Do they still have that deal giving pensions to unmarried daughters of dead state employees?
Well, the Greeks have tried fudging their retirement system, and Germans want them to push it back more. Doing something different might mean reevaluating the value of that tired tug-of-war. Again, look at what youâre fighting over with the retirement age: Pennies on the Dollar. (Or cents on the Euro.) What Greece needs is either a bigger GDP or less debt. The first isnât going to happen. Period. Not unless the Spartans left massive reserves of gold bouillon under the Acropolis no one knows about. The less debt thing will only happen with time, forgiveness, or both. 100% forgiveness is probably unreasonable, but 0% forgiveness is also unreasonable. Creditors accept risk of default. If Greece was a corporation, it wouldnât be around any longer and Germany would be SOL for the balance. The fact that people have to continue living and governing there because itâs a country with an indefinite lifespan and not a corporation doesnât mean that Germany isnât just as fucked over the balance as it would be had it lent to a corporation.
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The actions of German voters during the 1930âs to 1945 didnât matter in the discussions about debt forgiveness 70 years ago either. It was rational to sweep that under the rug in order to try and prevent worse from happening and allow a rebuild on solid foundations. Itâs rational to do the same for Greece.
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How would selling soup recipes help? 
(Sorry)
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Luckily, I never claimed you did. This isnât the first time youâve put words in my mouth, here. Could it stop, please?
Nope, would have drawn the parallels to British imperialism and probably would have said something obliquely about the Raj. Jingoism is nationalism whether youâre British or German.
Hereâs your first comment, the one I think youâre referring to:
Youâre not actually saying âthe Greeks are equally to blameâ here â youâre literally saying, âthe Greeks blame only external factorsâ with a strongly implied âfalselyâ between âGreeksâ and âblameâ. I made a cogent rebuttal that this hasty generalization is probably just about completely untrue â that a lot of Greeks probably blame tax evasion and government corruption, while another subset of Greeks, likely disjoint from the other, are quite likely to blame Greek pensions and entitlement programs. You ignored that, and when I lampooned this simplistic view of the situation, you responded by going into self-pity mode with the âWhy do people always think weâre NAZIs?â routine.
I also made a cogent rebuttal to this point. Itâs just tragedy of the commons. If no one else is paying taxes, and your personal tax contribution canât possibly make a meaningful contribution to the countryâs revenue, but it can make a difference between your family getting a full meal tonight or not, then youâre probably going to skip paying taxes if you can. This is another instance of trying to apply virtue ethics to a situation that is much better understood economically.
Let me spell it out for you: Greek people care less about some German millionaire getting short-changed on his speculative investments in Greece than they do about whether their own children get to eat tonight. This should not be a surprise. In fact, this should be blindingly obvious. People donât like to be in debt, and they donât like to owe money, but those considerations are usually secondary to basic biological needs like food and shelter.
Iâm interested in seeing your response to a previous question. Get rid of pensions for 61-67 year olds. Unemployment is rampant, and a 61 year old isnât very employable even if that werenât the case. Now what?
Your position seems to be âthey get what they deserveâ â because they acted in their own best interests to prioritize their own and familiesâ health and well-being above and beyond that of debt that their national government owes to other (mostly non-human) entities. And âwhat they deserveâ seems to beâŚwhatever happens to them? Starving to death, humanitarian aid from Russia â you donât seem too worried about the actual outcome.
Just in who is to âblameâ. It seems suspiciously like you want to absolve yourself and your countrymen of any responsibility for anything bad that happens to Greek people as a result of austerity. That looks a lot like motivated reasoning, as it always does when people try to use virtue ethics to make sense of political situations. Maybe you should spend some time thinking about the situation as concretely as possible and most importantly avoiding any moralistic concepts as part of the analysis. Once you do that, maybe think about how youâve arrived at your current opinions. Do a self-audit. Because if I can judge your reasoning on this issue based on the arguments youâve made so far, your reasoning on this issue is really shitty.
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Bullshit theatrics . You confuse cause and effect. Tax evasion is not the reaction to the crisis itâs one of the reason for it.
Perhaps you should too?
Just FYI:
http://www.aleksandreia.com/2010/03/08/greek-retirement-age-and-more-on-the-greek-debt-crisis/
Also, relatedly, privatization of pensions has been a nightmare in the US, and more and more people are working well into the 70s and 80s. After the Enron scandal gutted the retimrement of their employs, who only got around $3000 in compensation, many of those people, close to or beyond retirement age, had to go back to work.
I think the question to ask is who benefits from austerity, and the Greek people have rightly understood that it wonât be them.
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Youâve avoided every single question asked of you, refusing to address, or even acknowledge how what youâre asking for will outright hurt some people.
The only real conclusion is that you either donât care that your desires end up hurting people, or that itâs part of your goal because you think theyâre âdeservingâ. Maybe you should try addressing all the people pointing out that your ideas donât hold any water at all, if you donât want to look like a heartless jerk?
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I donât ask for anything. As I clearly stated I donât have any idea what to do. Iâm just elaborating on the original comment I made. Iâm not speaking on behalf of the EU, ECB, Germany etc. so I donât have any answers to the other questions put forth here.
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First, in what sense is it âtheatricsâ?
Second, have you never been exposed to the concept of âfeedbackâ, or any physical model involving cause and effect more complicated than a two-body problem? The âcrisisâ does not have one cause or one effect. âTax evasionâ does not have just one cause or one effect.
