Analysts are telling us that in four or five years what is happening to Greece now will happen to us. They are wrong. It would be a lot worse than that.
To start with, if the U.S. were in Greece’s financial straits, there would be no one to bail us out. The other reason involves the economic implications of washing our hands.
The all-time celebrity hand-washer in history is undoubtedly Pontius Pilate, who gave Christ over to the bloodthirsty mob as he literally and symbolically washed his hands of responsibility. The award for fictional characters would likely go to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who kept washing her hands to get rid of the stains of her past sins.
Both of those hand-washers, the real and the imaginary, should have a place in our thoughts as reports come in of riotous mobs in Athens.
Washing our hands is both real and a symbolic gesture that eases our burden of responsibility. And there is a good side to it. Justifying our decisions is the kind of non-alcoholic, non-narcotic, palliative that, to paraphrase Elvis, helps us make it through the night. We cannot remain effective, or even sane, as human beings if we are forever agonizing over decisions that we have already made.
This is not to say that there is no place for regret, or even remorse. And certainly there is room for the occasional re-boot, as in the reuniting of high-school sweethearts a few years or even decades later. But we do need a way to put decisions — good and bad — behind us by washing our hands of them, one way or another.
Ancient Greece gave us the seeds of democracy that would come into full flower with the birth of the United States of America. There is little doubt that Ancient Athens would be proud. And we remain in its debt.
Along with this gift, though, came one of the least studied and least appreciated aspects of democracy, though: its effectiveness at hand-washing. When the system is working right, there is a sanity-saving, cleansing peace to be found in decisions made when “the people have spoken.”
Although the founding fathers had a realistic fear of mobs — a feeling shared by most people who have ever seen one up close — they had an abiding faith in the collective wisdom of the people. This country, in fact, was built on that concept. It is no small irony, then, that democracy is a faith-based system, since faith of any sort has become such a touchstone for dissent and dissonance.
The recent mob violence in Athens represents a challenge to that faith. To the extent that it exposes a flaw in the democracy-economics alliance that has served us so well, it reflects a threat to democracy itself. And it is one that is interesting for its long-term as well as its short-term implications.
The Greek riots were caused by unhappiness that public spending on a broad range of entitlement programs was being cut. That these cuts were dictated by the collapse of the Greek financial system under the weight of deficit spending by government didn’t matter to the mob. Their entitlements were being cut or cut off.
Similar riots had taken place in France a few years ago, for much the same reason: budget realities had forced spending cuts that were unacceptable to the beneficiaries. They are commonplace affairs in some countries, but not at the intensity, and the power for global mischief, that characterized the chaos that was Greece.
The flaw exposed by these riots is that the volume and allocation of spending in a modern democracy has increasingly become a process of appeasing specific vocal constituencies rather than responding to the best interests or the expressed will of the public. The recent experience in Greece tells us how that ends. No individual constituency believes for one second that there isn’t enough money for its demands; and public spending is controlled by politicians with similarly narrow interests and dependencies. Collectively they can destroy a country’s economy and the country itself — and avoid any responsibility for it.
Because Greece is wired into the European Community, it may not suffer the fate of so many countries in its situation, who found their representative governments replaced by a tyrant and their markets replaced by a command economy … at least not yet. But the trillion-dollar bailout fund for European financial institutions indicates what a serious threat Greece’s economic behavior really is.
Is their behavior so different from our own that we needn’t worry? The Greeks gave us the words “democracy” and “economics,” and we have enjoyed the fruits of both. But they gave us “catastrophe,” too, and are showing us how to get there.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist.
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