ATHENS, Greece — With no warning, a few dozen students blocked a major avenue in central Athens, marching slowly up the middle of the street to make sure motorists couldn't get through. Tempers frayed, horns honked.The photo that accompanies this story is frightening. A group of high school students are bringing traffic to a standstill in a goofy, brainless protest, much like the Occupy Wall Street ones.
Greece is in total collapse and needs every cent it can earn to ease the pain, but the students are out there happily waving signs and throwing rocks. They have no idea at all how things work. Ben Boychuk has a great line about the Wall Street protests that applies equally to the Greeks.
What to make of all this? The movement's manifesto (to say nothing of this unofficial list of demands) reads like a Marxist child's letter to a Santa Claus his doctrinaire parents forgot to tell him doesn't exist.It's childish and naive and pathetic. How did these kids get this far and have no clue about how wealth is created?
Too much "protection" by labor laws, employment requirements and minimum wage laws?
ReplyDelete(I know my folks would love to hire a few random teens on the ranch...but the cost in cash, along with the way that they'd have to be there supervising, means that it's almost never better to think about hiring someone than doing it yourself.)
How can they know how work is when they've never seen it?
Wealth is created by the government giving everything to me.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was obvious.