Like hairdressers, Greek TV and radio hosts can also retire at fifty—because of their high level of exposure to “microphone bacteria.”16 Were you inspired to buy this book by seeing me yakking into a mike about it up on the podium at a stop on the publicity tour? Well, that very microphone counts as a hazardous work environment in Greece. What a class action we authors will have! These publishing houses are like the tobacco companies: when they booked me and J. K. Rowling and the guy who does those Chicken Soup things and the rest of us on a coast-to-coast media blitz, they knew all about the risks of microphone bacteria, but they went ahead and ruined our life expectancy anyway.
It all sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to be a Greek hairdresser? Alas, being a Greek, period, is now a hazardous profession. An Obamafied America, following California down the Athenian path, is Greecing its own skids.
The EU is now throwing an extra trillion dollars at countries which by any objective measure are insolvent, and are unlikely ever again to be anything but—at least this side of bloody revolution. How do you grow your economy in an ever shrinking market? Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government.
How do you increase GDP? By export? To where? You’re entirely uncompetitive; you can’t make anything at a price any foreigner would be prepared to pay for it.
When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government introduced an austerity package to rein in spending.17 In response, Greek tax collectors walked off the job. Read that again slowly: to protest government cuts, striking tax collectors refuse to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills—if you can find anywhere to flee.
Let us take it as read that Greece is an outlier. As waggish officials in Brussels and Strasbourg will tell you, it only snuck into the EU due to some sort of clerical error. It’s a cesspit of sloth and corruption even by Mediterranean standards. If you were going to cut one “advanced” social democracy loose and watch it plunge into the abyss
Some of the oldest nations in the world are now in the situation of a homeowner who’s fallen too far behind on the payments and has no prospect of catching up: you might as well just put the door keys in an envelope, shove ’em under the door of the bank, and move on—perhaps to an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific as yet unspoilt by unsustainable levels of government. At some point, the least worst option becomes armed revolution, civil war, or at least an electro-magnetic pulse attack that conveniently obliterates every single bank account and wipes the slate clean. As lazy, feckless, squalid, corrupt, and vicious as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical. It’s where the rest of Europe’s headed—and Japan and North America shortly thereafter.
Greece is broke, and has run out of Greeks. So it’s getting bailed out by Germany. But Germany also has deathbed demographics: as Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it.22 Germany has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three
Absolved from having to pay for their own defense, Continentals beat their swords into welfare checks, and erected huge cradle-to-grave entitlements. Even under the U.S. security umbrella, they proved unsustainable.
Why? Well, like Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead—so why not bilk the future? We won’t be here, and our creditors won’t have a forwarding address. No one has engaged in transgenerational theft on the scale that Europe has.
