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A public sector can be enormous without damaging the economy. In Scandinavian countries it's about 50% and used to be higher. The problem is that the Greek gove
by tormeh 11y ago
A public sector can be enormous without damaging the economy. In Scandinavian countries it's about 50% and used to be higher. The problem is that the Greek government is both bad and weak. The Greek public sector's purpose is not really to provide utility to the populace, but to buy votes from the unions. It's very hard to pay for because it does not enrichen the private sector nearly as much as it should. And because the Greek oligarchs own the media (and many parliamentarians) so taxing the rich is absurdly hard.
Greece is not just insolvent, it's also practically a failed state.
- peterfirefly 11y agoI can assure you that the sizes of the public sectors in Scandinavia damage our economies! Our private sectors are a lot freer than in Greece, though, which is why we can afford them and why Greece can't.
- quonn 11y ago> Greece is not just insolvent, it's also practically a failed state. Syria, Iraq - those are failed states. Greece just managed to organise a democratic referendum peacefully and efficiently - within a week. A failed state looks different to me.
- corin_ 11y agoI don't entirely agree with the concept that it's a failed state, but the fact that it doesn't look like other "failed states" doesn't mean much. If two companies go out of business and one had a crazy employee go on a killing spree you wouldn't say the other company hadn't failed because all it's former employees were still alive.
- tptacek 11y agoRight! There are so many ideologues using Greece to support an agenda, I should probably be more careful to distance myself from "public sector bad, private sector good". The issue with Greece seems to be that they have an enormous public sector, and extraordinarily generous (literally: extra-ordinary) entitlements, "financed" by a nominal tax rate that is decoupled from their actual tax income. From the little reading I've done, it seems like there's been a theme throughout the 1990s of "raising tax rates" to fund a populist spoils-system government, with scare quotes deliberately applied to "raising tax rates".
- spiralpolitik 11y agoThey also have a bad record on actually collecting taxes due. Tax Evasion is at 6% of GDP which is considerably higher than similar economies.