to use Margaret Thatcher’s prophetic phrase, simply run out of other people’s money.”
Oh, you mean you’re NOT talking about the United States? For a moment there, I thought you were. These are the same problems we are having right now and soon the party will be over for us, too. Unless we do something to stop it right now, this is what we have to look forward to. I especially liked the part in this story where Greeks would not do a lot of jobs they thought were “beneath” them, so they import a lot of immigrants. Sound familiar, anyone? This really is where we are headed. So in 2012 we, as a nation, have a choice. Do we stop the madness and vote Conservatives to take over all of Congress and the White House, or do we go the “Greek Way” with Obama and be overwhelmed by more debt and, eventually, bankruptcy?
There is a very real choice to be made in 2012, and the direction of this country is literally in our hands. I hope we don’t blow it, again.
What we, and the Greeks, are going to find out is that pitting rich against poor is nothing compared to pitting Americans/Greeks against aliens, who don’t care about the fate of a foreign country (even if they’re residing there for the moment). Think a bunch of Mexicans/Arabs give a damn what happens to America/Greece? No, why would they? Do you care what happens to Central America? Hell, no.
Saddly Greece could soon get into a more severe Social unrest, we all forget they were “forced” to take the second bailout, not that they solved problems with the first one. But change has to come from the goverment and its electors in providing a less dependant economy driven from the states. Pensions, Jobless benefits, etc. These are simply unafordable.
Saddly Greece could be an example of the Europe to come, back some 70 years since WWII, into a place of hunger and necesity.
Excellent article. I’m very interested in the impact of Greece’s problems on ordinary Greeks. My view is that if things in both Greece and here at home do not turn around then watching Greece will give us a good indicator of what to expect when the same political-economic collapse happens here. Your article provides excellent insight. I would love to have additional links to ongoing online sources of this information.
We will soon be Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iraq, the Balkans, Serbia, Israel, Libya, Nigeria, Belgium, Malaysia etc.
If diversity is a strength – then Yugoslavia should be a superpower… Where are they today?
The difference between Greece and the US is: That the US will soon have marshal law that the senate passed, soon to be made the law of the land, and the Fema camps that are currently looking to hire staff to open for operation.
The greeks will protest and cause problems, the US will just round us protesters up and bye bye, we being terrorists and all.
Yes, a vote to change direction is what the US needs, as long as the new prez does not follow the same game plan.
Think of the US as Greece on steroids.
The situation desribed in this article is essentially one where normal political operations have become impossible, the only solution to this is martial law and a military govt. If you look carefully at events here in the US you will see many parallels, and bear in mind that the borrowing party is still in full swing in the US, there have been no cuts at the Federal level and only minor cuts at State and municipal levels. When financial discipline is imposed the uproar will be huge, if financial discipline is not imposed the damage to peoples lives will be even more. I think that there is a very real possibility of a military coup in the US in the next decade, we will become the northern Argentina.
These things could be communicated to the American public at large, but they are not. Why is that?
Is’s abundantly clear that the people who control the media in this country don’t want this infomration to be widely known. We are all aware of that, along with the myriad of other information that, if it was honestly dispersed, would turn the American public decisively against the federal politicians and bureaucrats who are leading us down the path to becoming Greece.
So that leads to the next question. Why does the media hide the information?
To me at least, it’s clear. The media represents powerful forces that want the country to become Greece, or in other words, to revert to a way of life prior to the one that emerged in the modern western countries after the American Revolution; the way of life that changed the power equation from one of Aristocrats and Serfs to one where power is based on accomplishments.
The media is the mouthpiece of the power elite that wants to turn the clock back to 1750; to the time when they had total power, and when the people like us had no chance to control our destiny and instead served our time on earth in subservience to self-appointed masters.
As Pat Buchanan writes in “Suicide of a Superpower, “…what most modern conservatives, who dislike Nietzsche almost as much as Karl Marx and Hillary Clinton, don’t grasp is that what looks like decline, decadence and decay to conservatives appears to the champions of such trends as progress and the birth of a new civilization.” While we conservatives see our country being destroyed, the liberals see progress toward their utopia in that destruction.
Every adult in America should read Buchanan’s book. It is brilliant. It is depressing. It is truthful.
I read this piece after finishing Hannan’s “The New Road to Serfdom.” While it isn’t a great book and I don’t agree with some of his analysis, it provides some insights into the EU. Given this context, I am not at all optimistic about Greece. The folks leading Europe just don’t get it and they are rigid ideologues at least as bad as Obama. Also, I love how liberals are so dismissive when you point to Europe and say “there lies our future”. Even O’Reilly said, during the Romney interview, that we aren’t “out of control” like Greece. What do you call debt equal to GDP and borrowing 40% of the money the federal government spends? Our finances are in such bad shape that we wouldn’t qualify us to join the EU! But we aren’t “out of control”?
