The Shape of Things to Come

A friend at work, knowing I'm a debt geek, asked me what was up with the Greeks these days. I told him about their austerity measures and that it looked like the Germans were finally going to be sufficiently satisfied to bail them out. In the process of discussing it, it dawned on me that the austerity measures did not change the course of Greek society, they just applied the brakes. A little bit. There was no move towards a market economy or deregulation in a country where starting even the tiniest of businesses requires approval from 11 different government entities.

The slothful, trundling hulk of Greek society shuffles on, just more slowly.

Reading this piece by Mark Steyn today, a particular paragraph caught my eye.

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

Mark has long been arguing that passing ObamaCare will forever change the nation. No matter what happens after that, we'll never be able to undo it and we'll be just another limpid Eurostate. The Greeks are proving him right. In the face of economic catastrophe, brought on by disconnecting earning from having and ignoring what things cost in favor of what they simply want to have, the Greeks are not moving to dismantle any part of their bloated, parasitic govenment.

Argentina proves Mark right as well. Peronism, the blueprint for the Obama Administration, was economic fascism that drove Argentina into default, currency devaluations and chaos. It's also still the way to get elected in Argentina.

I used to think that Mark Steyn was a pessimist. The Greeks are proving him right.

America or Greece? Both.