The 21st century global banking system based on fiat currencies and redistribution of wealth through inflation is immoral and destructive. That doesn’t mean stiffing your creditors is at all justified, heroic or remotely “libertarian,” as many on my newsfeeds are suggesting.
The Greeks who decided to take two month vacations, vote themselves useless government jobs and then retire at 50, all on someone else’s dime, aren’t the victims today. They are as much the perpetrators as the so-called “banksters.”
The real victims are those hardworking Greeks who have hitherto paid for all of this and the honest creditors who lent them money, although the latter have some culpability for bad judgment.
The Greek “no” vote on accepting “austerity” measures in return for additional loans from the European Central Bank (ECB) was more like a childish tantrum than a blow for freedom.
Imagine if you couldn’t pay your rent and asked a friend for a loan. If she agreed, stipulating you must cut your ice cream consumption from $100 to $50 per month, you wouldn’t be considered heroic for defiantly refusing her terms and still not being able to pay your rent or repay the other friend you borrowed from last month.
The Greek vote had nothing to do with liberty, but it was certainly democracy in action. Over two hundred years ago, John Adams wrote,
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
The Greek democracy has the revolver to its head. Time will tell if democracy or common sense will prevail.
Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.