was set up—as Greece defaulted again on its international loans (against its background of political inabilities to comply with financial needs/policies)—between Syriza’s own hard-line stance and the European Central Bank’s demands for immediate compliance, which would mean accepting further austerity.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the understandable decision of the Greek Referendum in July 2015 to reject the imposition of further austerity measures, one casualty was Yanis Varoufakis, the internationally respected economist and then Greek Finance Minister. He resigned the morning after the referendum’s results was known, saying that Greek Prime Minister Tsipras had agreed with him that other Eurozone finance ministers would find it easier to try finding a different “bailout package” for the Greeks without Varoufakis in the room. Across Europe, media reports stated that Varoufakis tweeted to his international followers: “I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.”
To many outside Europe, it was hard to immediately understand the reasons why the Greeks should reject the bailout package offered by the Eurozone countries. However, tracking both societal and financial restrictions during the period from the 2010 crisis through the 2012 bailout to 2015 reveals many human reasons for this. In that five-year period:
• Many salaries had been gradually halved to a level of €600/US$675/£450 per calendar month.
• Nearly 60 percent of all pensioner families’ incomes had become less than €500/US$560/£375 per calendar month.
• Over 50 percent of workers aged under twenty-five were unemployed. For workers aged over twenty-five, that figure was approximately 25 to 30 percent, depending upon location (e.g., city, tourist resort, island). Many city and government workers went to their offices daily, simply to retain their jobs despite not being paid.
• The provision of universal healthcare had undergone a 25 percent cut in both provision and delivery.
For many of those already living in isolated—mountain, rural, or island—poverty as well as the middle classes, who were possibly supporting their adult, college-educated children on a single, halved salary, further austerity could not be contemplated. They had to vote “Oxi”—“No”—and reject the Eurozone’s further bailout because of the increasing austerity measures and higher taxation demanded.
Greece was the first modernized postwar country to default on its loan from the World Bank. This put the Greeks in the same dubious defaulter’s “bucket” as the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Summer 2015 wore tortuously onward, as the Tsipras government was humiliatingly forced to accept an IMG and ECB package that was even more austere than that rejected by the July 2015 referendum. France tried to help Greece draft domestic measures to receive that bailout. Nations such as Finland became increasingly hawkish as did the penitent but previously failing Portugal. Finally, by autumn 2015, that Eurozone bailout had been agreed on, but at what cost to Syriza, and the poorest of the Greek taxpayers and pensioners, as well as national pride in the meaning of democracy?
Even so, summer 2016 saw that bailout demanding the increase of VAT (purchase tax) from 16 to 25 percent on all goods and services, inflicting further damage upon Greek tourist income, precipitating further hardship.
Was it not Aristophanes who had his Athenian hero, Dikaiopolis, say of the conflict with the Spartans: “Greeks will never be free until we sack the clowns who rule us”?31 As the condition of Spartan austerity hurts more Greeks, there is much more to come as increasingly that proud people questions what it means to be ruled from afar. As Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s chief economist, maintained: “Europe’s austerity measures are a suicide pact.”
Taxation
A major part of Greece’s recent problems has been the (political) inability to create and sustain a progressive but uniform taxation across all its people. The lesson for us is in the key question: what kind of society and state intervention do we want?
Religious/church taxes
The Bible is full of encouragement to bring of our best before God. At harvest time we are to “put the first fruits in a basket and go to the altar” (Deut 26:1–10). Yet we are also enjoined by Jesus that if we are at enmity with a sister or brother, we should leave the basket and go and seek reconciliation first. The Hebrew practices of offering animal sacrifices are still part of what we often call “pagan cultures.” It is unsurprising that human nature seeks to get away with the minimum and so there was almost a temple tariff of what needed to be sacrificed to expiate for one’s individual sin. It was graduated or progressive: the poor man might need to sacrifice only two doves while the rich man might need to offer a goat.
Alongside this, the biblical practice of “tithing” occurred. This means giving the first 10 percent of one’s income or harvest to God or his earthly representative! My friend, Stuart Murray, has written a penetrating analysis of this practice, in Beyond Tithing, arguing that although tithing may be biblical, it is not Christian. The promotion of tithing by evangelical Christians must be interrogated, not just on those grounds, but also because it creates a minimalist attitude to Christian generosity. It allows tithers to say “job done” easily—particularly if US tax breaks are involved. This is in marked contrast to the generous lifestyles of my politically radical friends, family, Anabaptist and Mennonite compañeros.
Before the Industrial Revolution, every English parish had its tithe barn so the priest could oversee and collect the due tithes from every parishioner. In Lutheran countries, the tithe was converted into a tax and collected by the state authorities, who passed it on to the church. Gradually Lutheranism has moved from an “opt-out” to an “opt-in” church tax policy, across Germany and Scandinavia, massively reducing denominational income and its stewardship theology built upon tithing.
Learning from “secular” Europe
Late nineteenth-century Germany provided a model of “state socialism,” which found echoes in US “progressivism” and the UK’s “social liberalism.” Chancellor Bismarck’s policies then have evolved into present-day Germany’s welfare state. Benefits apply equally to all German citizens but it is an individual’s contribution and positive taxation history that determines what they receive. Similarly in France, French nationals (or more precisely their employers) pay highly to provide social benefits and high-quality health care to workers and their families, both during employment and in retirement. However the French have “top-up” payments for everything, including doctors’ appointments, health tests, and medication; the French poor can reclaim some or all of those payments through a convoluted bureaucratic process. In other words, benefits are “means-tested” for all citizens but refugees, incomers, etc. in both France and Germany receive fewer automatic benefits.
This is unlike Britain, where the post-1945 Beveridge Report created a nationwide system of non-means-tested benefits, including the National Health Service. That was fine when most health care was palliative, surgery was risky, and life expectancy lower. In today’s UK, the country cannot afford universal health care without making difficult choices:
• What treatments should be freely available to all? E.g., should infertility treatment or cancer care or diabetes clinics take priority? What happens when different regions (therefore zip codes) have different answers?
• Should there be automatic “means-testing” (anathema to UK socialists) of all benefits? The British already pay for much dental and optical care and prescriptions in England.
Those who favor a universal “Obamacare” health provision need to recognize these arguments, as well as the growing US problems associated with diabetes and advancing medical science, when making their long-term policy decisions.
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