Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama's stimulus.
No doubt Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit, Greece truly was a mess. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.
Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.
One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.
Instead, he ordered a public-works initiative and built the Parthenon.
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