Do Y'All Know How Bad Things Are in Greece?

Michael Lewis does. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and, most recently, a great book on the Wall Street meltdown awhile back, The Big Short. He’s got an article in the recent Vanity Fair on the destruction of the Greek economy called "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds."  

I recommend that you read the whole astounding article. Here is an excerpt:

In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”


As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

The Trojan Horse -- beware of gifts bearing Greeks

I do not wish to suggest that the United States is likely to become like Greece anytime soon. I do suggest that democracies who wish to remain democracies pay some heed to the growth of the public sector. Which is set to explode under the policies of the current President. The last couple of Republican presidents didn’t do us any favors in this regard, either, so there is plenty of blame to go around.

I have nothing against the Greek. I thank him for much of what has become Western Civilization, which is really an excellent civilization. A first-rate civilization, and much of it started with the ancestors of this beautiful people.

But I am telling you, Cool Hot Centrists, there is something in the human condition that inspires its constituents to say to themselves, if we are promised something, we are entitled to it even if the keeping of that promise is devastating not only to our countrymen, but to the world into which our descendants will be born. You see it here in the demands of unions and all groups benefiting from the federal dole, which numbers are alarmingly large (although, thanks to a startlingly principled Republican Congress during the Clinton Administration, and Bill Clinton’s shrewd read of the American gestalt, is smaller than it could be).  You see it in the truly desperate condition of the California state government.

I don’t wish to be wearisome on the topic of our unsatisfactory President, I truly don’t. But Greece is the ultimate endpoint of the European Model of the role of government. It is a model that our President admires, at least if you take his advocacy of the present version – that is, the enacted version – of healthcare reform as evidence. The percentage of our economy accounted for by governmental activity – and that means persons employed by the federal government, and the taxes needed to support them and their benefits – is set to grow markedly under him.

The Democrats also seek to expand the influence of labor unions, as well as their ability to organize employees in businesses where their effect is unlikely to be any less baleful than their effect on the auto industry and local and state governments.

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio said this the other day:  "This election is nothing less than a referendum of our identity as a nation and as a people."  I have misgivings about the Tea Party, but this much they have absolutely right.

Think about it. Just think about it.

Breaking News: This Guy Agrees with Me

In several posts I have suggested that Barack Obama does not care much about being re-elected in 2012.

Toby Hamden agrees with me in this article in the Telegraph (UK).  (Astonishingly, he neglects to cite to my trailblazing posts.)

We disagree somewhat on Obama's thinking.  I have written that Obama cares only about the approval of his social-justice-redistributionist academic and leftist journalist constituency, the only people he respects.  These people will lionize him and hire him even if he goes down to defeat in 2012.   Electoral failure in the future cannot rob him of his schoolchild's title of Our First Black President, for which he will be (justifiably) noted forever, no matter how lousy a president he turned out to be.

Hamden takes a different view, speculating that Obama is thinking ahead to becoming a figure on the world stage in a "post-American" era.  In fact, these positions are not so far apart.  Hamden writes:

"Obama does not suffer from self-doubt.  He has long seemed so convinced of his own virtue that to question his motives is illogical.  Increasingly, his pronouncements carry the tone of one who believes those who disagree are stupid or bigoted.

*   *   *

"In Berlin in 2008, Obama cast himself as a 'citizen of the world.'  He has dismissed the bedrock notion of American exceptionalism by describing it  .  .  .  as little more than narrow patriotism.  Elite opinion among liberal Ivy League types -- of which Obama is the embodiment -- holds that we are already living in a post-American world."

That's right.  He is looking forward to the time when he need move only among -- and answer only to -- liberal opinion leaders.  However, I don't think he will become a respected world leader.  Oh, he'll be greeted politely by those who are already delighted at the weakening of the United States that began several administrations ago (Republicans most assuredly included) and that he has greatly accelerated.  He is not respected -- he seems almost to be regarded as a faintly comical figure -- among leaders of Western democracies. 

He is, in short, Jimmy Carter.

Unlike Carter and Bill Clinton, however, Obama will never travel to hostile countries to free incarcerated Americans in hostile lands.  He'll never pound nails into a Habitat for Humanity home; he'll never co-chair disaster relief efforts with George W. Bush.   That's a far too, too  .  .  .  practical a use of his grand and mostly self-imagined moral authority.  Let the politicians do stuff like that. 

I see for Obama a rather sad old age.  Oh, he'll do fine in the decade or so after he leaves office, serving on the Harvard faculty (good luck finding him in a classroom -- this is not an industrious man), chairing left-of-center foundations (again, mostly honorarily), speechifying vaporously around the world, with that odd head-swing of his as he pivots from teleprompter to teleprompter.  But in the long run, after the history books acknowledge his historical significance, the next paragraphs will note his failed promise.  He will not be influential, as Bill Clinton has been (aided to some degree, in his case, by the visibility and talents of Mrs. Clinton, but mainly because of his political intelligence and resonance with voters).   For future generations he won't be much more than a picture on a plate. 

And the guy whose profligacy they're still paying for.

It's really too bad.  I didn't vote for the guy, but there was promise there.   Turns out he's just another pol who confused the title with the task.

