From Der Speigel:
The people who could ultimately give Greece the coup de grace are not the kind to throw stones or Molotov cocktails, and they have yet to torch any cars. Instead, they are people like 60-year-old beverage distributor Angelos Belitsakos, people who might soon turn into a real problem for the economically unstable country. Feeling cornered, he and other private business owners want to go on the offensive. But instead fighting with weapons, they are using something much more dangerous. They are fighting with money.
Belitsakos is a short, slim and alert man who lives in the middle-class Athenian suburb of Holargos. He is also the physical and spiritual leader of a movement of businesspeople in Greece that is recruiting new members with growing speed. While Greece’s government is desperately trying to combat its ballooning budget deficit by raising taxes and imposing new fees, people like Belitsakos are putting their faith in passive resistance.
The group’s slogan is as simple as it is stoic: “We Won’t Pay.”…
Greece, like all socialist countries is, of course, over run by moochers. People who, by one means or another, get all or most of their income via government funding. Whether its by special tax breaks, government employment or direct welfare payments, a huge number of people (and perhaps a majority, once you total it all up) in Europe either don’t work at all, or don’t work much, or don’t work at anything which creates wealth…but they still manage to live pretty well. And, meanwhile, it is people like Mr. Belitsakos who have been paying for it all. And now that Greece’s socialist fantasy has come economically crashing down, the government wants people like Mr. Belitsakos to pony up even more. And a revolt is brewing.
Do keep in mind that those people you remember rioting from time to time in Greece (and Britain and Spain…and soon to spread elsewhere in Europe) were not hard working, middle class people…they were the moochers who are ticked off that even a small amount of their welfare is being cut. Around the world a revolution is brewing…those who are hard working, play by the rules and try to do the right thing are starting to wake up and shake off those who have lived off them for nigh on a century. There won’t be much room for either a George Soros to manipulate governments to make billions, nor for the welfare bum who runs riot when his stipend is cut.
While there is no way for us to shake off our moral responsibility to those who cannot work through no fault of their own, we must all admit that this moral obligation has been much abused. A gigantic amount of money is siphoned away from the productive in the name of helping the less fortunate, but we know where a large amount (possibly a majority) of it goes: to over paid bureaucrats, crony-capitalists and people who could darn well work, but choose not to. The moochers have, by this point, driven us in to bankruptcy…and their only real answer is to demand more from us…and to take it by taxing it, or by devaluing the currency, which steals the wealth we’ve already created.
You know that things are changing when even in socialist Europe, something akin to the TEA Party emerges. This will be quite an interesting decade, I’m thinking.
HAT TIP: Dan Mitchell
