Erasmia Dimoula is a 25-year-old woman from Greece. I have never met her or spoken with her. I learned from an published in the National Post a couple of weeks ago that she is a nursery school teacher -- or rather, that she trained to be one. But in the two years since she qualified to teach nursery school she has only been able to work briefly, as a waitress. She is currently unemployed and lives with her parents.
But what makes Erasmia worthy of praise is her lucidity and the intellectual maturity she displays despite her young age. In this article she was quoted as saying, "I don't expect anything from any government, from any politician. I can only expect things from myself." She adds, "You have to take responsibility if you give your vote to these people. Then you'd have to shut up about what's going on."
In the last 60 years or so, the trend in much of the Western world has been to expect more and more from the state. Much of us expect that it will provide individuals with schooling, pensions, health care, and even vacations! These are things that people used to provide for themselves or relied on their communities to provide. Corporations also receive financial and regulatory favours from governments.
Yes, there's something for everybody in the modern welfare state. But where did our politicians acquire the means to play Santa Claus to their populations? Most obviously, through the taxation of those very same populations, so that Peter is robbed to pay Paul, and Paul is robbed to pay Peter. And thanks to the "friction" that occurs during income transfers through the government machine, and because of the further inefficiency generated by top-down government control, it's not even a transfer of one to one dollars that's taking place.
Most people tend to dislike taxes, but most people also want the benefits of government largess without having to foot the bill. In essence, they want something for nothing. But since the world doesn't work that way, politicians have to find ways to seem to be meeting this irrational desire.
One of those ways is monetary inflation, through which they print money. But with more money around, the value of each dollar decreases, so in reality inflation is a tax. To make matters worse, this influx of "phony money" into the economic system is what fuels those wealth-destroying boom-and-bust cycles.
The other main option for politicians who need to keep doling out benefits to voters who don't want to pay for them is that four-letter word: debt. Governments can borrow money to fund their activities. The debt that results, however, must be paid back someday, and with interest. This is a great way (from the politician's perspective) to tax voters that are not of voting age and, in some cases, that are not even born yet.
But, ultimately, government borrowing can lead to a debt crisis, which brings us back to the case of Greece. With a national debt level equal to 160 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), the Greek government has had to accept austerity measures in exchange for debt forgiveness and bailouts from the international community. As if Greece's national debt doesn't look bad enough, it jumps to a staggering 875 per cent of GDP when unfunded pension and health-care liabilities are factored in, according to a recent article by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute.
For decades, goodies have been gotten from governments around the world without being fully funded through taxation. Greece distinguishes itself only in a manner of degree. But even the United States, writes Tanner, is not looking much better, if at all. Its national debt now stands at 102 per cent of GDP, and when unfunded liabilities are included, that number soars to 480 per cent of GDP under best-case scenario assumptions, or, an astonishing 911 per cent of GDP -- worse than Greece -- under more realistic projections. However, its tax base is much stronger than Greece. Still, the fundamental trend at work is the same.
These dangerous levels of debt are the result of public spending levels so high that nobody wants to pay for them. Spending by governments at all levels amounts to 43 per cent of GDP in America, and slightly over 50 per cent, on average, in Europe.
But there is no such thing as a free lunch, and with 48 per cent unemployment for those 25 and under, the burden created by this situation in Greece is falling disproportionately on the young in the form of lost opportunities due to a stagnant economy.
In Greece, as in many other countries, established political parties from both the left and the right grew the state to irresponsible proportions in their competition for votes. Can the same politicians who created the current crisis be counted on to repair the damage they've caused?
Erasmia is right to doubt that they can. In a democracy, politicians go where the votes are. The only way they can be counted on to stop promising people more than they can afford is for those people to stop asking for it -- in other words, to stop expecting so much from government and start expecting more from themselves and their communities.
Let's hope for the sake of Greece and for the sake of other welfare state countries, that there are a lot more Erasmia Dimoulas out there because, at the most fundamental level, it is people like her who will allow us to get out of our current mess. Not bailout plans or inflationist monetary policies.
Follow Michel Kelly-Gagnon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/iedm_montreal
I suppose it's telling that a bought-and-paid-for think-tank apparatchik would praise the attitude of someone completely broken and defeated by the financial system. That attitude is exactly what leads to the highest profits; people who know and accept their powerlessness and don't even dream of overcoming it anymore.
Dear boy, read a history book, any history book about events before the C20. Start there. You need to learn about, among other things, the Poor Laws that began with Eliz I, and continued to the C19, say, or the Hudson's Bay Company, the CPR...etc....etc...?
I am sure this sounds like a great idea if you are rich living in a rich community. How about this instead;
"in other words, to stop believing that you are not getting anything from government because tax cuts are hand outs and start expecting to give your fair share to your friends, family and communities."
