We Win When They All Lose

Back in the late eighties, there used to be a joke, especially among radio and nightclub DJs.

Q: If Tiffany and Debbie Gibson got into a knife fight, who’d win?

A: The world

Both Ms. Darwish and Ms. Gibson are alive, well, and unscathed enough.

But the same joke could be applied to the Greek crisis – where two of the most noxious ideas of the past 100 years are duking it out.

On the one hand, you have the Greek people, who yesterday resoundingly proclaimed “We can’t be broke!  We still have more checks!”.  They represent the impulse De Tocqueville warned of when he said (I’ll paraphrase) “a democracy can only survive until the majority discovers they can vote themselves goodies from the public treasury”.   What do we call it?  Populism?  Mob Rule?  Let’s call it “Krugmanism”.

On the other hand, we have the EU – a monolithic bureaucracy which is intending to overturn an elected (if deeply stupid) sovereign government.  Call it the bureaucratic nanny-state.

If they kill each other off in Greece, the world will win.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Oh, just read the piece in the Telegraph by Janet Daley.

7 thoughts on “We Win When They All Lose

  1. Mitch, I hope you’ll forgive my divergence, but this really needs to be discussed…and discussed…and discussed.

    “San Francisco Shooting Suspect Says He Kept Coming Back to the City to Avoid Deportation”

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/san-francisco-shooting-suspect-coming-back-city-avoid/story?id=32247731

    Multiple felon, deported 5, count ’em 5 times.

    Leftists import criminals for their vote, and ensure citizens are disarmed to provide them prey to feed on. How is it we can spend two fucking weeks DEMANDING South Carolina remove a flag when cities controlled by leftist traitors not only refuse to cooperate with federal law, but aid and abet in breaking it?

  2. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 07.06.15 : The Other McCain

  3. The Greeks are reprehensible stewards of money, and always have been.

    But what does that say that the EU allowed them entry, and winked at the fact that Goldman-Sachs twisted the truth enough to get them entry?

    What does it say when the EU refuses to consider debt restructuring and instead offloads all the private risk taken by French and German banks, as well as the aforementioned Goldman-Sachs, onto the ECB and IMF? The EU intentionally socialized private risks to try to hide the fact that they were stupid enough to let the Greeks into the EU in the first place!

    There should have been no way for private loans to be socialized and their lenders essentially bailed out, but Euro politics were involved and to “preserve their Great Experiment” the leaders of the EU intentionally and knowingly condemned Greece to poverty permanently. The IMF has admitted that it and the ECB knew back in 2010 that the Greek bailout was doomed to failure simply because there is no way the Greeks would ever be able to pay back those loans.

    Let’s be honest, with the Greeks defaulting we should be seeing headlines like, “Greece defaults: Goldman-Sachs hit hard” today. But no, instead we see a massive political crisis because what should have been a bloodbath for unwise private investors has been turned into a massive political crisis as politicians are finally forced to face up to the fact that they were politically cowardly and economically foolish.

  4. How do you say I’ll gladly pay you on Tuesday in Greek?

    I am not certain there is any such thing as “Europe”. But if there is, I am quite certain Greece has nothing to do with it

  5. Nerdbert:
    You can’t make a developing nation into an advanced nation simply by throwing subsidies and cheap credit at it for a few decades. I’ve heard interviews with Greeks who are afraid that if they abandon the Euro, they will become a developing nation again. Sadly, they never stopped being one; they were just a rich one for a time. And now that time is over.

  6. It reminds me of two corrupt dictators talking at the corrupt dictators’ annual conference. The first year, it was in Dictator A’s country, and he showed Dictator B a highway, and a few miles off the highway was a wonderful palace. To Dictator B’s amazement, it belonged to Dictator A, and Dictator A simply said to the others “10%!”.

    A few years later, the corrupt dictator’s conference was in country B, and Dictator B proudly showed the visitors a dirt road flowing with raw sewage, but somewhat near that was an even more amazing palace. As the dictators were assembled in dictator B’s palace, he simply shouted “100%.”

    Which is a long way of saying that if the IMF, or private banks for that matter, are going to make loans to developing (or corrupt) countries, you need a way of ensuring that needed reforms are actually going to be made. And I don’t see that “intestinal fortitude” at the IMF, UN, or EU.

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