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So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the crudest sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at fifty-eight, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the protests in Greece, France, Britain, and beyond make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the generous collectivism of big government: give a chap government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the other benefits, and the last thing he’ll care about is what it means for society as a whole. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, so what? In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth-century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus,” offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.”⁵ The Greeks are Keynesians to a man: the mob is rioting for the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

You don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement.

The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. As Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminally terminated Terminator, told the legislature in his fourth State of the State address, “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.”⁶

That’s half-right: California has the ideas of Athens. Unfortunately, it’s late twentieth-century Athens. As for “the power of Sparta,” unless he’s referring to gay marriage, it’s hard to see what he’s on about.

Greek public servants have their nose to the grindstone 24/7. They work twenty-four hours a week for seven months of the year. It’s not just that every year you receive fourteen monthly payments, but that you only do about thirty weeks’ work for it. For many public-sector “workers,” the work day ends at 2.30 p.m. Gosh, when you retire on your fourteen monthly pension payments, you scarcely notice the difference, except for a few freed-up mornings. Couldn’t happen in America, right?

In Bell, California, an impoverished dump on the edge of Los Angeles whose citizens have a per capita annual income of $24,800, the city manager was paid $787,637. With benefits, Robert Rizzo’s compensation came to $1.5 million per annum. I use the phrase “per annum” loosely, since among the other gratifying aspects of his “job” was twenty-eight weeks off for vacation and sick leave. So in practical terms it worked out to $1.5 million per five and a half months.⁷

What kind of “city management” did Bell get in return for remunerating their city manager so handsomely? By 2008, Mr. Rizzo’s regime had piled up nearly $80 million of debt on its 38,000 residents.⁸ You do the math: clearly it would be unreasonable to expect Manager Rizzo to—or the blue-chip insurers, bondholders, and guarantors (Citigroup, Wedbush Morgan) who continued to facilitate Rizzo’s “city management” in defiance of its arithmetical implausibility.⁹ U.S. municipal government is the subprime mortgage of big collective borrowing: Citigroup and the other bigshots wouldn’t have dealt with you on this basis, but they took the then reasonable view that even deranged spendthrift government doesn’t default, because there’s always someone it can pass the buck to. To modify Lord Acton, for Bell’s underwriters coziness with power corrupts very cozily.