If an alcoholic needs to get sober, does his friend pay for him take another drink to settle his nerves?
If a teenager keeps breaking curfew, do the parents let him go out with his friends again on a Friday night to Tijuana, with only his verbal agreement to return by midnight?
If a faithless husband is trying to make things right with his wife, does the wife allow him to shack up with his mistress and snap photos of their illicit bliss for others to peruse on YouTube?
Reasonable people would acknowledge that such measures intended to assist only assist in enabling more deviant and destructive behavior. What's worse, enable such terrible conduct hurts the very people who think that they are helping. Addiction and disreputable behavior require immediate intervention, cessation, and restoration according to clearly demarcated boundaries, no matter how painful the withdrawal may be for the addict and those who wish to help.
Yet the European Union, at the behest of presumably reasonable leaders, continues doling out loans and bailouts to nations whose economic crises rode on the waves of easy credit, sloppy lending practices, and disgusting cradle-to-grave dependence.
Economic reports furiously allege that Greece had lied its way into the Eurozone, relying on the creative accounting from the same agencies which later set of the Great Recession in this country. Spain fell victim to a similar housing crisis fueled by easy credit and heedless disregard for growing debt, as did Ireland. Then there are Italy and Portugal, two Mediterranean nations with exploding elderly populations which insisted on socialist subsidies without consideration of who was going to have foot the bill for pensions, benefits, and
Why throw good money after bad? Greece has already received two major bailouts, still with no sign of slowing its mad descent into socialist insanity. Riots among entitlement-minded Hellenes are rattling political nerves, scaring away tourists, and further entrenching their collective refusal to accept that having eaten their cake, they will just have to pay for it.
Bailouts from more stable economies in the Eurozone merely induce more moral hazard, which enable these irresponsible governments to relapse into the same "hand out now, pay later" mentality which shoved them to the brink of economic collapse in the first place. Now, the nations which played by the rules are getting punished for the willfull disobedience of the lesser states in the Union, with overburdened taxpayers crying out "Enough!"
Investors and stock markets around the world fear the global financial collapse that will results if the indebted European nations default on their debt. Yet by stringing out the inevitable, trading partners are tumbling into a slower freefall with the same heart-stopping, nation-breaking bottom to follow.
Free market economist Jean-Baptiste Say stated, "Markets correct themselves." Following the unwavering refusal of solvent states to bail out insolvent ones, the economic pain thrust upon the global economy will be significant, but it will be short-lived compared to the slow death which the world economy is fearfully suffering as markets sag and weave in the wake of uncertain outcomes by larger governments' dithering whether to inject another bailout into the abysmal abyss of failing nations' dwindling economies.
Recovery is tough. Change is not easy. Breaking free of addiction is taxing to any person or system so accustomed to dependence, and the withdrawal symptoms may be severe. Yet the current alternative aggregious actions of the Eurozone is dragging out a slow death which doom both the addits and the enabler.
Stop the Bailouts. No more second chances! No more according opportunities for people and nation-states to engage in the same dysfunction and damning practices which have egged on the economic crises gripping the world. If abusers are unwilling to break free, everyone of us should at least saves ourselves and our nations and break free of these unjustified entanglements.