from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens

excerpt:

But maybe rules isn’t quite the right word. The larger issue is reality—and Greece’s flight from it. Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 177%, which sounds like an abstraction but means that this year Greece will produce barely half as much as it owes. This is what the Greek government and its fellow travelers call austerity.

As of 2008, on the eve of the meltdown, Greece had no fewer than 133 public-pension funds, each administered by its own little bureaucracy. (Under pressure from creditors, the number was supposed to come down to 13.) Greeks retire earlier and live longer than most of their eurozone peers, which means they spend close to 18% of GDP on public pensions, compared with about 7% in Ireland and 5% in the U.S. Pension fraud is pervasive, but nobody can put an exact figure on it because record-keeping is notoriously, and probably deliberately, spotty.

Privatization of state-owned companies was supposed to bring in €50 billion. Five years into the crisis, successive governments have only sold off €2.5 billion of assets. Greece has more lawyers per capita than the United States. As of 2010, Greek labor costs were 25% higher than in Germany. A liter of milk in Greece costs 30% more than elsewhere in Europe, thanks to regulations that allow it to remain on the shelf for no more than a week. Pharmaceuticals are also more expensive, thanks to the cartelization of the economy.

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