Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2011

Goar: Here’s why the poor voted Conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

In another dispatch from an alternate universe where the Toronto Star isn’t the house newsletter for the Liberal party, Carol Goar tells poverty activists why the people they agitate for voted for Conservatives in the last election:

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

• People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

• What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

• It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.

Of course, her message not only won’t be heeded, it’s going to mark her as an apostate to be spurned and ridiculed by all right-thinking intellectuals — especially those in the poverty activist ranks. She may never lunch in this town again.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

April 12, 2011

A “gun-crazed oil-drunk Albertan” on the NDP and Green platforms

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Colby Cosh tries to be nice about the Green Party and NDP platforms:

The contrast between the parties’ platforms is interesting: the Green ideas induce slightly more sheer nausea of the “literally everything in here is eye-slashingly horrible” kind, but at the same time there is a consoling breath of radicalism pervading Vision Green, a redeeming Small Is Beautiful spirit. At least, one feels, their nonsense is addressed to the individual. A typical laissez-faire economist would probably like the Green platform the least of the four on offer from national parties, but the Greens may be the strongest of all in advocating the core precept that prices are signals. At one point, denouncing market distortions created by corporate welfare, Vision Green approvingly quotes the maxim “Governments are not adept at picking winners, but losers are adept at picking governments.” (The saying is attributed to a 2006 book by Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute, but a gentleman named Paul Martin Jr. had uttered a version of it as early as 2000.)

That has always been the biggest failing of the regulatory view of politics: no matter how carefully you select the regulators, the regulated have many, many ways to (eventually) suborn them. Regulatory capture is the most common result, as the regulators become more closely attuned to the needs of their “charges” and work to protect them from competitors and social and technological change. What may have started as an attempt to rein-in over powerful industrial interests slowly becomes a de facto arm of government protection over the existing major players in that industry.

The New Democratic platform is more adult and serious than the Greens’ overall, which comes as no surprise. But it occurs to me, not for the first time this year, how much some folks love “trickle-down politics” when they are not busy denouncing “trickle-down economics”. How does Jack Layton hope to remedy the plight of the Canadian Indian? By “building a new relationship” with his politicians and band chiefs. How does he propose to improve the lot of artists? By flooding movie and TV producers, and funding agencies, with money and tax credits. He’ll help parents by giving money to day care entrepreneurs; he’ll sweeten the pot for “women’s groups” and “civil society groups”. One detects, perhaps mostly from prejudice, a suffocating sense of system-building, of unskeptical passion for bureaucracy, of disrespect for the sheer power of middlemen to make value disappear.

It’s useful to check who would be the actual beneficiaries of this kind of increased bureaucratization of life — and we’re generally not talking about the putative winners, but the actual ones — the ones who will staff the new agencies, bureaux, and commissions, the ones who will provide consulting services, and the ones who will study the results.

The Greens get a big thumbs-up from this corner for this particular clause of their platfom:

In 2008, according to the Treasury Board, Canada spent $61.3 million targeting illicit drugs, with a majority of that money going to law enforcement. Most of that was for the “war” against cannabis (marijuana). Marijuana prohibition is also prohibitively costly in other ways, including criminalizing youth and fostering organized crime. Cannabis prohibition, which has gone on for decades, has utterly failed and has not led to reduced drug use in Canada.

The Greens promise that cannabis would be removed from the schedule of illegal drugs and that the growth and sale of cannabis products would be regularized (and taxed), although with the usual shibboleth about the market needing to be restricted to small producers. If you’re making the stuff legal to sell, you shouldn’t try to micro-manage the product and producers you’re moving into the legal marketplace.

March 18, 2011

Ignoring death threats to politicians (but only on the right)

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

An interesting article at the Huffington Post on the relative media silence on the spate of death threats against Wisconsin politicians:

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to Wisconsin State Department of Justice, authorities have found a suspect who admitted to sending the following email:

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

After the Giffords shooting, authorities have to take this sort of threat seriously. The media should too, even if the disturbed person who sent that email was motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more threats floating around the internet, in varying degrees of scary and credible.

The Google search for the string “Wisconsin death threats” only returned 704 results for me this morning, and the only major media outlets represented on the first page were the Chicago Sun-Times and Fox News.

