The Greek crisis seems to me something like the mortgage crisis, in which all kinds of people were encouraged to saddle themselves with junk mortgages. Then they lost everything when the economy took a dive and they fell behind on payments. Greece, I understand, has a humongous debt that even the International Monetary Fund has concluded can never be repaid. And this is partly because the Greek government of awhile back borrowed irresponsibly, but it has to be said the lenders were being irresponsible as well. That may not be what happened, but that’s how I understand it.

The Greeks have suffered terrible deprivation doing what the Eurozone nations told them to do, which was to reduce government spending and pay down the debt. But the austerity cuts, cuts, cuts had the effect of killing their economy, so the debt couldn’t be paid down. And then the Greeks voted in a government that said, bleep austerity. And yesterday they voted to reject Eurozone austerity demands. Without more money coming from the Eurozone partners, Greek banks may collapse.

There’s a lot of clucking about What It All Means, and What Should Greece Do, and What Should Europe Do. I think it’s all just wrong. There’s something basically wrong when people are impoverished not because of anything they did or because of natural calamity, but because of the way economies work.

I’ve never been to Greece, but everything I’ve heard about it says it is very beautiful, the climate is lovely, and there’s a large agricultural area. And of course it has a rich and ancient civilization. There’s no reason I can see that people in Greece can’t have everything they need to live perfectly satisfying lives. If they can’t, it’s not because there’s something wrong with the geological entity of Greece and its people. It’s the System that got them into this mess.

Professor Krugman has been largely sympathetic to the Greeks and thinks the only way out of the mess is for them to bail on the Euro and set up their own monetary system. He wrote,

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over. If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

Professor Krugman also said,

Jared Bernstein weighs in on the big No, hopes that it leads to a change in Europe’s approach, but acknowledges the political difficulties:

To be fair, it’s not that simple. There are structural political factors in play, endemic to the fact that the currency union is not a political union, nor a fiscal union, nor a banking union. As one German economist put it to me, “How do you think the people of Manhattan would like bailing out Texas?” Fair point, and a non-trivial challenge, for sure.

Ahem. As it happens, the people of Manhattan did bail out Texas, big time. I wrote about it here. The savings and loan crisis, which was very costly to taxpayers, was mainly a Texas affair:

The cleanup from that crisis cost taxpayers about $125 billion (pdf), back when that was real money. As best I can tell, around 60 percent of the losses were in Texas (pdf). So that’s around $75 billion in aid — not loans, outright transfer.

Texas GDP was about $300 billion in 1987. So this was equivalent to giving — not lending, not even taking an equity stake — Spain 25 percent of its GDP to bail out its banks.

But of course Manhattan was never asked to bail out Texas; we had a national system of deposit insurance, and the big Lone Star bailout was automatic.

… and the people who brought on the crisis because they were recklessly playing the system to enrich themselves were given slaps on the wrist and told to never be naughty again. Neil Bush, for example, was fined $50,000; Republican supporters chipped in to pay it. Meanwhile, taxpayers shelled out $1.3 billion to clean up Bush’s Silverado mess..

In short, I don’t blame the Greeks for telling the Eurozone to go bleep itself.

I genuinely hate to say this, but Dylan Matthews makes some good points in “Three Reasons the American Revolution Was a Mistake.” And here they are:

I’m reasonably confident a world where the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse.

Of course, in the Real World the southern plantation class would have fought tooth and nail to keep slavery whether the government was in Washington or London, so there still might have been a Civil War. I’m not sure why the people of the U.S. were so much more brutal toward the native Americans than Canadians were, and I’m not persuaded policies issued from London would have made much difference.

But the parliamentary system thing is what really breaks my heart, because I fear our system of government is growing unworkable. The two-party polarization that plagues us now is the natural result of our system; the way we hold elections makes third-party challenges nearly impossible. A parliamentary system is more responsive to the will of the people; it’s easier for smaller parties to win seats and form coalitions.

In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that’s literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than presidential systems.

This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia’s tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system. And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher, after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that’s very good news indeed.

This is not to say everything is hunky-dory in the UK. People get angry with the government there, too.

Apparently someone studied internet trolls to find out what makes them tick.

Executive summary: They’re assholes.

From an LA Times interview of a woman who wrote a book about trolls:

It’s hard to get demographics on who trolls are, but you note that their targets are usually women, people of color and LGBT people, and sometimes Christians and Republicans.

They’re asserting power and privilege in an unmistakable pattern: They’re policing against female-gendered behaviors — anything regarded by them as soft or emotional or sentimental. The idea of “raping with logic” comes up again and again. That’s how they understand and celebrate their behavior.

Trolling is gendered male. With race, there’s this presumption that everyone [trolling] is white, and anyone who deviates from that has to flag themselves. And this is leisure activity. Only a certain kind of person is going to have the time or energy to devote to something that doesn’t get them anything other than enjoyment and interest.

Sick jokes and laughing at others’ pain have been around far longer than the Internet, but trolls also mock the dead and their mourners.

The primary question I get is, “What’s wrong with them?” That sidesteps the ways in which trolling necessitates the trolling mask. Instead of thinking about [a tragedy] as a totality, they think about individual, tiny, fetishized details. If a young person was killed in a particular way and there was an “amusing” detail about the death, they would focus on that. They’re not thinking about the person who died and the people affected by that death. It’s not that they’re laughing necessarily at other people’s pain. They’re in a privileged position where they don’t need to think about it.

Like I said, assholes.