Joseph Stiglitz was right the other day to complain during his stay in Athens that there are some people in Brussels who are "deficit fetishists" and that they get pleasure from talking tough to Euro-zone economic miscreants. He was also right that during times of crisis it is by deficit spending that you stimulate the economy -along the lines of Obama's stimulus plan of last year.

But on both of these points he was right on the purely theoretical level -they, unfortunately, are not considerations that can be applied to the current Greek situation. Stiglitz's views on Greece seem to be refracted through the opinions of his close friend, the current prime minister. The latter seems to be of the opinion that the current dust up is due to speculators trying through rumors to take down "strong governments" (this is how he expressed it at Davos). Anybody who would count Greece among strong states unfairly facing the malign designs of evil forces is of course either lying or dreaming. But this is a notion that goes down well with the klepto-socialist diehards of the prime minister's own party, who are chiefly responsible for the present shambles not only of the economy but of the entire institutional and ethical framework of this society. It also stokes the nationalist resentment of the average man in the street who -again under decades of ideological manipulation by "leftist" pilferers and robbers of the public coffers- is more than eager blame to the present collapse on anyone but the misdeeds of the local political class. There is always good old imperialism to conjure up when anything goes awry, for this removes the responsibility to look ourselves in the mirror and to recognize the deformity of our own outlook.

With respect to Stiglitz, the Greek deficit was not run up during times of crisis. It was the result of sustained bad management for the last three decades at least, whose purpose was to provide a scandalously privileged existence to a thin layer of well connected bribers, blackmailers and outright thieves by a governing class who also in turn grew disgustingly fat in the process. Public moneys were never primarily expended for infrastructure projects but siphoned off to the private accounts of party bosses and also the parasitic consumption of their political clientele. As a result of this type of deficit spending, the streets of the country became filled with Porsches and all the latest in luxury cars and SUV's at the same time as the health service and education simply rotted away, and the portion of the people, i.e. the great majority, who had no access to outrageous public sector privileges secured by ruthless unions in cahoots with the ruling parties were strangled by taxation.

The public sector that, thus, became a bloated whale not only did not contribute anything to economic growth, but has been the most decisive factor in preventing healthy economic investment and competition through all kinds of absurd regulations whose effect was to cut the country off from the broad European environment in which it operated. The ever expanding coils of bureaucracy (that put to shame the achievements in this field of Czarist Russia for instance) was their lethal weapon in sucking the blood out of the real economy and preventing structural reform. To these people, still in effective control of the state apparatus, Stiglitz's statements are music to the ears. Not because they know or care anything about Stiglitz and his theories (he is, after all, also a cunning imperialist and a Jew to boot), but because he provides them with cover for carrying on their anti-social rampage under the guise of the "welfare state" -a state, that is, whose only purpose is, as far as they are concerned, to fill their insatiable bellies at the expense of everyone else.