Greece Can Only Help Itself

A case for why Germany should help Greece.

The interesting part of the discussion is the fact that Greece, if helped, needs to change the way it does things and that can only begin from within. A case I made here before.

One important point made was that while West Germany benefited from aid after WWII, it DID change. The result being it lead to an economic miracle. Even Italy experience its own miracle. These countries went on to produce some of the world's great products.

Greece is in no such position and seems prepared to stubbornly cling to its failing ways.

Germany can bail it out and throw all the money in the world at it, but it won't do anything if Greece remains unchanged. It will find itself in the exact same spot again down the road. In other words, Germany doesn't want to enable Greece.

And so far, I don't see any interest on the part of Greeks to want to clean up its act.

As for comparisons to Germany, the U.S., and even Italy, it's ridiculous. Greece is nothing like those countries. It's essentially an agrarian, tourist based economy while the others are industrial powers.

The bottom line is the excuses will have to stop at some point.

Interesting comment in the article's thread:

"I spent close to 10 years in Greece, during those years I was not questioning if the economy is going to collapse it was when is going to. The middle class, doctors, lawyers, landlords and shop owners by the government accounts were paying between 7-9% in taxes. Everyone was hiding incomes and no one wanted to make them pay. Close to 40% of the population were living on government jobs, 57% of women did not work, the education system had built a double layer of schooling (they call it frontistirio, privately run classes that did not pay taxes). Government workers were striking to get weekly hours limited to 35. Utility companies, phone companies, ports and many others were own by government. Unions were striking against privatization of large state own companies, even though EU it was pressuring them to do so. Most probably the author of this article belongs to the segment of Greeks that still think Germans own them for damages during WWII. Instead of analyzing the reasons and finding internal solutions for their country’s problems they keep asking Germans to bail them out. They did that for 30+ years and what happen? Greece has fairly decent infrastructures, they have a good educated class of engineers, doctors, lawyer, economists, they have all needed to reverse the last 40 years they screwed up. This will happen only if they start finding solutions inside themselves. I hope they do."

The truth is, while the days of the welfare state are numbered for all Western countries, Greece's problem is unique to their own internal issues and no amount of bail outs will ever fix that.