Following Up on Greece

I cross-posted yesterday's The 1%'s European Coup over at DailyKos, where it generated quite a bit of commentary.  In reading some of those comments this morning, I came across a number that took issue with my characterization of exactly what happened to Greece.  I addressed these points in a lengthy comment of my own, but it occurred to me to cross-post that additional argument/data here as well.


I originally had left out this information because I thought yesterday's post was getting long enough as it is, but I do think that this additional data supports my contention that Greece's debt problems arose because its wealthiest citizens simply refused to pay their taxes.  The comment I posted up over at DailyKos and the additional supporting information are both below the fold.

Ayn Rand: Getting it Completely Backwards

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand.  The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher.  The third was neither but thought she was both.

                                                --Corey Robin

                                                The Reactionary Mind

It’s been a long time since I read it – because it has been a long time since I was an idiot adolescent – but I recall that there is a scene toward the end of Atlas Shrugged in which Rand’s ragtag team of superhero industrialists, flying in a plane, look down and see the lights of New York begin to go out.

In Rand’s narrative, you see, the Mighty 1%™ had chosen to withdraw their creativity, their entrepreneur-based superpowers, their special genius . . . and now New York and the entire world would go dark.  That’d show the rest of us!

In the Real World, another narrative is shaping up.  The ending is similar, but the story is very, very different.

In the Real World, the narrative runs like this . . . .

The Banksters: Conspiracy or Confluence?

I have a very good friend, a guy I’ve known since Junior High School, which -- these days – means that we’ve been buddies much longer than half our lives.  (In fact – I just took the time to calculate this -- in only three years we’ll have been best friends for 2/3rds of our lives).  He is by far my oldest friend and most of our really funny, really weird stories involve things that happened when we were hanging out together and were both much younger and much, much stupider.  My buddy and I talk and debate politics and the economy often, and we agree about most things.  We are as close as brothers.

But we generally part ways when it comes to the perfidiousness of the 1%.  My buddy is convinced that the huge funneling of our nation’s massive resources to a smaller and smaller number of people over the past 30 years has been an intentional, meticulously planned scheme from the beginning:

“I’m telling you,” he recently told me, “when they look into this shit 100 years from now they’ll figure out this was planned from the start.  Cut taxes on the rich, cut government spending for the rest of us, and convince us it was for our own good while they whistle all the way to the bank.  There’s no way the last 30 years happened by accident.”

Me?  I have a higher disregard for people.  I distrust conspiracies and complicated plans.  I thrill to a good heist movie, same as anyone else, but I also know that any plan that involves more than 3 people and requires split-second choreography (“Adjust your watches on my mark . . . 3, 2, 1, Mark!”) never ever really works out in Real Life. 

People just aren’t that smart and – even if they were – they’re never that competent.  Generally speaking, Big Evil doesn’t result from well thought-out, complicated, secret conspiracies involving large numbers of people.  Big Evil more often results because a large number of small, greedy, grasping jackasses – working entirely autonomously – suddenly find a loophole to exploit, and subsequently use the leverage their initial exploitation gives them to twist and exploit the system even further until eventually they control that system completely.

But – sometimes – I get hit with something that makes me wonder if my buddy might not be right after all.  Maybe the past 30 years haven’t just been a confluence of events, driven at every step by nothing more than the blind grasping of the already overly privileged.  Certainly it isn’t too unreasonable to think that the public relations campaign they’ve launched over the past decade or so wasn’t just coincidence.

If that were the case then half the nation and all of our TeeVee pundits wouldn’t keep reflexively repeating that the 1% are the “producers,” the “achievers,” or the “job creators.” 

Instead, it’d still be the other way ‘round.