Greeks Bearing Debts

why didn’t I borrow $148 billion to improve my life while the lending was good and the lenders were idiots? I’m just kicking myself over last year’s failure to act, because back in those halcyon days there was nothing like an outstretched palm and an unsatisfactory pile up of debt to loosen the purse strings of rich creditors. By outstretched palm and rotten spending habits, I am of course talking about Greece, which got $148 billion when everyone knew there wasn’t the faintest hope of seeing much of that sum returned.

By wealthy creditors, I am talking about almost anyone who wasn’t Greece. Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands: they were willing chumps (as were their enabling banks), and if the doughty Angela Merkel, say, was moderately wary of dropping her own hard-won coins into the beggar’s box without getting so much as a pencil in return, her hesitancy by no means impeded the bailout. Greece, where the retirement age was until last year 53, was too profligate to fail, the eurobrains decided. So Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou went away flush with other nations’ cash. Angela went away poorer, bullied by her allies but despised by her own countrymen for lending to a country with no realistic prospect of repayment. And the bankers went away, as bankers so often do, a few brain cells lighter and the bonds they collected about as valuable today as Confederate dollars in 1866.

Among the Greeks, however, this bailout—or rather the consequences of the bailout, namely (relative) austerity and repayment—has by no means been a source of unalloyed joy. Or gratitude. Last week saw mass demonstrations in Athens, violent clashes with police complete with firebombs, a general strike, and above all, major acts of parliamentary cowardice in the face of all that rage. Giorgos Lianis tendered his resignation from the ruling party’s central committee, for instance, in order, as he put it, to safely “walk the streets.” Here is what else he said:Mr. President, we have humiliated, hurt, and wronged the Greek people. A proud people, full of fighting spirit. That’s why the people humiliate us now.I am sure that by “proud people, full of fighting spirit,” the cringing parliamentarian is referring not to today’s Greece which, in the face of default, now wants a fresh new loan of about the same amount as the one it got last year—and wants its old loan repayments somehow or other renegotiated (which amounts to default as well). I have a feeling he’s talking about maybe some of the old Greek warriors of myth: Ulysses, Ajax, and the like. I don’t recall Homer mentioning that any of them ever took handouts from lady chancellors. In those days, the ones with fighting spirit were assumed to be self-sufficient or, when all else failed, in tight with some approving goddess.

If the Greek people feel humiliated and wronged these days they have only themselves to blame. Part of the new austerity program: “Highly profitable businesses will be subject to an ad hoc tax.”  In other words, punishment for the successful: always a wise fiscal reform.The consequences of an exit from the euro, the Greek prime minister recently warned his angry nation, would be “catastrophic” for Greece. But for the rest of Europe, perhaps a godsend.