GREECE CAN IMPROVE WITH SIMPLE STEPS
Stop hiring government employees.
Bring back the draft, to draft from the militia that is capable of work.
If a shortage of employees actually results in a government office, draft retirees.
Monasteries and other sites of religious contemplation also engage in simple trade such as cheese or wine. Surely a religious community can be found which could collect taxes more honestly than the tax collectors.
If nothing works, they should try BACKWARDS IMPERIALISM.
–Send two top members of the Greek embassy in D.C. to the House of Representatives, petitioning to be seated as delegates from Greece, which wants to leave the EU and become a member of the US Commonwealth in Categories III or IV. An internet and news media question in Greece can take care of the plebiscite. A downloaded copy of the Greek constitution can be handed in.
Once accepted as a US Territory, the meddlers from the House of Representatives and page-turners from the FBI can sort things out.
This year, we saw widespread riots in Greece and the UK. Largely, those riots featured people who don’t want any cuts in their freebies. Those riots were destructive and even deadly. OWS shows we’re being primed for similar riots here in the US. We have millions of people who’re dependent on a vast collection of government welfare programs and who will be highly upset in any changes to life as they know it.
We have a Greece of our own – California. With their massive debt, I don’t understand how they have managed to continue without declaring bankruptcy. The only explanation is that the bondholders are betting on the federal government to bail them out, sooner or later, if worse comes to worse. Otherwise, why lend California money? California is in need of a Greece solution, to open the eyes of Americans of what will happen to the federal government, if we continue our out of control spending. The U.S. government is not “too big to fail”.
Excuse me Jarmo, but Illinois is the real Greece of America. California is our Portugal.
What’s with the photo: they play baseball in Syntagma Square?
How many times is this going to be asked. OF COURSE this is the direction America is being ushered towards. Hence the rise of the Tea Party movement.
I remember a Greek tour guide on one of the shore excursions from the Mediterranean cruise I took a few months ago. On the bus ride to Olympia, she spoke quite candidly about the state of things and reasons for it. As she put it, political candidates “bought” votes by promising more and more government jobs. This eventually swelled the public sector to the size of France’s, a country with 5 times the population of Greece! Once installed, these workers would try to justify their existence by making more and more regulations. Which paralyzed the private sector – no one wanted to invest in projects when they couldn’t be sure that the laws affecting their business would be the same by the end of the process as when they started. And so on and so on….Damn, I wish she could have been the tour guide for Obama as he stepped towards those pseudo-Olympian Greek columns in Denver back in ’08. But of course he wouldn’t have listened…sigh.
I enjoyed this article very much. I have hated Greece for years. I remember having the pleasure of telling a Greek navy captain I met at the NATO Defense College in Rome that my whole family had come to hate Greece as the result of its anti-Americanism. I hope things get worse for the Greeks. They deserve it.
I understand your sentiments and why you would feel the way you do, but hating Greeks isn’t worth it. I’ve met my fair share of un-informed Greeks/Europeans in my time too. Our scorn would be better directed at Socialists/Activist groups that have indoctrinated the youth of Greece with anti-western populist literature and an air of entitlement (+hubris) for at least the last four decades. The Marxist poison is not unique to Greece it’s global and has infected academia, media, the arts and most facets of our own US culture also.
The Obama supporter hoping the president will pay for her gas and healthcare is no different to the Greek who demands Europe pay for their lifestyle and retirement. The greatest challenge is overcoming the progressive mindset of the self proclaimed ’99%’ers. Sometimes a major recession/depression, is the only real lesson. Life is full of consequence. We either learn or we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.
Do I have high hopes for Greece? No, not immediately. Far-future, maybe they can turn their current malaise around. The country is broke, it has little in resources, a general apathy for hard work, overall accountability is lacking for any true reckoning to work and Eu policy and centralization has effectively subjugated Greeks from Greece. Their sovereignty is all but worthless. They have little recourse while they remain in the EU, and the brain-drain will continue to grow as their brightest, most enterprising individuals leave the country in droves. The influx of illegals from the ME and Africa does not help matters either, again their sovereignty is undermined by policy from Brussels.
Greece needs and economic and national cathasis, a chance to renew and start afresh. In Greece’s current state this most likely involves a hard default and leaving the Eurozone, question is do their leaders have the nous and courage to do it?
