Ah, but who is 'the EU' here? Because a lot of the time what's perceived as the EU working against itself really is national politicians abusing the supernational processes and institutions.
No it's not. The specific politicians say they want things. They then proceed to do things that make what they want impossible. You always leap to make excuses for them. It's bullshit. It's not you being cynical. It's you ignoring reality because they tell you to.
Look, it's many steps but each of them is simple. The various politicians say that they want Greece to service debt that used to be privately owned and is now mostly publicly owned. So they want a certain amount of money to flow out of greece. But the thing is that there isn't much money in Greece. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. The dynamics of capital flight and whatnot are complicated but what they boil down to is really simple: if there isn't much money in a country, you can't get a lot of taxes and send them abroad. It's also really obvious. So any policy that is predicated over reducing the amount of money in greece is not going to work. This leads us to the central fact they blithely ignore year after year:
Any money you want to take out to Greece needs to come from somewhereI'm not talking "spend money to make money" or Keynesian stimulus or anything fancy like that. I'm talking just simple, grade school arithmetic. Money in has to be greater then or equal to money out or money shrinks. There greek pool of capital can't shrink anymore. So where is Greece going to get new money?
1) Public transfers: This can be all sorts of things. Debt forgiveness. Cost sharing. Subsidies. At the end of the day they boil down to the same thing, Greece's government having more money or fewer obligations. Your politicians keep saying they hate this and dont want to do this. They are doing it, just ineptly hiding it. They reduce the obligations and then say "look we didn't give them money!" But who cares if they didn't give them money? They reduced the obligations. It's the same fucking thing.
2) Decrease private money out of greece. Syriza wants to do this. Despite the fact that the EU doesn't want this, it slowly happens anyway. But it happens as a byproduct of incredible human misery because Greece isn't able to leave the Euro. Everytime that Greece becomes 1% poorer, it spends 2% less on imports. This ratio could be increased, and Syriza desperately wants to increase it (since it means Greece doesn't need to be as poor) but such policies are a complete non-starter outside Greece. Well not everywhere outside Greece. The IMF, ECB and US Government would be on board with all sorts of policies to smooth this.
This would also be really, really easy to effectively set up. At the extreme a tiger team could probably create a special tarrif commision in under a week, staff it entirely with non-greeks and accept those revenues as debt service. Greece wouldn't need to do anything other then agree. It's crude but it shows just how simple the problem would be to solve if anyone outside greece actually believed a word of what they said.
3) Create money within Greece: "money" refers to a lot of capital assets beyond holdings of euros. It's possible that by appreciating the value of greek assets you can make more "money" in this sense in a sustainable way. Think of it like this, if you buy stock in Coca Cola and that stock goes up in value, you have made money without taking it from anyone.
This is the outcome that everyone says they want. However actions speak louder then words.
They have created an environment of unprecedented hostility towards greek domestic growth. I'm not talking about spending money or investment or tax incentives or anything else. What they have done is tell anyone thinking about investing in greece that Europe is going to fuck up your investment JUST TO BE AN ASSHOLE. Not to get anything out of it. Just to be punish Greece, they are going to ruin investments. Would you want to invest in Greece under those conditions? If politicians in Berlin or Brussels actually cared about the results they would have been screaming their heads off about the ECB not filling it's legal obligations.
4) Increase private money flows into Greece: In theory outside money could attempt to invest in Greece. However such investments are difficult thanks to the situation outlined in 3. And furthermore the price of greek assets is ridiculously depressed so such private inflows would be an enormous transfer of wealth away from the Greek people. Actually, I think Europe likes the idea of making Greece poorer so I wonder why we haven't seen more of this.
And that's it. Those are the four things. Either money goes to the government, the private sector spends less, the private sector creates new assets or the foreign capital flows in. Those are the four options. One of them has to happen. It's that simple. Your politicians say they absolutely dont want number 1. But they refuse to do anything to support 2 and support policies that make 3 and 4 even worse. Let's put this in equation form for a sec:
T + I + G + P = 0
Now, middle school algebra...
T = - (I + G + P)
So, now imagine you are an european politician and imagine you are an amoral idiot. Looking at that really complicated equation right there... if you want to make T as small as possible, should you pursue policies that make I, G and P bigger or smaller?
Honestly, when I think about this I start to wonder if maybe it just would be better if the European Union broke apart. Because you guys have proven yourself so utterly incapable of doing even basic policies. The US had these sorts of problem before the constitution and immediately took actions to fix them by making the constitution. Europe is just making it's problems worse. You can ignore them for now because it's just Greece and they are really small. But what is going to happen when the problems hit something bigger? Greece is the canary in your coal mine and you guys are just calling the canary stupid.
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