PART 2: Barack Obama -- The Definitive Explanation -- My Answer

When last we met, Your Cool Hot Center was puzzling over why President Obama would persist in pursuing a far-left agenda that a large number of people who voted for him, and voted for Democratic representatives and senators, do not like.  They don't like it so much that they are banding together -- community organizing, as I suggested last time -- to vote his supporters out of office.  The ever-faithful Anonymous left a comment on the previous article suggesting that people have short memories, and it is indeed the case that today's lightning news cycles can produce dramatic swings in voter sentiment in a very short period of time.  But somehow, I don't think those Tea Party folks -- who frankly make me a little uneasy, although I would probably agree with most of their positions -- are going to stand down after the November elections.  I think they're going to keep the pressure on for repeal of the health care bill and a halt to the redistributionist policies of this President and Congress. 

There will no doubt be considerable residual fondness in 2012 for this magnetic man of history.  It may also be the case that if the November elections have the effect of reining in his excesses, his Presidency will calm down, he'll turn to Bill Clinton for advice on how to navigate the new waters, and people will take a kindlier view of the man.  (And, of course, the Republicans could nominate a knucklehead, or two.)  Reforms will moderate, and some may be salutary.  (No one -- not me anyway -- believes that some stuff around here doesn't need fixing.)  Those Death Valley "strongly disapprove" ratings will ease, and he'll have his second term.  But my questions is:  Why is he risking that with his demand for the lightning restructuring of the American economy and role of government?

So, with thanks to Anonymous for the corrective, I return to my question:  Doesn't he care about the results of the mid-term election, or his own reelection?

Well, no; no, he doesn't, not very much anyway.

His policies may appear nonsensical, even unhinged, to that big chunk of the center-to-right portion of the electorate. You know, that chunk that elects presidents. But there is one place -- and really only one place -- where his freedom-unfriendly, government-intensive policies are almost unanimously popular, and where the working middle class is held at arms-length, like a faintly distasteful family member:

The academy.

This is where the policies he is advancing came from. His administration is government by abstract theory. Take the most notorious example, health care legislation. Put aside the corruption and near-comic ignornace of its provisions exhibited by Congress. Government-run health-care has never worked, anywhere.  And when I say it hasn't worked, I mean it hasn't worked as a system that expects the miracles that we demand of ours, and which it routinely delivers.  (And delivers to foreigners who flock here from their own state-run systems to experience them.)  The health-care bill is based, much of what he believes appears to be based, on a near-socialist (at least near-) view of wealth redistribution. The theories upon which this view is based get traction only in certain isolated islands of American geography: The departments of economics, political science, philosophy, history, ethnic studies, English and literature in American colleges and universities. (Wait, let's not forget Greece, Great Britain, much of Europe, and California.)

The president does not much care what happens on November 2, 2010, to the Pelosi-whipped represenatives who voted for a health-care reform bill they did not and could not read. He really doesn't even care all that much about what happens to him on November 6, 2012.  He cares mostly about his lionization for the remainder of his considerable days by the only people whose opinion he respects: Liberal arts faculties and their products.  He cares about how he will appear in the books they will write. They will celebrate his bravery in taking on those small-minded people who want to direct their earnings as they see fit rather than turning it over to a governing elite who can parcel it out based on ideas of what has come to be konwn as "social justice." "Social justice" has its modern foundation in the theories of John Rawls, expressed at tedious length and unreadable prose in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. The men and women who were undergraduates when that book had its heyday are now running American liberal arts departments.

Barack Obama's worldview owes less to his upbringing and race than it does to his association with Harvard and the University of Chicago and the academics and intellectuals he has brought with him on his rather brief journey.  The academy is truly where he came from.  It is where he will go when he is turned out.  It will nuture and celebrate him in the decades (Jah willing) he has left, as they have celebrated and elevated him since he came of age. While the nation is struggling to undo the damage he has caused, he will be basking in the warmth of tenured fans.   He has even assumed their manner -- a noticeable tendency to lecture, a growing distaste for questions, even from the press who had a big role in putting him behind the lecturn with that big seal on it.

Because he is really good at thinking, and really light on experience, he values the results of thought divorced from experience.  He admires the methods of today's academic social scientists.  He believes what they believe. These university guys are cool and witty and freaky smart and I'm just like them. And the hell with people whose perspective is shaped by something other than theory, like, for example, nontenured employment and income-tax withholding.  Indeed, even during the campaign, he has been unable wholly to supress his discomfort with the concerns and enthusiasms of the middle class. 

(There is one other island that tends this way -- unionized government employees.  But they are not quite so monolithic and their intellectual contribution to the administration is negligible.)

Am I overstating the leftism of the academy?  No. Study after study finds Democrats outnumbering Republicans there by breathtaking margins, and their political beliefs overwhelmingly to the left.   (Scroll through the abstracts collected here.)  (Yeah, Steverino, but doesn't that just prove conservatives are dumb because only smart people are professors? No, but that's a topic for another day.)   Do I overstate the President's attachment to this subculture?  I'm not a mind-reader, but I don't think I do.  The President disowned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but only distanced himself from Prof. William Ayres's youthful violence.  (The President may have other reasons not to alienate Prof. Ayres; the evidence that the latter composed the much-praised Dreams from My Father, while not conclusive, is suggestive.)  And the academy has risen to Prof. Ayres's vigorous defense. 

So no, I can't prove that President Obama places decisive value on the approbation of liberal arts faculties.  But I am convinced that a significant element of the President's motivation is his knowledge that he is actually enacting the dreamy speculations of the academic left that no previous national leader dared promote. These are his friends, his mentors. He will move among them as their hero the many long years of his life.

The legacy he is imagining has less to do with political parties than with cocktail parties.