As much as I condemn American politicians for bad policy, things could be worse.
We could be Greek citizens, which would be very depressing. Indeed, you’ll understand why I put Obamaland in the title after you read today’s column.
Simply stated, Greece is a cesspool of statism. The people seem to be wonderful (at least outside of polling booths), but government intervention is pervasive and atrocious.
Here’s an example. As I was coming in a taxi from the airport to the city yesterday, we passed some sort of protest. There were a couple of hundred people at the rally and probably about 50 riot cops.
I naturally wondered about the situation, expecting that it was radical statists or some of the crazies from Golden Dawn. But the cab driver explained that it was pharmacists.
So why are pharmacists protesting? I found out from some of the locals at the Free Market Road Show that this is a heavily regulated and protected sector of the Greek economy.
The government has rules, for instance, that products such as aspirin and other painkillers can only be purchased at pharmacies. The bureaucracy also rigs all the prices to preclude competition. And there are even government policies that make it very difficult for new pharmacies to compete against the established firms.
When special interests have that much power, no wonder Greece is in trouble.
Thought there are some sectors of the business community, such as online entrepreneurs, that are treated like crap. Literally.
Here’s another example from a Wall Street Journal report, albeit one where a modest bit of progress has been achieved.
For the first time in more than a hundred years, Greece is sacking public servants. In 1911, Greece introduced jobs for life under Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. Now, a century later, his descendant, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s minister for administrative reform, is faced with the delicate task of slimming down the massive public sector this law helped create. …In exchange for…aid, Greece has promised to cut the government workforce by at least 150,000 by 2015 through attrition, and to lay off an additional 15,000 outright by the end of this year. Another 25,000 would be placed in the temporary labor pool. Of those goals, the first has been reached: Greece had 713,000 government workers at the end of 2012, down 122,000 from the end of 2010. …But the labor pool is still a work in progress. Last July, the first 4,000 employees were put in that pool, while another 8,000 or so followed a few months later. Few of them are expected to be rehired. And with Greece’s unemployment rate already close to 30%, few expect to find jobs in the private sector.
I actually feel a bit sorry for some of these people.
They probably took jobs in the bureaucracy without ever thinking about who was paying their salaries and without giving any thought to the featherbedding and waste that accompany most public sector positions.
But I bet they voted for the politicians that dramatically expanded the number of bureaucrats, so it’s hard to feel too much sympathy.
In any event, they’re understandably worried now that the gravy train is being derailed.
Or maybe the gravy is still there, but in different forms.
It appears that there’s still taxpayer money floating around that can be wasted in interesting ways.
Here are some excerpts from the Guardian about EU-funded “anger management” for some of Greece’s senior tax bureaucrats.
Until Greece’s economic meltdown, anger management was an alien concept at the country’s finance ministry. …Today these are the buzzwords flying around the ground-floor training room at 1 Handris Street. For tax inspectors attending mandatory seminars at the government building, anger management, like patience and politesse, are now seen as essential prerequisites of an increasingly stressful job. “Today, in Greece, everyone is either unhappy or angry when they have to go and pay at the tax office,” Fotis Kourmouris, a senior official at the finance ministry’s public revenues department said. “There is a lot of negative emotion … in the framework of better customer service, classes in psychological and emotional intelligence had become necessary.”
I wouldn’t call it “negative emotion.”
This is a long-overdue revolt of the Greek tax slaves.
…inspectors have found themselves at the sharp end of popular rage. In recent months visiting auditors have been chased out of remote villages, hounded out of towns and booted off islands by an increasingly desperate populace. “We’ve had multiple cases of violence at tax offices by angry members of public, including physical assaults; shots were fired in one case, and one attacker came with an axe,” said Trifonas Alexiadis, vice-chairman of the national association of employees at state financial services.
But when you read how the Greek government is trying to rape and pillage taxpayers, you can understand the anger.
A series of new tax laws has further fuelled public anger. Since the outbreak of the crisis, close to 30 new levies have been introduced by governments desperate to augment empty state coffers. “Too much pressure is being put on people who can’t pay,” said Alexiadis, who suggested that in such circumstances the classes were not only ill-conceived but “juvenile and unnecessary”. …accountant Heracles Galanakopoulos agreed. “They produce a law that nobody understands and then produce another three to explain it. By the time people get here they are really very angry,” he lamented… “I spend at least five or six hours a day reading up on all these new laws and still can’t keep up. Anger management is a nice idea but in a system that is so absurd it’s not going to make a jot of difference.”
Amen. As I’ve argued before, Greece’s problem is high tax rates. Evasion is simply a function of a bad tax code.
Let’s close with some Greek-related humor.
I very much recommend this very funny video from a Greek comedian and this politically incorrect map of how the Greeks view the rest of Europe.
