From The New York Times:
Under Chinese, a Greek Port Thrives
By Liz Alderman | 10 October 2012
PIRAEUS, Greece — The captain gazed from his elegant office overlooking this port on the Aegean Sea and smiled as towering cranes plucked container after container from a giant ship while robotic transport vehicles fanned out to transfer the cargo to smaller vessels bound for the Mediterranean.
The cargo volume here is three times the level it was two years ago, before the captain, Fu Cheng Qiu, was put in charge by his employer, Cosco, a global shipping giant owned by the Chinese government.
In a 2010 deal that put 500 million euros ($647 million) into the coffers of Greece’s cash-starved government, Cosco leased half of the port of Piraeus and quickly converted a business that had languished as a Greek state-run enterprise into a hotbed of productivity.
The other half of the port is still run by Greece. And the fact that its business lags behind Cosco’s is emblematic of the entrenched labor rules and relatively high wages — for those lucky enough to still have jobs — that have stifled the country’s economic growth.
Much more at the link. MetalMiner reports that Cosco is going to invest another €300 million to add another pier and expand its capacity.
The state-run business that operates the other side of the port is languishing, because the featherbedding government workers under a socialist system are so used to not working hard. Under the Chinese, the workers have to actually produce, or, in a country with roughly 24% unemployment, the Chinese management will find someone else who will.
There’s something odd about the soft-socialism countries of democratic Europe having to get a lesson in capitalism from the Communist Chinese, but that’s what has happened. In the People’s Republic of China, which is rapidly going capitalist in its economy, the government still retains tight, totalitarian control, and the subjects who don’t want to work can be “re-educated” at any one of a number of facilities dedicated to such purposes. In democratic Greece, the government can’t force people to work hard or efficiently, and, since the government has always just taken care of the indolent, they don’t really have to.
Too bad it’s all collapsing. Perhaps the Greek government can’t make people work harder, but the discipline of an empty stomach might. The Greek economy is in the toilet from the weight of accumulated debt from decades of borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, to live beyond the means justified by their production, and they’ve hit the wall: private lenders won’t extend them credit without some guarantees from nations which still can pay their bills, and the European Union nations which have been foolish enough willing to help are imposing severe austerity conditions as the price for their help.
If we are smart enough, we ought to be able to learn the same lesson: the soft socialism of democratic Europe doesn’t work, at least, doesn’t work forever, and only the discipline of capitalism, where failure to work hard means hunger, provides a society with solid economic growth and prosperity.
In the United States, we have just voted for the President of Free Stuff, the President of Welfare and the Malingerers. The soft socialists will tell us that this is for the good, and it can help people, but our looming debt crisis ought to be telling intelligent and educated people (who already knew, and voted Republican) that there is no free stuff, that eventually what you want has to be paid for.
If the House Republicans go all wobbly-kneed, as Speaker John Boehner looks like he might, President Obama might just get more of his soft socialism plans passed. Eventually, the bills have to be paid, and eventually we’ll be in the same boat as the Greeks. Trouble is, there is no one who can bail out the United States.
The liberals won the election, no doubt about that. But winning the election doesn’t make them right; it just means that they won. If we follow their path, if we allow them to lead us down the garden path, we will go flat broke.
Uh-huh.
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On the other hand, many things you hear about Greece just aren’t true. The Greeks aren’t lazy — on the contrary, they work longer hours than almost anyone else in Europe, and much longer hours than the Germans in particular. Nor does Greece have a runaway welfare state, as conservatives like to claim; social expenditure as a percentage of G.D.P., the standard measure of the size of the welfare state, is substantially lower in Greece than in, say, Sweden or Germany, countries that have so far weathered the European crisis pretty well.
So how did Greece get into so much trouble? Blame the euro.
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You people just can’t handle reality
Oh, and about your alternative…
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So it is time to stop invoking Greece as a cautionary tale about the dangers of deficits; from an American point of view, Greece should instead be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to reduce deficits too quickly, while the economy is still deeply depressed. (And yes, despite some better news lately, our economy is still deeply depressed.)
The truth is that if you want to know who is really trying to turn America into Greece, it’s not those urging more stimulus for our still-depressed economy; it’s the people demanding that we emulate Greek-style austerity even though we don’t face Greek-style borrowing constraints, and thereby plunge ourselves into a Greek-style depression.
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Again, you people just can’t handle reality.
(Oh, and before Hitchcock starts spluttering about Krugman not being credible – it WAS Romney by 300 you were predicting a short while ago, wasn’t it? Seems like it’s TOU that really doesn’t know sh1t, doesn’t it? Bwahahaahahahahahah)
You can search all you want; you won’t find a single prediction from me concerning any election outcome.
Naturally, you quoted Paul Krugman, the liberals’ favorite economist, and someone who has never run anything or been responsible for a thing.
The Greeks are in a recession and having to go through stringent austerity measures because the only alternative would be that they were just fornicating bankrupt. That was their choice: accept real austerity, and try to get their house in order, or go bankrupt, and have nobody lend them a single shilling, and things would be much, much worse for them than they are now.
What Paul Krugman wants is for us to keep borrowing and borrowing, as though we can somehow borrow ourselves into prosperity. But the actually responsible people, people who have to lead governments — other than the idiot we have as President, of course — know better, and are doing what they can to get their houses in order. The French didn’t like it, and they replaced a responsible leader with a socialist, and we’ll soon be seeing France in economic hot water as well.
Naturally, you quoted Paul Krugman, the liberals’ favorite economist, and someone who has never run anything or been responsible for a thing.
Krugman knows the difference between a trade deficit and a government deficit. You don’t.
Why on earth should anyone take you, your comments, or your predictions seriously?
Oh, and by the way, here are some more facts.
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It was disguised as a technical appendix, but it turned out to be an act of insurrection. The International Monetary Fund has published results from a study, which show that the impact of fiscal policy on growth is higher than previously estimated. The policy conclusion of a large fiscal multiplier is obvious: excessive austerity defeats itself. It must end.
One has to be clear about what this statement says, and what it does not say. The IMF does not say that austerity is too hard, too unfair, causes too much pain in the short term or hits the poor more than the rich. It says simply that austerity may not achieve its goal of reducing debt within a reasonable amount of time.
[...]
In a recent paper, the economists Brad DeLong and Lawrence Summers started with the observation that the fiscal multiplier increases when monetary policy hits the zero bound. Then they added the hysteresis effect, and made a number of reasonable assumptions about the state of the world, and found that stimulus spending can become self-financing. The corollary is that austerity becomes self-defeating. In other words: austerity turns into a cause of a deteriorating debt crisis.
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But just like the maths predicting a win for Obama, you can’t deal with the facts, can you?
The Phoenician quoted:
Let’s see, Lawrence Summers, economist, former President of Harvard University, and a member of President Obama’s economic team that sold us the stimulus on the projection it would hold unemployment to a maximum of 8%, right?
But, what’s one mistake, right? Dr Summers and his colleague “found that stimulus spending can become self-financing?” How odd, then, that the big stimulus plan pushed through by President Obama and his minions proved to be anything but self-financing, and our deficits have remained over a trillion dollars a year. When we consider the fact that we have been “stimulating” the economy via running deficits for 38 out of the last 42 years, if Dr Summers was right, we should have self-financed our way to balanced budgets and enormous prosperity; somehow, I haven’t noticed that to be the case.
Laughable. You have cited economic research papers which haven’t proved to be true in the real world, and you call them facts. Apparently, the definition of the word “fact” is different in Kiwi English than what we use in the United States.