February 27, 2011

Reason.TV: State budget battle showdowns

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

QotD: Big government and big unions

Filed under: Government, Greece, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

The Times managed to get the salient feature of the story entirely wrong. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob of “public servants” objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paychecks per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims — a man and two women — were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

You don’t have to go to Athens to find “public servants” happy to take it out on the public. In Madison, politicized doctors provide fake sick notes for politicized teachers to skip class. In New York’s Christmas snowstorm, Sanitation Department plough drivers are unable to clear the streets, with fatal consequences for some residents. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Dept head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged. Three hundred Sanitation Department workers have salaries of over $100,000 per year. In retirement, you get a pension of 66 grand per annum plus excellent health benefits, all inflation proofed.

That’s what “collective bargaining” is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Mark Steyn, “States of the Unions”, SteynOnline, 2011-02-26

February 24, 2011

Wisconsin’s proposed labour laws not uncommon

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:07

To read all the huffing and puffing, you might get the impression that if the proposed labour law changes be enacted, Wisconsin public workers would be uniquely disenfranchised. As Josh Barro points out, however, that’s not very accurate:

The truth, as laid out in a GAO report from 2002, is that there are already 12 states with no public employee collective bargaining law at all. In these states, state workers have no right to collective bargaining; local employees have collective bargaining only if local elected officials choose to grant it. (And in a few states, notably Virginia and North Carolina, state law forbids localities to allow collective bargaining.) Another 12 states grant collective bargaining rights only to certain classes of employees, such as only state workers or only teachers. Only 26 states have a collective bargaining law covering nearly all public workers.

So that means that the model from which Walker proposes to break, much to the horror and outrage of public worker unions and their backers, is a model only actually followed by 25 other states. And indeed, by retaining limited bargaining rights for most workers (and fuller rights for a few classes, including police and firefighters) Walker is going less far in restricting public-sector collective bargaining than a substantial number of states already do.

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

February 17, 2011

Once upon a time, working in public service entailed a bit of sacrifice

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

But that old notion of “lower wages but better pensions” for public service work has gone the way of the buggy-whip industry. Now, public servants get better wages, much better pensions, and generally much more generous benefits. Even through the recession, federal and provincial wages continued to outpace those in the private sector:

Both images are details from this National Post graphic.

December 23, 2010

Prichard, Alabama defaults on civil service pensions

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

The town failed to fully fund the pension plan for their employees, and it ran out of money in 2009. In spite of state law, they stopped paying the pensioners:

Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.

Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”

The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.

Prichard is only the start: far too many local governments are approaching the same situation.

November 3, 2010

Monty: The flushing sound you just heard is California’s future

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Monty pronounces the final doom of California:

That sound you just heard was the State of California irretrievably flushing itself down the toilet.

[. . .]

California’s most dire problems right now are related to public-employee obligations (pensions and healthcare). The power of public-employee unions in California have held the State and local governments in thrall for years, and with the election of Jerry Brown as Governor, the people of California have opted to spray kerosene on a blaze that was already threatening to overwhelm them.

[. . .]

Well, the die has been cast, California. You have placed your fate into the hands of a political party and a governmental machine that cares for nothing except what it can squeeze out of you to keep the party-train rolling. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when you will have cause to bitterly regret what happened last night, and to wonder when the disaster truly became unavoidable. Well, now you know: it happened last night when you elected Jerry Brown as your governor. You chose to kowtow to the labor unions; you chose to believe comforting lies rather than the horrible truth.

You will reap the whirlwind.

Update: A couple of Twitter updates from Iowahawk sum things up nicely.

10:28: Boxer, Brown, no on Prop 19: congrats, California. You have officially gone Full Retard.

11:05: And as if California wasn’t already full of idiots, lunatics, and drug abusers, I’m flying there this afternoon.

October 28, 2010

A significant indicator of social decline

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Monty puts his finger on the biggest social change since the 1960’s and posits the likely results:

The recipe for the decline and fall of the American republic: most people who receive government benefits will not willingly give them up, or even allow them to be reduced. They’ve been told that these benefits are a right so often by the so-called “progressives” that they’ve come to believe it, and any attempt to reduce their benefits amounts, in their eyes, to a civil-rights violation. This is what the welfare state leads to — an entire class of dependents who insist upon receiving the sweat of your brow not as charity or payment for services rendered, but as a birthright not to be denied them. Class warfare (between public-sector workers and taxpayers) and generational warfare (between the recipients of Medicare and Social Security and those who must fund it) is the only possible outcome if things do not change soon. And I don’t mean that in rhetorical or symbolic terms; I mean in actual, bloody, street-fighting terms. It’s the culture of grievance, of victimhood, of moral equivalence playing out in real time. As I wrote in an essay a while back, look at what’s happening in England and France right now. That is our future — only more violent — if we don’t change our ways.

