For at least the last 30 years, and definitely since the Reagan/Thatcher revolution got going, a frequent mantra of right wing politics has been that "the state must be run like a private firm". In the Europe in the 1990s the right wing, enabled by third-way social democrats, managed the spectacular feat of structuring the Eurozone around rules that make it all but impossible to run the state in any other way, to the point that Zapatero now freely admits and preaches that the state needs to fund itself in the capital markets (or borrowing from other states) and that in order to access credit it has to be thrifty. So the fourth largest Eurozone member state must run its financial affairs just like a private firm, or a local government, and this is the message coming from a Social-Democratic leader. How the mighty have fallen.