Look at the pitiful spectacle of Greek civil servants and sundry Communists (insofar as those two categories are not identical) wailing about their country’s plight:

"We want to send a message to the people of Europe," said Panagiotis Papageorgopoulos, a communist party official marching with the protesters. "We can take control of our fate with organised protests so that our lives are not run by the EU and IMF"…

Passing in front of Athens‘ imposing Greek parliament, demonstrators shouted: "Let the rich pay for the crisis."

Theodore Dalrymple nails this one. Bang (my emphasis):

When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults.

It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and no doubt many of them are thieves; but their real crime was not stealing, but offering a substantial proportion of the Greek population a standard of living that was economically unjustified, maintained for a time by borrowing, and in the long run unsustainable, in return for votes.

The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.

Huh?

Yes. He’s right.

What is happening, very broadly speaking, is this.

Governments are bribing voters with money borrowed from the future, as clear a case of ‘taxation without representation’ as can be imagined.

There may be a case for doing that now and again or even regularly to keep some sort of reasonable cash-flow going, and so generate the success now from which future generations stand to benefit.

But if it gets out of hand, the implications are ruinous. As Mrs Duffy famously said to Gordon Brown, only to be denounced as a bigot:

Gillian Duffy: But how are you going to get us out of all this debt, Gordon?

Unfortunately for Europe, the whole of modern Western state funding is based on an unimaginable Ponzi scheme:

In our view, in the not too distant future, the interest payments on the outstanding national debts in the overstretched ‘developed’ nations will become so large that their central banks will need to create money just to keep the Ponzi schemes going.

When that happens, the game will be up and we will probably experience a total breakdown of the fiat-money experiment. At this stage, we do not know when the day of reckoning will arrive but we do know that all Ponzi schemes ultimately collapse under their own weight and this one will be no different.

Given the shocking debt overhang in the West and the threat of surging inflation later this decade, we cannot understand why anybody would want to lend money to bankrupt governments!?

In the worst case scenario, these naïve bondholders risk losing their entire capital and the best outcome involves a significant loss of purchasing power due to inflation. Accordingly, we are not investing in sovereign debt and we suggest that you refrain from lending money to dubious governments.

Because, basically, it makes sense for the markets to lend governments money on this scale only if the future population is going to there to repay those huge loans and accumulated interest.

In Europe‘s case, they won’t be:

According to the EC’s projections, the EU’s working-age population grew at an average rate of 0.9 percent per year from 2004 to 2010, thus boosting overall GDP growth. But beginning in this decade, the workforce is going to contract, slowing GDP growth by an average of 0.1 percent every year through 2030. In other words, the shift from an expanding to a contracting workforce is worth about a 1.0 percentage point drop in GDP every year.

Meanwhile, the cost of the European welfare state is set to rise dramatically with population aging. The EC projected that pension and health costs will rise about 2.4 percent of EU-wide GDP from 2004 to 2030.

 

To survive the demographic tidal wave coming their way, European governments should have been running large primary budget surpluses in the years when their workforces were still growing and paying taxes. But most did not.

 

Now, their choices are far less attractive. If lenders won’t finance their welfare states at preferential rates, European governments will have no choice but to impose even higher taxes on the shrinking number of workers who continue to produce goods and services, or ask those no longer working to cut their consumption dramatically. Either way, it’s a politician’s nightmare.

 

European voters voted in these people in return for the promise of a prosperous quiet life, funded by someone or other, somewhere, some time, somehow. When does Stupidity slip into Immorality?