JimC wrote:In some ways, it's a broader failure of the Greek social structure and democratic process, with an apparent inability to competently use legal processes to reduce corruption, ensure tax is paid and ensure that the state bureaucratic apparatus is at least marginally competent.
It's not so much a failure of capitalism as a whole, but a poor fit between state apparatus and fiscal control.
It's about centralized control and planning, which is an essential component of state socialism. An applicable label is "liberal fascism." Marxist state socialism assumes that all planning and control must come from the central government, and therefore the central government must be overwhelmingly large in order to perform all these "services." The inevitable result is bureaucratic bloat and featherbedding. The population of bureaucrats and their minions explodes as corruption and bribery become the way things get done. This is particularly obvious in Greece, where a simple expansion of a restaurant into an unoccupied neighboring retail space requires approvals from two dozen different bureaucrats and board and plenty of payoffs to inspectors and those who approve applications.
State socialism always becomes a kleptocracy because the central government is so complex, so huge, so bureaucratically inept that the left hand literally never knows what the right hand is doing, and if one does something corrupt, both hands work to cover it up because the bureaucracy has become its own corrupt living organism with a Darwinian will to survive by predating on the proletarian masses.
The proletariat becomes nothing more than a food source for the central government, which must become ever-more authoritarian and brutal as the desire to work is leached out of the working class, who become the dependent class, who must be either pacified with government-provided benefits or controlled with police and military force when they become unruly.
"The State" becomes its own reason for existence and anything that preserves the power of the state becomes acceptable to the bureaucracy. "The People" cease to exist as the author of all power and authority exercised by government and become the slaves of the State whose purpose is to do as the State says or be liquidated as disruptive and "counterrevolutionary" blights on the State's supreme authority.
In Greece, this is exactly what happened, but unlike most other liberal fascist states Greece has not had the balls to impose the kind of fascistic controls required to cow the populace into obedience, so Greece ended up with a two-layer society. On the surface it's liberal-fascist State Socialism with strong central planning, but underneath it's quite Libertarian in that there is an entire sub-culture that rejects the central planning and goes on about it's own business while largely ignoring the dictates of the State, and by refusing to pay the taxes the State needs to keep its bureaucrats employed.
The conflict is between the dependent class, which includes both government bureaucrats, unionized workers, and those on public welfare, and the productive class, which is pretty much everyone else, who have no desire or intention of supporting the bloated bureaucracy any more than possibly avoid without going to jail.
Greece is unusual in that the central government does not appear to be strong enough to implement military force, the most common method of protecting the State's existence and income, to brutalize and terrorize the populace and crush the underground economy.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
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