Elections in Greece
Europe and the financial markets are in turmoil over the decision of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s call for a referendum on the recent deal reached to rescue the country from it financial problems. Some called it “a strange thing to do.” Other were “irritated,” while a member of the opposition called it “a dangerous and frivolous decision.”
While there seems to be few that support his call, I think it is great! Who would have thought that democracy in Greece would cause such a problem? There is, in fact, a deeper issue here, and one that goes to the heart of the financial problem in Greece, the rest of Europe, and even here in the United States.
While they are vastly different movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements do share at least one common belief, and it is a belief also shared by a large segment of society. It is the belief that things are out of their control.
The Tea Party sees government as having lost touch with the people and on a seemingly uncontrollable spending binge that threatens to turn this country into Greece. Occupy Wall Street seems to hold that the rich and powerful, symbolized by Wall Street, are out of control and that their greed is causing our problems.
The idea that there are forces and powers outside of our control that are running things is not new. In the extreme, this belief forms the basis for many of the conspiracy theories that seem never to go away. But this idea exists and influences behavior beyond just conspiracy theories. While this type of thinking can be found on both the right and the left, it is particularly strong on the left, for there it is integrated into the way they view the world.
Compared to Occupy Wall Street, the Tea parties come at this backwards. The Tea Parties started out of an alarm over the massively exploding debt. Throughout the Bush years many Democrats and some Republicans complained about the growth of the debt. In fact, the Republican loss of the Congress in 2006 was probably due more to the failure of Republicans to rein in spending, than the War in Iraq.
Yet with Obama and the Democrats, the deficit did not go down, it went up even more. In fact it exploded to unprecedented heights to a level roughly 10 times higher than the last Republican budget. To make matters worse, this was not just a short term problem due to the recession. The Obama budgets showed huge deficits with no end in sight. This caused a lot of people to focus what was going on, and the Tea Parties were born.
Whereas the Tea Parties can point to specific problems and polices, Occupy Wall Street has no such specificity. Instead, they seem to be trying to force the current problems to fit their existing worldview. The Left is, at its core, a movement of division. It sees the world as a series of competing groups: labor, management, union, non-union, rich, middle class, poor, men, women, white, black, Hispanic, etc, etc, etc..
While there are many problems with this worldview, the key problem in this discussion is that these divisions frequently end up viewing things in an us-versus-them fashion. In doing so it separate actions from responsibility. This is most easily seen with labor unions. At their core, Labor unions pit management against employees, using force and intimidation (normally the use of the strike, but historically often physical force and intimidation as well) to get changes to working conditions. This engenders a get-all-you-can mentality, without any responsibility for the consequences. If management gives in too much and the business (or even industry) fails, that is management’s fault for agreeing to union demands.
We currently see this issue playing out in a number of states. Government unions are a particular problem in that government employees are often a significant political force, a force which can get their candidates elected. As such in many instances they find themselves effectively negotiating with themselves, i.e. the people they elected. This has led to huge problems in many states, as wages and benefits have far exceeded those in the privates sector and where grave concerns exist on how these obligations will be paid for. California, for example, which is already in serious financial trouble, also faces an unfunded pension liability of $500 billion.
Returning to Greece, this is the core of their problem. In short, the Greek government spent too freely, made too many promises, and now the bill is coming due. But the Greek people do not yet seem to grasp this and there is broad disapproval with the debt deal. Polls “showed that nearly 60 percent of Greeks viewed the deal as negative or probably negative.”
If democracy is to work, people must be free to choose, but also to suffer the consequences of those choices. There is no such thing as choice without consequences, at least in the long run, and the belief that there is, is one of the gravest dangers for any democratic system. In the short term the consequences can be postponed, and thus ignored. But eventually the bill comes due, as is currently happening in Greece, and will eventually happen here.
This is the big difference between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party wants to bring spending and the debt under control now. Occupy Wall Street is still in an Us-versus-Them mentality, refusing to take responsibility and instead seeking to blame unseen forces of Wall Street for just not paying their fair share.
So I say let Greeks vote, but let them take the consequences of that vote. That way, regardless of what they decide, the Greek people will be responsible for what happens. They will not be able to blame others, as they almost certainly would have, had this deal been imposed on them against the will of the majority.