October 25, 2010

Studying bureaucratic bias

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I’ve always thought that behaviour patterns of bureaucrats are fairly easy to predict: it all hinges on risk/reward. A bureaucrat with expectation of retiring at the peak of pension eligibility will have a very high aversion to risk — but not quite what most people refer to as risk. A bureaucrat has a built-in bias to “stay the course”, to avoid “rocking the boat”, and to prevent the kind of change that will introduce exceptions to normal process.

Expecting a bureaucrat to react like an entrepreneur is unrealistic, because the bureaucrat’s risks (loss of promotion opportunities, loss of status, but not usually loss of job) do not scale well against the possible rewards — except in particularly corrupt jurisdictions, bureaucrats do not directly benefit from making risky decisions.

Given that, is it any surprise that bureaucrats, as a whole, are quite unwilling to step outside “normal practice” or to allow variances, exceptions, or (sometimes) even common sense solutions?

I should be careful (except that I’m a blogger, where “careful” really just means “avoiding lawsuits”), because there’s a risk I’m suffering from one of the traits identified in behavioural economics, the illusion of competence in my preceding horseback judgement:

There is a fashionable new science — behavioral economics, they call it — which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the “bandwagon effect.” And it labels as “hindsight bias” the all-too-common tendency during the recent bust to imagine that past events were more predictable than they were. Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like “loss aversion”: how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.

But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.” Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.

In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand.

July 8, 2010

Monty sneers at your so-called “service industry” economy

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

In today’s daily Financial Briefing, Monty takes a bit of time to pine for the good old days when a job meant lots of physical work:

I’ve always felt that the “service-based” economy idea was kind of a mirage. Yes, IT has turned into a huge industry in the United States; and yes, IT has transformed the world job market. I’m just not sure the transformation is an entirely positive one. If you’re smart and willing to sit in a cubicle all day staring at a computer screen, you can do quite well. If your skills are more mechanical or manual in nature, or you like to work outdoors or on a shop-floor . . . not so much. It’s not just a question of being smart enough or not. Are we going to say that people below some arbitrary level of IQ are not essential any more, or are not able to be productive or successful? It’s almost like a mirror-image of Harrison Bergeron. Efficiency isn’t everything, in markets or anything else. An economy must produce stuff, not just electrons in different patterns that fly back and forth. Less-bright people may have skills that the smarties lack. Many is the theoretical physicist or mathematician or computer whiz who must call a plumber when the toilet backs up.

Speaking as someone who started with a few manual labour jobs, I’m absolutely delighted that I didn’t have to stay in that segment of the economy: I was terrible at ’em. He does make a good point that no matter how digitized our economy becomes, there will always be need for people who are more skilled at moving atomic-based matter as well as those who play with electrons.

It’s not exactly news that Obama is as anti-business as they come, even for a Democrat, but it’s nice to see that more people are realizing it. It’s useful to recognize the beast that’s killing you.

This is a good overview of why Obama (or any politician, really) can’t “create jobs” by hiring in the public sector. Public-sector workers do not add to GDP; they are net consumers of GDP because their paychecks are funded ultimately through taxes and fees. (They are also overpaid by about 12% compared to the private sector, mainly because their jobs are not subject to market pressures.) Public workers are paid via transfer-payments from the private sector. Government workers of any level are overhead. They are part of the cost-center, not the profit-center. You don’t hear private sector businessmen crying, “Let’s increase our overhead by 100%, boys! It’s the only way to save the firm!” There’s a reason why they don’t say that: it’s self-evidently stupid. There is also the fact that economies do not exist to give people jobs — economies exist to mediate the flow of goods between producers and consumers. Jobs are a side-effect, not the purpose, of an economy.

Several embedded links in the original post that are worth following.

May 22, 2010

Another reason public service pensions are better than private ones

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Megan McArdle points out another key difference between “ordinary” pensions and US state government pensions:

Public employees rack up overtime in their last year of work, with the active encouragement of their supervisors and even local politicians, then they retire with inflated pensions that can be greater than their base salary.

