Greece-ing the Skids Toward Dependency
On my drive from work, I was listening to a snippet of NPR where they were discussing the current economic apocalypse in Greece that Glenn Beck warned in his CPAC speech would occur here. There have been riots in the streets as the Greek government desperately seeks to find ways of ameliorating their budgetary boondoggle. They are of course frustrated by a plethora of failings and attempted fixes as reported by The Globe and Mail:
Greece will need to cut spending – by 10 per cent of GDP over 10 years – while raising revenue and cracking down on its untaxed black-market economy, which counts for as much as a third of all financial activity in the country. This combination could provoke further unrest, and may foretell similar tensions in Italy and Portugal.
If Greece’s crisis and accompanying political unrest were an isolated case, it might be more manageable, but this week the turmoil seemed to spread across the belly of Europe.
On Tuesday, Spain’s cities were shut down by unionized workers protesting its left-wing government’s plan to raise the retirement age to 67 and cut spending in order to deal with its own serious fiscal situation.
Spain has debt of 54 per cent of GDP and a deficit of more than 11 per cent, plus unemployment levels that approach 20 per cent and a housing-market collapse.
What struck me during the NPR report was their emphasis on the retirement age being raised while benefits are to head in the opposite direction in Greece; and at the same time, the story according to The Globe and Mail is that Greece is going to be taking similar steps.
Riots are occurring in the streets because the government is controlling the retirement benefits of the citizenry. Scary.
I was listening to the February 23rd edition of Mark Levin (I do the free podcast a day later while I run, God bless him for making his show free and available) where he talked about being at the mercy of the government. As these people in Europe see themselves: at the mercy of their government. “Please sir, can I have some more?” Where is the dignity and the honor? I work in a place where I see the day to day sufferings of people who find themselves dependent on a government that only knows of their existence based on a number in a database. Is this what we want? To have to go to the government, to Social Security, to your Congress-persons’ offices, to Medicare, and beg for money to exist?
Tocqueville once lamented about the coming age of rational control. We look at a leviathan to take away the “pain of thinking” and the “agony of living” as Dr. Mansfield once recounted. What needs to be explained to people, is that a dependency on government does nothing of the sort! The people dependent on government might have purged the “pain of thinking” from their lives, but they continue to live in agony as their life is no longer at the will of him or her self or even Providence, but of boards, panels and case workers… How long after Health Care gets passed (should we be so unfortunate) before we are rioting in the streets because we have found ourselves in government bondage?
-rj
