Afraid of the future? We should.

Be afraid about your future: the western world has lived for decades in an unrealistic way, thinking it could afford the cost of social benefits, health care, unemployment protection, family allocations for children, etc., but this was just like luxury things bought by spending inexistent money or taking taxes which impaired the otherwise flourishing economy. Paying for those in need was a mistake which drove the whole economy to an unprecedented crisis to such an extent that now everyone has to pay for the huge debts accumulated by the States. Greece is the best example: Greeks, and many Europeans, have been 'living above their means'.

Here is - of course as a caricature - the kind of arguments one finds easily as explanations for the bad economic situation taking place in Europe (see a more elaborated list here). In the UK, the conservative government calls the crisis a 'budget crisis' and basically targets as responsible the former labour policy, accused of being too generous in terms of social welfare; perhaps not 'too generous' but rather irresponsibly dispendious. This line of arguments is found everywhere in the mouth or the conservative leaders but is also taken as a suitable explanation by many: after all, when a family spends too much on holidays, there is no money left for the essential things. Hence the feeling that the explanation is correct: States have been spending irresponsibly on superfluous matters, ignoring basics of economic wisdom that everyone having a family has. This is also because people in the public services are incompetent and don't really care about what they are doing. Only the private sector is serious and responsible, because people there know what they are working for.

All this can be summed up in one sentence: there is too much State, meaning the State uses too much resources from the community in order to function. As a consequence, the State should be made more rational in its conduct and actions, which means that big parts of its traditional missions should be abandoned to non-State hands when not abandoned completely.

This Thatcherian view has led to this very bizarre paradox: the State should not manage a public service, for example public transportation, which should then be privatized; the privatized companies then will make profit from these services; a profit which, as a consequence, the State won't make. The idea behind is that it's the hard truth of nature and men: if you want to use a bus to go to work, you just need to pay the fair price of it, which turns out to be a price which involves a profit for the company, because the search for profit is the key to success. The circle is closed when you understand that the State being non-profit, it has no interest in buses correctly running. There are, of course, some rules which the State imposes in order to ensure that a minimum of service to the population is secured, but suffices to go to England to see how hectic, inefficient and absurdly expensive public transport is, in particular trains. 

(that's also why I love Switzerland: trains are rather expensive, but whenever you take it, wherever you go, there is always the same old good flat rate per kilometer: no need to think about buying a ticket over the internet so much time in advance and to look for that promotion hidden somewhere, compare companies, etc. Let this be for as long as possible...). 

Selling around public services to private companies (which makes them more expensive) and at the same time reducing social benefits leads of course inevitably to a harsh impoverishment of the middle class, which can't buy goods as much it used to, which thus leads to less profits for most of the areas of the economy, leading in turn to less taxes, leading again to more privatization, unemployment, etc. The vicious circle is well known and Nobel prize winner (of economics) Joseph Stiglitz has made a number of public statements denouncing the policy encouraging it. 

But the idea was also that a high debt is too bad for economic growth, according to a well-known official study from the IMF. However, the study was recently completely identified as totally false (see here, and for a former mistake identified earlier, see here), thus the mere facts are that, as many macro-economists have pointed out, crisis time is investment time, be it through some conjunctural increase of public debts.

Worse even: people suffer and die. This is not a mere word, and this is about Europe. 

Those who had a difficult life, those with little income, who were at the edge of a livable budget, have seen their living costs raising to a suffocating point. They have to forget about curing their teeth, or even their medication for serious illnesses, as several reports have shown in Greece.

Greece, and to a lesser but promising extent, Portugal and Spain, are the laboratory for the crisis. Hunger has come back into Europe. There are children in Athens who are reported hungry and under-fed by school authorities, as New York Times reports. 

Kids looking for food remains in trash bins near the school where they are taught how to count and write. When did we see this last time in Europe? In the thirties. Europe is home, a home still warm for some, but a home with hungry kids. Hungry kids is a revolting thing anywhere; how unexpected for people of my generation it is to realize that we have hungry kids at home, a home where such ideals as progress and equity are so meaningful, home, when other people hide their money in offshore accounts.

In the lovely island of Naxos, there are about a hundred families who have to go to public food emergency help. In Greece, the taxes have been combined with utilities bills, so that the price of electricity raised by about 30%. People just can't follow this when they don't have a strong economic backbone, in which case they might simply go and put the money away. And they can't even sell grand-ma's house on a non existent real estate market when no one knows if Greece will stay in the Euro zone and for how long. 

The crisis and its consequences made stronger than ever the implementation of ultra-liberalism. The crisis is a full and total, crushing, victory of the free market ideology. A free market where predators freely take the wealth to themselves while still appearing on TV programs explaining that the States has to reduce their debts by decreasing social benefits and other aspects of public services. People standing in the administration committee of important companies, of specialists in communication hired for doing the persuasive lobbying at every level. All this when scholars in the fields of economics simply say otherwise. 

All this, forgetting that the crisis was not actually created by overweight States (and States are indeed often actually overweight) or by lazy southern people, but by adventurous and unprofessional financial institutions who provided the technical means to fake figures and the elaborated solutions to hide money away from the State; while incompetent notation agencies (which are not universities or independent research centers in economics) grading the behaviour of States from offices where the notion of democracy (power to the people) has acquired some complication. 

What is the next step, then? What is the future of those happy few people whose wealth increases enormously exactly during the time when most people see their income melt down? People hiding their money abroad and escaping income tax while kids look for food in Athens trash bins near the classroom? 

Policies have to change before it's too late, if it's not yet so.