The Greek Way of Sorrow

Greece is in the news a lot these days.  That's why I recommend an article by Greek blogger Napoleon Linardatos in National Review Online, The Greek Way of Sorrow: How a Charismatic Politician with the Slogan “Change” Launched Greece on the Path to Ruin. 

Mr. Linardatos writes…

“Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP… The 1980s in Greece were a time of dramatic expansion of government…Now the Greek government finds itself with a debt-to-GDP ratio somewhere north of 140 percent and quickly rising…. There stands Greece today, a year after it was bailed out by the taxpayers of other countries, facing the choice of reforming itself or going to utter ruin, and it cannot make up its mind…. The thirty years of hardcore statism have destroyed not only the economy of the nation, but also its ability to do politics, to articulate choices and ideas for the crisis at hand.”

Sound familiar?

Mr. Lindardatos concludes…

Back in the mid-Eighties I was a primary-school student. I didn’t understand the politics, but I could feel the pathos of a country that had just “discovered” that there is a thing called a free lunch.

The American people instinctively know that “there is no such thing as a free lunch."  But right now, we have an Administration which believes that the eating of free lunches is essentially to growing the economy.  That is not sustainable.  In Greece.  Or America.  Or any country on Earth.