Third, did you actually read what youâre responding to? I never argued anywhere that the crisis caused tax evasion. I argued that tax evasion cause tax evasion. You are willing to consider tax evasion as not just a cause for the crisis, but your moral justification for blaming the problem entirely on the Greek people. Are we then not supposed to analyze the phenomenon of Greek tax evasion? Why not? Because it might be inconvenient for your argument?
If the purpose of the statement at hand was not to imply that Greeks blaming external factors is unjustified, then what was your point? It seems clear to me youâre not just making some (clearly untrue â are you going to address that part yet?) claim about what Greeks like to blame for what. It seems clear that your comment is trying to imply that such blaming external factors is unjustified.
This is obvious enough that I felt justified in saying that you implied that the Greeks were wrong about the blame falling on external actors. Thatâs not what you were saying? At the very least, I think itâs a pretty reasonable inference.
On the other hand, you have three times now simply responded to me as if I said something I never did. You never said I was implying any of it, or made a case that I was. You simply acted as if I had said things that I hadnât. There is a big difference between those two acts: putting words into someoneâs mouth, and making a reasonable interpretation of the motivation behind a speech act.
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â we not you
Sorry, Iâm just going to go off into some light-hearted pedantry here, because goodness knows, thatâs what this thread needs.
The Spartans could have left a load of gold hanging around. The legendary tales of Sparta have them with a disdain for gold- making their currency out of Iron instead, to show that love of gold and other luxury items was against The Spartan Way. Of course, thereâs no actual evidence of this iron currency, but there you go. Oh, and thereâs no reason that the Spartans would leave their gold under the Acropolis, right in the middle of their greatest enemy, the Athenians. Unless youâre talking about after the Peloponnesian War of course, when Sparta conquered Athens and managed to dominate it entirely for a while, replacing the proto-democratic Athenian state with domination by violent Spartan militarismâŚ
So, yeah⌠back to the thread.
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Gold bouillon tastes terrible anyway.
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Right, you responded to an argument I made by implying hypocrisy because itâs incompatible with an argument someone else made, and then fudged the sleight of hand by using the word âweâ to imply that Iâm somehow responsible for all the arguments in this thread with which you disagree.
Iâm not sure how thatâs supposed to make you or your reasoning look any better.
Here is a summary of what I think my most salient points in this discussion have been:
-it is unlikely that all Greeks only blame external factors; it is likely that most Greeks acknowledge at least some internal factors as contributing to the crisis.
-it is fruitless to use the sort of moral system we use to assign moral culpability in one-on-one human interaction to crises occurring at the level of nation states. Nation states are not people, and people within nation states do not coordinate the same way as an ant colony or bee hive.
-moreover, such reasoning obscures a lot of complexity; you frame the issue as if a person named âGreeceâ short-changed a person called âGermanyâ for malicious, selfish, or perhaps frivolous reasons, and then you use another sleight-of-hand to assign the blame from the person named âGreeceâ to the actual people living in the country Greece. But thatâs just not valid reasoning. The Greek people as a whole did not get together and decide to cause this problem. This obscures potential causes of the crisis such as wealth and income inequality within Greece, which as I argued before, was probably a major contributor to the tax evasion problem.
-Humans are physical entities that require certain resources (typically food, shelter, clothing, and companionship), and those requirements should be taken seriously because human beings are capable of suffering. Empty moralisms about what is owed to whom and who should have to pay should take a back seat to making sure people are fed and housed.
I donât think youâve meaningfully rebutted any of those points.
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Sounds like you may well know where the Spartans did hide their gold then. 
Because I donât need to. Youâre opening the debate to other issues. I didnât intend to argue Maslowâs hierarchy of needs, income inequality within Greece or the evolution of tax evasion etc. I just defended my post against your lazy nazi-parallels.
Each of those points has been used to rebut a specific claim made by you. So if you have an argument worth making that youâd like me to consider, then yes you need to address those points.
But itâs clear to me at this point youâre just defending your existing biases rather than trying to break out of them. You make no effort to break out of the simplistic, inapplicable virtue ethics analysis of the Greek crisis no matter how many times you are justifiably criticized for it. You make off-hand, largely spurious rebuttals to any serious arguments made to you.
In short, you do not seem to be engaging in good faith.
Ineffectively, since the post still contains the same ridiculous sweeping negative generalizations about an ethnic group that is not your own, and ridiculous sweepoing positive generalizations about an ethnic group that is. (I only brought up the Nazis specifically 'cause you went there first, sweety-pie.)
⌠and back to start. I just quote myself because I donât have anything further to say about the matter:
And yes Iâm generalizing here and rightly so because massive tax evasion was/is still rampant, perpetrated not only by the mega-rich but by a majority of the population - thatâs why itâs a problem. The public sector is overblown because a large percentage of the population profited form cronyism and corruption. The greeks voted for the governments squandering the borrowed money instead of investing it in the economy/infrastructure. So yes - Iâm blaming a majority of the greeks for the crisis with reasons I already stated above and not because I think theyâre subhuman and need to be eradicated.
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Sorry, can you just quickly remind me where I actually claimed you think the Greeks are subhuman and need to be eradicated?
Just a quick reminder, you made the Nazi comparison first, and I riffed on that. If you donât want Nazism used as an example, donât use it as a f&cking example!
I rebutted ârightly soâ and you have not adequately responded.
I rebutted the notion that âthe Greeksâ somehow coordinated on this outcome as a consciously willed decision and are therefore morally culpable for it in the simplistic ways your arguments seem to imply, and you have not adequately responded.
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⌠and interfering with increased debt service payments? Paying pensions is a good thing â economically and politically. Itâs smarter than diverting those funds for debt service which would further constrict the Greek economy and risk politically alienating Greece from Europe.
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