I'm hardly neo-liberal, I just want Greece to get more productive and arrive in the 21st century world of economic competition, which is very important these days. If you are a part of a highly productive Union, you should at least try and show the others that you still want to be productive in the future and not give up and complain. But I also recognize that the EU alltogether made a mistake in accepting countries like Greece or Portugal to be members so soon. A country should need at least 90% of the productivity/debt/deficit of the whole EU to join. If this would have been the case, a lot of these problems wouldn't take place right now. Greece would just go bankrupt like many other failed countries before and start from zero.
As for Franzl: Yeah, it's probably got to do with mentality. Austrians/Germans have grandparents who tell their grandchildren of how difficult it was after WW2, when they built our 2 countries back up out of the ashes and made them one of the most well managed and productive countries in the World. And it's passed along the generations. If you are told that you must work hard and don't whine around you also expect something like this from the people of Greece. That could also be a reason why there are almost no strikes here.
I really don't get this logic. How do you expect Greece to develop, modernize and become productive through savage austerity measures no civilized country could ever accept ? Don't you see how cutting the Welfare State, cutting social protections basically leads to economic and social regression ?
How can you consider yourself a social-democrat and advocate such policies ?!? All these measures are doing is pushing Greece into recession. Recession means less tax revenues, less tax revenues mean an even bigger deficit. So what do you do, another austerity plan ? Great ! When will this stop ? When there is no deficit, because there's no government anymore. And there will be no civilization anymore, as mass unemployment and poverty would have led to the breakup of social contract.
People, grow up.
THINK, for God's sake. Deficit isn't good, especially in times of economic prosperity. It's better to have a surplus than to have a deficit, of course. But since Keynes, everybody with
half 1/100th of a brain understands that a deficit might be necessary to avoid economic collaps in times of recession. It has been proven thousands of times that making deficit reduction a higher priority than restoring growth equals
economic suicide. Someone who thinks Greek people deserve this because their past (
right-wing) government let the deficit grow to excessive level could, IMO, reasonably be called an asshole. I hope it's not your case.