[…] It seems obvious that it’s better to be at the top of that chart, like Hong Kong and Singapore, instead of the bottom, like Italy or Greece. […]
[…] spent too much money and drove the economy into a ditch. And ever since, they’ve been trying to tax their way back to solvency, apparently oblivious to the fact that the private sector can’t rescue the economy if it’s […]
[…] leftist named Peter Orszag. If Orszag’s policy views were a country, they would be France or Greece. By contrast, I’m guessing that Elmendorf would be like Sweden or Germany. In other words, he […]
[…] effect, a nation slowly but surely becomes Greece as more and more people either rely on benefits or have jobs in the bloated bureaucracies that […]
[…] a never-ending array of new tax […]
[…] The evidence strongly indicates we need less government rather than more. Unless, of course, you think the United States would grow faster if we were more like France or Greece. […]
[…] The evidence strongly indicates we need less government rather than more. Unless, of course, you think the United States would grow faster if we were more like France or Greece. […]
[…] The evidence strongly indicates we need less government rather than more. Unless, of course, you think the United States would grow faster if we were more like France or Greece. […]
[…] participé le 2 avril à la dernière escale en date du Free Market Road Show. Deuxièmement, j’ai utilisé la blague « Obamaland » en écrivant il y a quelque jour sur ma visite en Grèce. Je ne devrais probablement pas […]
[…] I used the “Obamaland” joke when writing a few days ago about my visit to Greece. So I should probably not over-utilize any […]
“Riot police, anti-austerity protesters clash in Greece”…
“Greek riot police and demonstrators protesting against crippling austerity measures adopted by the government in Greece have clashed in Athens.”
what the eu… and the imf did for Greece… they now are going to do for Ukraine… truth be told… Ukraine could have likely gotten a better deal from Putin…
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/04/02/riot-police-anti-austerity-protesters-clash-in-greece.html
child abuse… drugs… mental illness… suicide…
“Greece child abuse rises as economy falters”
by John Psaropoulos :
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/03/greece-child-abuse-rises-as-economy-falters-2014328134335710676.html
WHAT IS THIS?
10 banks hold 80%0f deposits
2 firms distribute 90% of beer
Banks hold more equity in homes than occupants
10 firms hold 90% of health insurance policies
A youngster goes to prison for holding five grams of pot but not for holding a six pack of intoxicating beer
The majority of prisoners are there for non-violent crimes
58M get Social Securityâ8.1M are on SS disability
400 have more wealth than 90%
What can the public do?
Increase Minimum Wage to $10.10â50% tax on income over 1m and 70% om top one tenth of one percentâEstate Tax âRepeal Bush Tax CutâRepeal Obama Payroll Tax-Tariff tax on products made by overseas American plants
Clarence Swinney calls it horrible
Greece is the canary in the coal mine… the erosion of social capital there will take generations to replace… whenever elements of a society are willing to infect themselves with a.i.d.s. in order to collect social welfare benefits… the world in which we live has been turned on it’s ear… it is equal to eating next years seed stocks in order to survive the winter… and having nothing to plant in the spring… it is a kind if insanity… and it is destroying parts of Europe… and it has infected the leadership and peoples of America as well… the more statism and socialist thought we condone and accept… the more likely this dangerous world in which we live will provide us with challenges we can not overcome… ego… bombast… and disinformation will not change physical and economic realities…
“there is a storm coming Mr. Wayne…”
Greece is the quintessential pitchfork democracy. That is it’s most distinctive feature. It is the land of “yes we can”. We can vote and impose anything on anyone.
But it is easy for people who look at Greece for the first time to exclaim “it is such a mess that I never envision that happening here in my own western democracy, we will sure pull back and turn around way before we become Greece”.
But there is a vicious cycle. And that vicious cycle starts much-much before than what you see in Greece today.
It is the vicious cycle whereby the more economic performance declines, the more voters see the state as one of the ever fewer remaining hopes. What you see in Greece is the result of many inevitable iterations of this vicious cycle. That vicious cycle has consumed all productivity, real and potential, including the enormous geographical endowment Greeks are lucky to be born in.
Greece will never recover in a meaningful way, although the intense part of the crisis will eventually bottom out. Its tourist industry will recover (has actually been doing rather well throughout the crisis) at which point the majority who is not in the tourism industry will figure out that that’s where the money is and start voting its wealth their way at the polls. The Mykonos Hospital, the Santorini public music hall, the Naxos stadium and so on…
There is though one excuse I will grant the Greeks. Nice beaches do skew the Laffer Curve towards the vertical axis. In dreary flat Denmark you have much fewer options. Hence as an inhabitant of Denmark, you are willing to tolerate a much bigger percentage of your labor been harvested by your neighbors, and still work. If I were an economics wonk and had a Ph.D student I’d suggest he/she investigate how the shape of the Laffer Curve (and the much more decisive to prosperity Rahn Curve) changes with geographical latitude.
P.S. Did you know that Greece’s first socialist president in ’81 ran his election campaign under the main motto: “Change?” Coincidence? Or is Greece indeed ahead of most western democracies in more ways than one?
Enjoy Greece….I was there in December on a cruise….Athens and Olympia….you can see the depressed nature of the place by the garbage along the streets and graffiti on the walls..oh well, people in a democracy deserve the government they get. How long are you there for may I ask?
Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
Greece: lots of sun, beautiful islands and nice people. But, … what a mess.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
It’s easy to mistake the two; Obama has us well down the same road.
Reblogged this on Neverending1's Blog and commented:
I’m re-blogging this because I like what he wrote. It has nothing to do with gang stalking. And you have to see the link to Berlusconi’s map of Europe(funny!). Its a little smutty, but funny.
Interestingly enough, the US government this week is putting out word IRS agents need to be wary of dangerous tax prepares!
http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/irs-employees-warned-to-beware-of-dangerous-tax-preparers-70149-1.html