Yeah this is all pretty wrong. >> upset that Greece might actually be forced to pay its bills and what that means for the welfare state model the EU has built

Yeah this is all pretty wrong. >> upset that Greece might actually be forced to pay its bills and what that means for the welfare state model the EU has built itself on. 1) Those aren't just Greece's bills. Steve Waldman put it best: "The European financial system was architected to make lending to Greece — and Spain and Portugal and Italy — a money machine for bankers with little career risk over a medium term. Sketchy credits tend to punch above their weight in terms of volume of issuance, so there was a lot of nice paper to buy. The bankers who lent to these states understood perfectly well that there was in fact a long-term risk, an uncertainty, a constructive ambiguity. They lent anyway, and took home very nice salaries and bonuses for doing so." (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html) 2) This has nothing to do with implicating the welfare-state model; as you note, there are a ton of Euro welfare states with extremely robust economies. Some Euro welfare states have been chronically mismanaged (Greece, Italy, probably Spain) and now they're in trouble, in part for reasons not of their making. >> Only the most wealthy, least corrupt, and productive EU states can have a proper welfare state Oh, so in other words, if you take out Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Finland, Belgium and Switzerland, the European welfare state is a total disaster, huh? >> and even some of them have problems with youth unemployment, job growth, low military spending, almost no defense against an expansionist Putin outside of the US Military... 1) You know who else has problems with youth unemployment? The United States. Per the BLS (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm), 16-19-year-old unemployment rate among white people was 15.7% in June 2015, and 31.8% among 16-19-year-old black people. THIRTY TWO PERCENT. But yeah, European welfare states are the only ones with a problem here. 2) US military spending is insanely high - we spend as much as the next 7 countries combined (http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison). So it makes a certain amount of sense for Europe to throttle back their own spending a bit, though ideally they would spend more and we would spend much, much, much less.