After America

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the crudest sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at fifty-eight, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the protests in Greece, France, Britain, and beyond make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the generous collectivism of big government: give a chap government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the other benefits, and the last thing he’ll care about is what it means for society as a whole. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, so what? In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth-century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus,” offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.”⁵ The Greeks are Keynesians to a man: the mob is rioting for the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

You don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement.

The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. As Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminally terminated Terminator, told the legislature in his fourth State of the State address, “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.”⁶

That’s half-right: California has the ideas of Athens. Unfortunately, it’s late twentieth-century Athens. As for “the power of Sparta,” unless he’s referring to gay marriage, it’s hard to see what he’s on about.

Greek public servants have their nose to the grindstone 24/7. They work twenty-four hours a week for seven months of the year. It’s not just that every year you receive fourteen monthly payments, but that you only do about thirty weeks’ work for it. For many public-sector “workers,” the work day ends at 2.30 p.m. Gosh, when you retire on your fourteen monthly pension payments, you scarcely notice the difference, except for a few freed-up mornings. Couldn’t happen in America, right?

In Bell, California, an impoverished dump on the edge of Los Angeles whose citizens have a per capita annual income of $24,800, the city manager was paid $787,637. With benefits, Robert Rizzo’s compensation came to $1.5 million per annum. I use the phrase “per annum” loosely, since among the other gratifying aspects of his “job” was twenty-eight weeks off for vacation and sick leave. So in practical terms it worked out to $1.5 million per five and a half months.⁷

What kind of “city management” did Bell get in return for remunerating their city manager so handsomely? By 2008, Mr. Rizzo’s regime had piled up nearly $80 million of debt on its 38,000 residents.⁸ You do the math: clearly it would be unreasonable to expect Manager Rizzo to—or the blue-chip insurers, bondholders, and guarantors (Citigroup, Wedbush Morgan) who continued to facilitate Rizzo’s “city management” in defiance of its arithmetical implausibility.⁹ U.S. municipal government is the subprime mortgage of big collective borrowing: Citigroup and the other bigshots wouldn’t have dealt with you on this basis, but they took the then reasonable view that even deranged spendthrift government doesn’t default, because there’s always someone it can pass the buck to. To modify Lord Acton, for Bell’s underwriters coziness with power corrupts very cozily.

Ask not for whom Bell tolls, it tolls for thee. As for murderous civil servants, you don’t have to go to Athens for that. In the New York Christmas snowstorm of 2010, the casualties of the city government’s incompetence went beyond the abandoned hot dog carts and buses and ambulances wedged into the snow banks of midtown Manhattan. A young woman gave birth in the lobby of a Brooklyn apartment house, but the baby died, because, in one of the most densely populated cities on earth, “first responders” were unable to get to her through the unploughed streets of Crown Heights until ten hours after her 911 call.¹⁰ In Queens, Yvonne Freeman, seventy-five, woke up with breathing difficulties, but she too died because the ambulance took hours to reach her.¹¹ As the can’t-do buffoon mayor floundered from one disastrous press conference to another, it emerged that the city might have been afflicted not merely by the weather but by something close to the municipal equivalent of treason. A councilman claimed that, when the storm began, Sanitation Department bosses instructed their plough drivers to delay snow clearance in New York’s outer boroughs in order to protest some planned (and fairly desultory) budget cuts.¹² The streets of Crown Heights weren’t unploughed because they were meteorologically stricken but as a conscious act of sabotage by public “servants.” That would make Mrs. Freeman, the Brooklyn baby, and others, victims of unionized manslaughter. As their Athenian comrades did, the public servants of New York prevented emergency crews from reaching those in peril, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Department head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged.¹³

Public-sector shakedown states are always unsustainable, but, though easy to launch, they’re hard to reel back. In 2010 the media reported the largest demonstration in a quarter-century had taken to the streets outside the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, to demand, “Raise my taxes!”¹⁴ If you caught it with half an ear on the radio news, the gist seemed to be that these people were responsible and communitarian.

“Yes, people are hurting. That’s why we need a tax increase,” insisted Henry Bayer.

Who’s he? Well, he’s executive director of Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Ah, right. So it’s not butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers chanting, “Raise my taxes!” It’s government workers.

Who live off taxes.

Taxes pay their salaries, benefits, and pensions. Government levies taxes on you and gives it to them. So Mr. Bayer and his chums might as well be yelling, “Gimme your money!” It’s no more communitarian than me standing in the street chanting, “Buy my book!”

Big unions fund Big Government. The union slices off 2 percent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of 2 percent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic party, which thereby grows government…. Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

The “Raise my taxes!” protest was a subtler version of the Athenian riots—or a Trojan horse full of unionized Greeks. If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. When the “public service” becomes as dominant as Greece’s, it is the market: you can’t cut back public spending without moving toward economic crisis and social catastrophe.

The bloated public service leached so much out of the Greek economy that the European Union decided that the least worst response was to allow them to do the same to the broader EU economy—just as the debauched public sector of California is pinning its hopes on federal largesse.

Greece is a great civilization, or it was. Now it’s a basket case. They set up a caring, compassionate, progressive society, and it’s bankrupted them.

In Greece, a female working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at fifty. Initially, “hazardous” meant jobs like bomb disposal and mining. Ever fancied a career in bomb disposal? No? Don’t blame you, it’s kinda hazardous.

But, as is the way of government entitlements, the “hazardous” category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as “hazardous,” among them hairdressing.¹⁵ “I use a hundred different chemicals every day—dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year-old Vasia Veremi told the New York Times. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors.

Like hairdressers, Greek TV and radio hosts can also retire at fifty—because of their high level of exposure to “microphone bacteria.”¹⁶ Were you inspired to buy this book by seeing me yakking into a mike about it up on the podium at a stop on the publicity tour? Well, that very microphone counts as a hazardous work environment in Greece. What a class action we authors will have! These publishing houses are like the tobacco companies: when they booked me and J. K. Rowling and the guy who does those Chicken Soup things and the rest of us on a coast-to-coast media blitz, they knew all about the risks of microphone bacteria, but they went ahead and ruined our life expectancy anyway.

It all sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to be a Greek hairdresser? Alas, being a Greek, period, is now a hazardous profession. An Obamafied America, following California down the Athenian path, is Greecing its own