Saying government has a spending problem is like saying poor people, who have been laid off and banks and corporations taken everything from them in the forms of fees and user charges,etc. have a "spending problem" when they decide they want to EAT and go buy groceries. The problem isn't spending. The problem is that the people who seem to control more and more of the money - the National Wealth - are taking more and more of that wealth and refusing to pay back into the system. Now, the amount of wealth the wealthiest minority control is way out of proportion to the actual taxes they pay back. So this groups keeps getting richer and then uses that wealth and power to get special tax breaks/deals/loopholes.
WE can't keep building this jenga-tower economy and expect it to magically not collapse. We need to create a fairer economic system where the few aren't stealing from the rest of us to pad their corporate coffers, and then punishing us further by writing ridiculous articles about how government should cut services to the majority even further, just to protect corporate greed, corporate gouging, record profits, golden parachutes and all the corporate welfare and tax breaks that us regular folk never seem to get.
No one relied on themselves, like the Chinese model they relied on their children who were then held down by the cost of supporting their aging sick parents or letting them rot. Only the very rich and successful led healthy, happy, old lives, everyone else just died. You are really looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses here.
As for communities, the richer the community the more it can help itself stay rich. Community-based support only reinforces the seperation between richer and poorer communities who can pay for different things. If the poorer community needs the most money and help to support its community members, and the richer needs the least, then the poorer community is never going to get better (considering those same poor people are now splitting their time between working for themselves and others) and the profits of the individuals in the richer community will continue to expand because they add nothing to a communal pie.
No. We do not want everything handed to us, that's what you 1% trust fund babies are given you're whole lives. What the rest us, in this thing we call "reality", want is a system that is fair that allows anyone with the drive to succeed. But you 1%'ers are working overtime to make sure that there are ZERO oppertunities for anyone who isn't born into wealth.
The truth is that you don't want people to succeed because people like you need a slave race to work for pennies under terrible conditions so that you can make higher profits at everyone elses expense. This is why you and your fellow plutocrats are systematically destroying our way of life with the help of your Conservative Corporate buddies.
B.S.!! Most people don't want something for nothing. Most are more than willing to work for a living. What people want from their government is honesty and a fair system. And by the way, who pays your salary?
Au contraire, something for nothing is precisely what they want. It's usually expressed as 'free' as in 'free healthcare', 'free education', or 'free food'. 'Free' is a puny, pathetic, transparent fig leaf of a qualifier meaning 'paid for by somebody else, not me'.
Whenever I read about anything being 'free' it's a pretty sure indication that perpetual-motion-machine thinking is in play. Let me repeat it once again: nothing is free---ever, anywhere, for anyone, under any circumstances. Someone, somewhere, somehow has to pay for every single little good or service ever produced or that ever will be produced. In short, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
In fact, however, people who scream 'free' generally just want to maintain a patina of hard-working, honest respectability whilst enjoying the advantages of theft over honest toil (to paraphrase the late Dr Russell). If, instead of 'free', they said 'paid for by somebody else, not me', then it would be flagrantly obvious even to themselves that they're tawdry, hypocritical little thieves. They're just hoping that you, and they, will studiously ignore the obvious. And this forum is just chock-full of people like that.
1. Corporate tax breaks and corporate welfare in times of record profit
2. Wars on foreign soil against people who bear no threat to my nation
3. Obscene pay raises/bonuses for politicians and crown CEOs
4. Excessive government-generated propaganda meant to turn me against my own peers, blindsiding me from the true problems, caused by its own policies.
List of things I wish wouldn't mind paying for with my taxes, which benefit most members of the society of which I am a part, making the entirety stronger and more prosperous:
1. "Free" healthcare
2. "Free" education
3. "Free" food
I consider part of "relying on my community" to provide part of what we call self-government. Aristotle once said that those who have no interest in the business of the community have no business calling themselves its members. I think the same of those who say that everyone ought to be left on their own to compete for a 'share' of the good life.
In short, communities that govern themselves well can provide people with what they may be unable to provide for themselves. Those who see no virtue in cooperation see property and possession as the ultimate virtue. On their own, however, without the protections of society afforded through taxation, they would never have gotten where they are.
The government's job is to take enough money from the national community (the people) to support the lowest bracket of society. However, with the so-called "war on the middle class" going on and the trend of a shrinking middle class, the middle class needed support or else the number in the lowest bracket (that gets the most benefits) will increase, so now the middle class is on the dole. However, now the rich are grumbling that everyone gets something from their money and they get nothing, so they start getting "tax cuts" which is another term for welfare as that money is supposed to be community money for the reasons stated above, so now they are on the dole. Then, corporations start whining about how they aren't getting handouts, and remind us that if they fall than jobs disappear so more people will be pushed into poverty, so they start getting handouts as a preventative measure.
All of a sudden, we are all on welfare and its "unsustainable". Clearly we can see which people are in the wrong, and its not poor people.