New York is the understandable focus, but these problems are hardly unique to my home state. In fact, New York is among the better states on funding of pensions, because they actually have to do some. Other states kinda sorta haven’t really bothered — at least not at anywhere near the levels that would be needed. New York’s problem is notable only because its public sector unions are unusually powerful.

The problem is that these things are nearly impossible to change. People have worked for twenty years or more under the expectation of pensions that were calculated this way; you can’t just wait until they’re 58 and say “Ha, ha, just foolin’.”

<sarcasm>Of course, the money will always be there, right? No reason for anyone to change their expectations.</sarcasm>

May 21, 2010

California’s version of the Greek public service problem

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

David Crane shows why California’s public pension scheme has much in common with the Greek pension scheme, in the sense of a mind-boggling disconnect from economic reality:

In 1999 then California Governor Gray Davis signed into law a bill that represented the largest issuance of non-voter-approved debt in the state’s history. The bill SB 400 granted billions of dollars in retroactive pension boosts to state employees, allowing retirements as young as age 50 with lifetime pensions of up to 90% of final year salaries. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System sold the pension boost to the state legislature by promising that “no increase over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit improvements” and that Calpers would “remain fully funded.” They also claimed that enhanced pensions would not cost taxpayers “a dime” because investment bets would cover the expense.

What Calpers failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars, (4) Calpers’s own employees would benefit from the pension increases and (5) members of Calpers’s board had received contributions from the public employee unions who would benefit from the legislation. Had such a flagrant case of non-disclosure occurred in the private sector, even a sleepy SEC and US Attorney would have noticed.

Until very recently, public service pension schemes might as well have been listed in the dictionary under “soporific” — except for the beneficiaries, nobody paid much attention. Even so, you’d think that the breathtaking assumptions in the Calpers bill would have woken up at least a few politicians and reporters. Of course, no political body has an effective “Office of Realistic Assumptions” to run proposed legislation past (although it wouldn’t be a bad idea), so it might well be that nobody bothered to check the sums before the bill was passed.

Or, more likely, that nobody voting that day expected to be held accountable for the outcome.

Update: Good news! The state legislature just passed new regulations! That’s bound to fix the problem, right?

Oh, wait . . .

California’s public pension funds would have to report the ethnicity and gender of some of the outside investment managers they hire under a bill that passed the state Assembly on Thursday.

The bill states that businesses owned by women and minorities are not adequately represented in the state’s pension fund portfolios, compared to their proportion of California’s population. It passed on a 41-22 vote and now moves to the state Senate.

Well, that will certainly fix the funding issues in no time, won’t it? Your California state legislature, constantly working for you!

May 20, 2010

The root of the Greek economic crisis

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

No, it’s not the evil banks, the evil insurance companies, the evil oil companies, or even the evil manufacturing sector (take it as read that most media types think every corporation is, by definition, evil). No, in this case the reports are starting to identify the real culprit: the civil service. Mark Steyn summarizes handily:

They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paycheques per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paycheques per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims — a man and two women — were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

We’ve already seen that employees in the public sector have been outpacing their private sector equivalents handsomely, but the Greek civil service has it even better than most:

Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their “working” lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death.

Nice. I wonder how they got into that interesting arrangement? No matter, the private sector will ride to the rescue, right? Not likely:

According to the World Bank, when it comes to the ease of doing business, Greece ranks 109th out of 183 countries. If they were dramatically to liberate their business-killing economy, they might overtake Lebanon at big hit position 108, and Ethiopia at 107, and maybe Papua New Guinea at 102. And who knows? With even more radical reform, they might crack the Hot One Hundred and be bubbling under such favourable business environments as Yemen (99) and Moldova (94). Greece ranks 140th when it comes to starting a business, and 154th when it comes to protecting investors.

If it’s that difficult to start a new business, is it any wonder that so much of the Greek economy is in the underground/unreported/untaxed sector? Many media reports say that anywhere from 10% to 25% of Greek economic activity is “off the books”. A quick Google search will show a much higher range of estimates going up to 60% . . . and that might be an optimistic under-estimate.

If more than half of the nation’s economic activity is in the black market, it will take much more than adding a few auditors and inspectors to the tax department to fix the problem: an absolute majority of Greeks are actively hiding their business from the government, and any serious attempt to crack down on them will bring down the government. And that’s not even the biggest danger — the Greek government isn’t the most stable entity to start with. The government falling might be a safety valve, because the other alternative is literally revolution.

Talk about your destabilization!

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