Austerity, Technocracy, Autocracy...
Duncan Black sends us to Wolfgang Munchau and says:
Eschaton: Choices: Indeed.
Wolfgng Munchau:
When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a condition for further help, I knew that the game would soon be up. We are at the point where success is no longer compatible with democracy. The German finance minister wants to prevent a “wrong” democratic choice. Similar to this is the suggestion to let the elections go ahead, but to have a grand coalition irrespective of the outcome. The eurozone wants to impose its choice of government on Greece – the eurozone’s first colony.
There are two big questions:
Who is going to eat the losses on past loans to Greece that banks and investors really should have known better than to make--banks, investors, eurozone taxpayers, or Greek taxpayers?
At what level is Greece going to balance its taxes and government spending going forward?
I think that these questions are very different questions that should not be linked--and that the second of them is the business of the Greeks. The first is the business of us outsiders. And it is pretty clear that "Greek taxpayers" should not be a large part of the answer to the first question.
