Desperate Greek socialists now offer harsher austerity than they just told voters to reject

When you watch the inevitable result of socialist governance, which is exactly the tragi-comedy Greece is giving us today, the temptation to laugh at leftists getting their comeuppance has to be tempered by the fact that real people are paying an awfully heavy price for this exercise in political and economic foolishness. Then again, you also have to remember that these policies never could have been taken this far if not for a willfully delusional populace that wanted the free goodies and was willing to back politicians who promised to keep it coming - the looming reckoning notwithstanding.

The only reason Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza government are in power today is that they exploited the resentment of the populace toward having their benefits cut. Tsipras told the voters he would stand up to those meanie Germans and other EU creditors who were demanding so-called austerity measures in exchange for continued support of the bailout without which Greece could not survive. And that was what the voters wanted to hear, so Tsipras got to be prime minister and the IMF and the EU got to deal with the headache of Greece defaulting. Even when the creditors gave Tsipras a way out in the form of new cuts and reforms, all of which he could have simply asked the Greek parliament to adopt, he instead submitted it to a voter referendum and urged the voters to reject it. Which they did. Socialist spending profligacy slows down for no creditor! Well, at least until you're just about out of money, which Greece is. And the Germans are clearly finished screwing around, which suddenly has Tsipras scurrying to the table with even bigger austerity measures than he just told the voters to reject. If the offer is to be believed, the Greeks will cut spending between $12 billion and $13 billion euros, while instituting a host of new taxes and reforms to the completely unsustainable pension system that Tsipras got elected promising not to change. But that whole question of whether the Greeks can be believed looms large for the Germans, who have heard this song and dance a few too many times:

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Friday morning, Tsipras met with Syriza members to urge them to back the deal or face financial meltdown. “Either we’ll carry on all together or we will all fall together,” he told Parliament members, according to Greek media. Even so, it may not be enough to placate skeptical creditors —namely Germany — who are weary of paying for what they view as Athens’ reckless behavior. On Friday, leading German politicians from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU and its sister party CSU questioned the credibility of Greece’s proposals. Hans-Peter Friedrich, deputy chairman of the CSU, pointed out the similarities between the new proposal and the one voted down on Sunday. “Either the Greek government is fooling their own people or once again us,” he said in interview with public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. Tsipras is slated to bring the proposal before Greek parliament on Friday afternoon as a demonstration that Athens is serious about reforms. Germany has called on Greece to enact stricter austerity measures before it will consider providing additional aid. “The question is, whether all of this will be implemented, even if it is adopted in parliament, or whether these are just promises,” said Ralph Brinkhaus, the deputy chairman of the CDU group in parliament, told German public television network ZDF on Friday.

Understand, although Greece has only had a government that calls itself "socialist" for a few months, they've been operating in a socialist manner for years. And this is the inevitable destination of any socialist system. You promise people generous benefits, undercut the private sector's ability to generate the wealth you need to pay for it all, and then, when the whole thing is on the verge of collapse, you beg for a bailout on the grounds that it wouldn't be fair to all those people who depend on your beneficience to let you go under. The Germans are right to be skeptical. Even if Tsipras wanted to keep these new promises, which I doubt, the people of Greece clearly don't want him to. They just want their checks to keep coming. If Greece falls into bankruptcy and is kicked out of the Eurozone, that would absolutely deliver a shock to international financial markets. But maybe it's a shock those markets need to absorb. Somewhere along the line, people have to start experiencing the consequences of this fiscal recklessness. If left-wing politicians can make these kinds of promises to the ends of the Earth and they're always bailed out when the gambit collapses, when do we ever reach a point where we have to grapple with fiscal reality? Absent a deal that basically gives the creditors power to run Greece, my vote would be to tell the Greeks the jig is up.