Tragedy or Farce? the Greek Bailout Spawns Violent Protests

I don't even know how to tackle this. Greece is a prostrate mess of debt and bad accounting. That's bad enough. Now it's getting a massive bailout from EU members who are (understandably) angry at having to help out their wayward colleague. And now the Greeks are furious that the bailout will mean they must take up harsh austerity measures.

What, did they think there would be no pain?

Here is an interesting pair of quotes, though:

1) Vaggelis Gettos, 24, is just as alarmed at the burden being heaped on the young by austerity measures expected to be announced today, and has pledged to resist them in more protests this week against what he sees as a plot to impoverish Greece.

“We will live much worse than our parents,” he said. “Why should we be made to pay for their mistakes?”

2) Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.

That's right -- it's a plot to impoverish Greece. Yeah, right. As if the Greeks hadn't dug their own grave with their utterly reckless, irresponsible actions that are now threatening to wreck the Eurozone!

But I have to concur with the core of Vaggelis's complaint: we're going to have to pay for the massive financial sins of our fathers, and our children will too.

The sheer finger-pointing acrimony of the Greek catastrophe (there's a good Greek word!), though, has been ludicrous on all sides, from Greeks bringing up the Nazis to Germans suggesting that Greece sell off some islands to pay off their debt.

So it seems that Milton Friedman was right when he predicted that the euro currency would not survive its first real recession.