When Greece Falls

by JASmius


Hard dies the stubborn dream of a free lunch, and woe be onto any piper who tries to impose any reality upon the dreamers by attempting to collect:

"We're going bust." "No, you're not." "You're strangling us." "No we're not." "You owe us for World War Two." "We gave already."

The game of chicken between Greece and its international creditors is turning into a vicious blame game as Athens lurches closer to bankruptcy with no cash-for-reform agreement in sight.

Europe's political leaders and central bankers and Greek politicians agree on only one thing: if Greece goes down, they don't want their fingerprints on the murder weapon.

Not murder; suicide.

If Athens runs out of cash and defaults in the coming weeks, as seems increasingly possible, no one wants to be accused of having pushed it over the edge or failed to try to save it.

Which is silly on the part of all non-Greek parties, since (1) the Greeks did it to themselves and only differ in that regard from their feckless creditors by a matter of degree and (2) the Greeks should be made a maximally public example of precisely to discourage any other countries from following their criminally irresponsible bad example.

Greece's leftist government....

There is your "murder" weapon, in case you were wondering.

....has already identified its culprit of choice - Germany, Europe's main paymaster, accused of having inflicted toxic austerity policies on Greeks, causing a "humanitarian crisis".

Otherwise known as "economic reality," by which is meant "the rest of Europe being disinclined to subsidize the Greeks' spending binge".  Which, given the like-minded mentality of the rest of Europe, is really saying something about the magnitude of the Greeks' excesses.

Eurozone governments are preparing the ground to blame the novice government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for having blustered, obstructed, failed to meet commitments and evaded hard choices while Athens burned.

"We are doing everything we can to save Greece from itself, but in the end, it's up to them," is the message pouring out of Berlin, Brussels and IMF headquarters in Washington.

It isn't that the Tsipras government is "novice"; it's that it's Marxist.  "Austerity" is simple recognition of the TANSTAAFL principle: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".  The Greeks are deadbeats and freeloaders whose time is running out even in so sclerotically leftwing an entity as the "EuroZone," and they are infantily raging against the inevitable and self-inflicted day of reckoning.  And they will "richly" deserve every last dizzying spiral until they disappear down the fiscal drain.

And, just as a reminder, remember which Western country is in even worse fiscal shape than Greece.

To tweak the famous quote from Chief Brody....



...."We're gonna need a bigger drain".