There are indeed some underlying similarities between our nations, and we’re starring down the same road of self-destruction (increasing debt, reckless spending, govt. largesse, stagflation). However, we have our sovereignty (for now), and with that we can pursue and determine our own future. Indeed we can begin to alter our trajectory next year, it’s up to us.
writing in english and using an american name doesn’t make u american TURKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
We live in very dangerous times. Greece is just one of perhaps six European nations, which on paper, can not survive. The members of the European Union have broken a fundamental rule: In exchange for the benefits of a common currency, each nation would be fiscally responsible. However every economist knew that any one nation could cheat, and lean on a disciplined neighbor, let them do the hard work. Now comes the day of reckoning. If European history is any guide, next will come a Hitler, who will blame all of the ills on those other people: Jews, Romas, etc. Mussolini came to power promising stability and trains that would run on time. Or else. Next comes militarization, then war.
However, Europe has leaned on Uncle Sam to stay alive since 1945. Uncle Sam faced down the USSR bear as Europe went to the Med and played. Europe could not defend itself today, without US money and muscle. Unfortunately for everybody, the US is now broke, war weary, and a sizeable minority also wants to play. California is worse off than Greece. The only new things are WMD, lots of extremely hard working Asians, and a bloated, unionized government payroll cohort.
We live in dangerous times.
When one watches for the inevitable consequnces of socialism, one is not surprised to see the actual resulting misery and the further unraveling of wealth and order. Europe is in the process of trying to dance along beside the grave yard, not yet willing to recognize the game is up. All of the Marxist,Fabian, and Keynseian psuedo economic fantasy comes with quite a price when market reality sets in.
My expectation is that Greece is too far gone for any sort of quick recovery. The sensible people described in the article are vastly outnumbered by parasites.
Here in America we are going to find out what the ratio of parasites to productive types is in about 10 1/2 months. My bet is that we are a lot closer to Greece than most currently suspect.
An excellent article. While I agree that we are in danger of ending up like Greece I don’t believe our situation is nearly as hopeless as some seem to think. The great thing about the United States is that we place a much higher value on the rule of law than Greece does.
Even among those who have a decent work ethic in Greece the system of bribery has become so common place that it’s simply accepted. They may complain about it but people over there who have a good work ethic still participate in the corruption. There’s a strange mindset over there that “what other people do is a problem but it’s okay if I do it.”
The bottom line is that you will never be able to get modern Greeks to adhere to the rule of law. If they don’t want to do something they simply won’t. It’s how the modern Greek culture works (or doesn’t, as the case may be) and even when it leads to collapse they will not change. Their history since the end of WWII has been “Every man for himself,” a mindset that I believe started during the civil war between the royalists and the communists.
Democracy and Power 101: Government is Power
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. -James Madison, Speech in the Virginia State Convention of 1829-1830
Government, in its last analysis, is organized force.
– Woodrow Wilson
Government within its jurisdiction has a monopoly on power. Government has the power to tax and enforce the collection of taxes, the power to regulate, the power to incarcerate and even take the life of a person.
Every act of government has an element of power, which is executed by force or coercion. Every government rule and regulation involves compliance with the power of government. For example, public education is overwhelmingly accepted as a public good. However, all aspects of public education are enforced by the power of government: taxation, compulsory attendance, jurisdiction, and curriculum.
“The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.”
George Washington
Greece, plus all of western Europe, and the USA are examples of a very simple truth: When you protect fools from the folly of their actions you fill the world with fools. We are on a ship of fools, soon we will be floundering on the shoals of depression.
“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
Ronald Reagan
The Guardian has reported that 60,000 Italians a year have left in your time frame and that last year almost 10% of Greeks doctors left the country.
The Eurozone countries most affected by the crisis are losing citizens at an accelerated rate. One can’t help but wonder how immigration from the Third World has undercut salaries and undercut tax and economic revenues by the presence of underground economies that send their disposable income out of the country to support their families.
The Vietnam gov’t turns a blind eye to smuggling people out of the country because of the enormous amount of revenue it receives from those immigrants. Europe has shot itself in the foot with its immigration policy.
In America I saw a story about jobless in Denver and asked myself how many jobless there were in Denver and how many illegal aliens. The idea illegals don’t affect the American economy in a negative way is ridiculous. It’s not rocket science: turn our illegals and jobs will appear with higher wages.
Greece is not alone in Europe and it seems that with the enormous sum just borrowed by EU banks from the central bank that worse is on the way, just put off at ever higher interest rates. This is worse than robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The bottom line is that the high birth rates in the Third World together with corrupt or casual policies that don’t address the realities of the Third World are bringing down the West, economically, culturally and economically.