Quote from: 99Percent on February 21, 2012, 02:42:11 AM

It has to do with a country's government ability to loan money and spend it without its corresponding taxation. Greece outspent itself knowing it would be bailed out by the rest of EU. Germany and the other countries know this and refuse to have to extend a hand to a country who keeps on sustaining a huge lazy bureaucracy and absurd subsidies, so they force the Greek government to cut down, and of course the already lazy and freeloading population protests. Unfortunately there is no way to fix this because the Greek economy is already tied down to the EU so there is no "foreign" investment that can counterbalance the severe austerity measures imposed.

The "contagion effect" so much feared here is that all European countries are actually doing what Greece is doing to varying degrees, even Germany.

You cannot have economic union without its corresponding political union.

Just like in a big family, usually the hard working brother end up paying the debt for his playboy brother, there's no fairness. If those Europe countries want to combine to a big union, some countries are destined to sacrifice something, and although some other countries consume more than they produce, they still think that they are treated unfairly Cool

Fairness or justice is just a feeling, each person/country have different personality/culture/climate/value, money is not a good benchmark to measure the fairness, it just forced everyone to accept same value, which in turn become slaves of money