And yet...
I keep hearing people explaining to me how Germans are justifiably fed up with paying for everyone else, that public finance should at long last be put under control by all the non-virtuous. Then when I try to point out that this does not match the recent years records, I will be told that in Greece there are entire villages full of Porsches that did not pay a single euro in income tax over the past few years.

I don't know where they got the story, but it must have been in one of the very serious sources as totally independent people reported it.

Well, I can't easily prove a negative (other than checking Greece's accounts to check that no village paid zero on income tax, or visiting all those who did to check that they are not full of Porsches), but when I did very briefly go to Greece last year, I saw anything but a country enjoying a rich life on German funds. It looked undoubtedly poor -and yet I did not leave rather touristic areas. I shudder to think what it would have been had I had time to see the remote areas.

But they just know that those villages are all over the place. That Greece (and Spain, and Portugal) must be whipped into good behaviour.
I find it entirely plausible that the EU circles of power could let it go all the way to total humanitarian disaster (and I mean worse than Russia in the 1990s -after all, Russia had its own currency AND a lot of mineral resources) without ever reassessing their fantasies. Unless Greeks are finally allowed to revolt. But they sure are doing their best to make that unlikely, if not impossible.


Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi