In today’s TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski links to an article about the situation in Greece, and highlights the quote “you can’t mix Freedom and Free Lunch.” It’s a great line, no doubt, but the one that caught my attention was, “the spectacle of government workers, cranky retirees, militant unionists, and mad dog socialists locked arm in arm protesting reality is a sight we’d better get used to.”
Protesting reality. The futility of doing this is summed up in this vulgar yet pithy quote from Bad Santa. Ignoring and failing to understand the facts gets us nowhere. I take that back. It takes us in the wrong direction.
Wake up America! How many million unionists are we expected to carry on our public payrolls? How long can we keep government employees on defined-benefit pension plans while the rest of us scramble to fund our 401(k)s ? How many more people are we going to drop from the income tax rolls as we lean on a smaller and smaller slice of citizens to carry an ever greater percentage of the load, leaving the rest free to vote for tax increases? How large a swath of our population can we pretend to keep supplied with newly manufactured economic rights like free healthcare as Social Security and Medicare careen toward insolvency? How much more do we think we can borrow from the Chinese to fund day-to-day government operations? How long do we think we can afford to police the world?
What the world’s political leaders and those who elect them need most right now is a shocking example of the only possible outcome of trying to practice redistributive justice on a national or even global scale. Rescuing Greece is a mistake. What they deserve is a good hard dose of exactly what they are asking for – unvarnished socialism.
Throw Greece out of the European Union. Let them default on their debts. Teach buyers to beware before they invest in sovereign bonds. Dare Greece to print Drachmas by the wheelbarrow. Put the whole country on the public payroll then challenge them to demonstrate what a truly egalitarian society looks like. Maybe a dramatic spectacle of what a workers paradise looks like under the media’s glare will teach us what’s in store if we don’t change our ways.
Democracy is broken. You can’t mix Freedom and Free Lunch. One or the other has got to go.
Yes, let them default on their debts. Nobody is too big to fail. No bailouts. Ever. But let’s not ask them to give socialism another shot to prove it’s worth. It’s had enough goes. I wish a dose of “unvarnished socialism” would wake the world up, but if the current example of Cuba and past example of Soviet Russia, among many other examples, don’t do the trick, I doubt another failed collectivist experiment in Greece will.
Protesting Reality
In today’s TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski links to an article about the situation in Greece, and highlights the quote “you can’t mix Freedom and Free Lunch.” It’s a great line, no doubt, but the one that caught my attention was, “the spectacle of government workers, cranky retirees, militant unionists, and mad dog socialists locked arm in arm protesting reality is a sight we’d better get used to.”
Protesting reality. The futility of doing this is summed up in this vulgar yet pithy quote from Bad Santa. Ignoring and failing to understand the facts gets us nowhere. I take that back. It takes us in the wrong direction.
Yes, let them default on their debts. Nobody is too big to fail. No bailouts. Ever. But let’s not ask them to give socialism another shot to prove it’s worth. It’s had enough goes. I wish a dose of “unvarnished socialism” would wake the world up, but if the current example of Cuba and past example of Soviet Russia, among many other examples, don’t do the trick, I doubt another failed collectivist experiment in Greece will.