The Great Lie.

Every tick on this chart is a joke:

Every tick on this chart (total public debt) is a lie:

U.S. government bonds promise payment but, in the end, it will never happen. None of that debt will be paid for, unless it's by following generations, whose enthusiasm for the consumption preferences of their ancestors is not the stuff of legend.

We need to remind ourselves of the words quoted immediately below. They pertain to Greek politics but it's really a matter of Western politics in general. The Syriza communists are just more honest about their platform.

The socialist paradigm is crumbling and the soaring public debt in all Western countries is simply the graphic evidence of the tragic Great Lie that overtook Western man since the dawn of the last century. Every tick on the graph of public debt above is proof of the Lie. The maneuverings over Greek debt to stave off operation of the iron laws of arithmetic (ILA), not to mention eternal truth,^[1] should similarly be seen for what they are: utter desperation.

But there were plenty of warning signs for Krugman and the world. A big one was the self-proclaimed adherence to Marxism by the leaders of Syriza, the governing party in Greece. I am not writing as a knee-jerk conservative here. I am willing to admit that it is possible to hold many political and economic views without immediately qualifying for the Flat Earth Society, but Marxism does not fall within this range of the allowable.

There is no doctrine in the social sciences that has been more thoroughly debunked, in both theory and practice, than Marxism. It is not possible to be a true believer in Marx unless you are an imbecile or willingly self-deceptive. In either case, this does not make you an ideal negotiating partner, something to bear in mind when you are deciding where to place your sympathies in the battle between Greece and the troika.^[2]

Mr. Barris should have said "imbecile, willingly self-deceptive, a liar, or a committed enemy of liberty." Other than that quibble, he states bedrock truth.

What he says applies to all the West, however. The Greek government may be an object of scorn but like Rosie O'Grady and the colonel's lady, all the parties to the forthcoming implosion are sisters under the skin.

As the "flat earth" link in the quoted text above suggests, alas, humans are capable of focusing on single points of data and thereafter excluding all contrary evidence. The single data point in question in modern times is the cry of our victorious statists, "We are not heartless capitalists. We know how to take care of you and there is no downside whatsoever."

For that they were adored but, as we see all too clearly, the grisly toll of communists and socialists in the past century, even at the dawn^[3] of their hideous reign in parts of the world, is simply not seen. And where some residual decency survived in the countries not buried in violent revolution, the violence has been muted, but the tyranny progresses nonetheless to the ultimate degradation. The very latest effort of the Europeans to create a world-class government has resulted in the European Union, a contemptible authoritarian monstrosity, whose leaders have nothing but contempt for the wishes of the people over whom they rule and whose substance they waste.

Subsidiary fascism is all the rage too and the left knows no caution.

Notes
^[1] "For euen when wee were with you, this wee commanded you, that if any would not worke, neither should he eate." 2 Thessalonians 3:10, New Testament, KJV.
^[2] "Destroying the Village to Save It – A Brief Post Mortem on Greece." By Roger Barris, Acting Man, 7/29/15.
^[3] "The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923." By Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, 1924 (?). An excerpt:

At Kertch the Bolshevists organised what they called "trips to Kuban," when the victims were taken out to sea, and drowned, and their terror-stricken wives and mothers flogged with [whips of horsehide] or, in a few cases, shot along with their sons or husbands. And for a long time bodies of such women, with babes still clasped to their breasts, could be seen lying outside the Jewish cemetery at Simferopol. At Yalta and Sevastopol stretcher patients were carried from the hospitals, and shot.

Pp. 78-79.

See also "The Record of the Red Terror." By S. Melgunoff, Current History, 1927.