Greece: The Birthplace of Modern Medicine Now Has None
[The following post is by TDV Editor In Chief, Jeff Berwick]
The UK's Independent reports, “Greek hospitals cannot afford painkillers, scissors or sheets as budget cuts bite“.
As one surgeon was quoted, “There is no money to repair medical equipment, no money for ambulances to use for petrol, no money to hire nurses and no money to buy modern surgical supplies.”
This comes with a bit of a sting considering that Greece is lauded as the “birthplace of modern medicine”, home to Hippocrates circa 400 B.C.
So, what is causing the birthplace of modern medicine to run out of medicine?
The answer to that lies partly in another Greek invention, known as the “birthplace of democracy” even further back in the 6th century B.C.
Plato and Aristotle were the main contributors to the idea of democracy… something which I often call demoncracy because it better describes its effects. Having lived through various forms of oppressive rule they came up with the idea of democracy in which the people, supposedly, “ruled themselves”. At the time it probably sounded like a great idea. But now, after millennia of evidence showing the results of democracy it is clear that it can be just as bad of a system as monarchy and often even worse.
A more direct cause of of Greece's democratic fall is corruption, and cronyism. These might be familiar to the Greek people if they are familiar with their own history. How many times has Greece fallen due to corruption from within, I wonder…
Of course, the real cause of the problem is the belief in government itself. But while so many people still believe they need this unnecessary evil, democracy is really showing itself to be a ridiculous system.
Democracy is good for one thing, though, comedy.
The people clamored to vote for a new government recently which ran on the campaign that they would not institute “austerity” measures. Austery just means stopping spending more than you are bringing in. It's something quite simple for a regular business to understand but when it comes to government people have all sorts of insane ideas about doing something as common sense as not spending more than you make.
And so, with democracy, the people got exactly what they wanted! Good and hard!
They elected a new government who, literally within days, basically said, “Uh, we have no money.”
This should have been obvious to anyone with a brain… but those are hard to come by nowadays and especially amongst the voting public.
Greece is in effect left with two options:
A) Institute austerity (aka. cutting spending)
B) Leave the Eurozone and currency
Either one will have extreme economic pain in Greece in the short term for many people. But, the grand, grand majority of the Greek voting public do not want to do either. Well, they are going to have to learn something about a term called “reality” in the process. It is going to have realize that government is not some magic cornucopia that gives people things… in fact, it does the exact opposite. It takes money from nearly everyone, wastes some, steals some and then gives some back.
There is going to be plenty of pain to come not only for Greece but for the entire Eurozone, the US, Australia, Japan, Canada and many other countries who are about to realize too that today's socialist democracies backed by Keynesian/Communist central banks that centrally plan the economy is not freedom and does not create a better society. [Editor's Note: Subscribe to TDV here to get the best analysis, information and strategies for surviving The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It]
And having a bunch of mouthbreathers voting in or out various criminals to manage it doesn't make it any better.
Winston Churchill put it well when he said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
The nearly 2,500 year old bad idea of democracy has once again come full circle back to Greece. Maybe after all these years it is time to try some new ideas.