by Robert Gore
It is impossible to overstate the significance of Greece’s “Oxi,” or No vote. It puts into stark relief a simple proposition: governments propose, the citizens whose labors fund them dispose. In this case the government in question was not the Greek government, but supranational institutions: the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, known collectively as the Troika. It is symbolically fitting that in a simple exercise of direct democracy, voters in its cradle rejected the Troika’s proposal of rescue loans without debt relief, coupled with a package of reforms. Leaving aside questions of fair dealing—neither side has clean hands—the vote shows that the financial foundation of government does indeed rest on the consent of the governed. Beyond the immediate chaos and longer-term ramifications, it was this realization that prompted the hysterical panic, prior to the vote, of the powers that be, in Europe and beyond. After the vote, panic gives way to terror.
Not that they should be surprised. History is littered with regimes in which the productive people who were to support the rulers’ grand schemes, burdened with too much debt and taxes, said “Oxi”. The joke in the old USSR: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Usually there is no vote to register the sentiment—there certainly wasn’t in the USSR—but when work is punished rather than rewarded, people stop working and governments collapse. The Greeks watched their economy shrink and unemployment climb under Troika-mandated austerity, and were facing decades of debt servitude. A default and exit from the EU will be no picnic. Alexis Tsirpas’s Syriza socialists will get acquainted with the realities of no credit (unless Russia or China comes through), reinstatement of a drachma that nobody inside or outside Greece will trust, and only what it can generate in economic activity going forward to fund their redistributive proclivities and the rest of the government, assuming Greek aversion to paying taxes can be overcome. In other words, Greeks will be starting from zero, but in their collective judgement, zero is better than negative—clawing out from a deep debt and austerity hole.
