The Greeks gambled in their referendum that European elites were more committed to their ideological obsession with integrating Europe than with mere economics. Stand up to a bunch of corrupt Greek civil servants and Europe risks going back to the bad old days of nation states and independent economies.
It is likely that their bet will pay off.
After all even a cursory glance at the European Union shows positively Grecian levels of waste, fraud and economic mismanagement. The $1.8 billion IMF payment that Greece defaulted on is a hole in the bucket compared to an annual $6 billion in the European Union’s estimated budget fraud.
A radical left-wing government in Greece is betting that more moderate European Socialists will meet their demands rather than risk opening a chasm that will expose the economic unsustainablity of the existing system. The Greek economy may be a fraud, but it’s a fraud built on a bigger Euro fraud.
And that’s a familiar pattern.
This is the way that public sector unions browbeat their Democratic allies in Chicago, New York and California to extract insane concessions from their unworkable budgets. The budgets are already bankrupting cities and states, so why not tear off free cosmetic surgery or $80k salaries from the mess?
Greece is just treating the European experiment the way that the California Teachers Association treats the state. It’s a giant corrupt piggy bank, so why not raid it? It’s going to go bankrupt, but it will anyway.