Go to Athens and you will see the problem very clearly. The habour is full of yachts, the streets are jammed with luxury cars and the people covered in designer labels and bling. This is a wealthy place, you might think, then look at little closer. The place looks like a building site and here's why: in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished? And they do, private individuals and corporations alike.
You see, the Greeks want a level of government spending like Germany or Sweden. They're even willing to vote in the taxes to fund it. But they're not willing to actually pay those taxes, and so they just don't. Greece is a poor country full of rich people. In that sense the austerity measures will be easy to implement: corruption is everywhere. As is a strong sense of entitlement... Compare that to Germany or Sweden where paying your tax is seen as a civic duty.
I did quite like the German idea that the Greeks ought to sell off their islands to other countries to raise cash.
You're right about the lack of forced labor camps, but "Stalinist" is how local economists describe the situation.
To give you some idea: if you want to start a company, it will take you a minimum of 40 days to visit various bureaucrats and get permissions.
When you hire employees they will come with union strings and have a Soviet-era worker mindset (i.e., they can do whatever work they want, incompetently or not, and they still expect to get paid, etc.), which is probably where the phrase comes from.
Well then those quote "local economists" are idiots with no sense of history.
"Mildly socialist, corrupt and inefficient" is how any economist who has a brain, local or otherwise, would describe it.
"Stalinist" is for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and other groups who are more concerned with "impact words" than actually understanding anything.
EDIT: Just to make it more clear how inaccurate and inflammatory that comparison is, Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. I'll repeat that. Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. Want to rethink the comparison maybe?
Their references to that term allude to red tape on a large scale, centralized economic planning, indifferent and unmotivated labor, etc., not the death camps and killing.
(And that last phrase reminded me of this: http://bit.ly/bh96ml apropos of nothing).
Yeah but even then, it's not "stalinist", it's "poorly executed social democracy". The government isn't running the farms or producing toilet paper, they just have more bureaucracy than in America, and less well executed than elsewhere in Europe.
> in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished? And they do, private individuals and corporations alike.
This. Athens reminded me a little bit of Cairo, with mile after mile of "unfinished" occupied buildings.
It seems also that good policy is a major problem. No taxes till complete? That's fine, now make it illegal to move into an incomplete building. No sane person can make a rational argument that people should be able to move into construction sites.
I would make that argument, especially if I'm personally involved in the building (not sure about the legalities here).
Maintaining a house no one lives in is pretty expensive, so there's every reason to have someone move in as soon as the house can manage weather protection, food storage, and ventilation. Further, if you're personally involved in advancing those concerns, you're already spending at least 10 hours a day in the building. Now, leasing the place out while there are holes in the floor is probably against a law, but there's no reason why buildings couldn't be continuously developed incrementally with user feedback. And occasionally, they are.
Hopefully the Germans will be smart enough to force the scheduling of the bailout payments to be done in such a way that it pushes the Greeks to cut their spending. Maybe something like make the first payment equal to about 95% of what seems to be needed in order to cover their interest payments and then decline from there.
"The place looks like a building site and here's why: in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished?"
Interesting. The exact same thing happens in south Italy.
Go to Athens and you will see the problem very clearly. The habour is full of yachts, the streets are jammed with luxury cars and the people covered in designer labels and bling. This is a wealthy place, you might think, then look at little closer. The place looks like a building site and here's why: in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished? And they do, private individuals and corporations alike.
You see, the Greeks want a level of government spending like Germany or Sweden. They're even willing to vote in the taxes to fund it. But they're not willing to actually pay those taxes, and so they just don't. Greece is a poor country full of rich people. In that sense the austerity measures will be easy to implement: corruption is everywhere. As is a strong sense of entitlement... Compare that to Germany or Sweden where paying your tax is seen as a civic duty.
I did quite like the German idea that the Greeks ought to sell off their islands to other countries to raise cash.