Plain truths are simple, but require a grownup's mindset to be embraced

There's a lot of buzz lately - for good reason - about the book Popular Economics by Forbes and Real Clear Markets editor John Tamny.  His basic thesis is that economics is not nearly so complex as most economists try to make it.

Basic principles are basic principles.  No amount of obfuscation can render them non-existent.

I've long said - I didn't get this from Tamny; I've been asserting it for years - that probably the most basic principle of all is this: The money has to come from somewhere.  You can earn it, you can borrow it, you can receive it as a gift, or you can steal it.  Those are the four ways you get it.

Speaking of borrowing, a corollary principle would be this: If you borrow money, your lender will expect to get it back.

True among individuals.  True between individuals and banks.  True between nations and international financial institutions.

So Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis's whinings in Washington this week ring a bit hollow:

"The fact is that Greece is out of the markets and it has been redeeming its debts for the last few months using its own scarce liquidity. It can't go on," he said.

Waaahhhh.

Look, pal, if you weren't all ate up with the ideology of your radical-leftist Syriza party, you'd see that the only way out of this for Greece is for government to extricate itself from the country's economic life - knock it off with the pension funds and state-supported industries - and for the Greek people to actually produce stuff of value.  Sure, you have tourism and olive oil, but it's clearly not enough.

To reiterate another of life's basic truths, culture is upstream from politics and policy.  Greek society must make the course correction from dependency and entitlement to inventiveness and enterprise.

A post-American is saying this because, pal, your refusal to face the basic truth has implications for us all:

George Osborne has warned that Greece's battle with Europe's creditor powers is nearing a "crunch" point and threatens to detonate a fresh global crisis if mishandled over the next days and weeks. 

The Chancellor said the escalating crisis in Greece is now the biggest threat to the world economy and has become a haunting theme for finance ministers and central bankers meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington this week. 

"The mood is notably more gloomy than at the last international gathering, and it is now clear to me that a misstep or a miscalculation by either side could easily return European economies to the kind of perilous situation we saw three or four years ago," he said.

And when the digestive byproduct hits the fan, we don't want to hear a lot of gobbled-gook.  The plain fact is that you, Greece - the Greece that elected Syriza - owe this money to European creditors and you have no actual plan to pay it back.

Speaking of the IMF meeting in Washington, there are also rumblings of concern about post-America:

As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
“It’s almost handing over legitimacy to the rising powers,” Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the government of India, said of the United States in an interview on Friday. “People can’t be too public about these things, but I would argue this is the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”

Notice how Jonathan Weisman of the NYT chalks it up to "dysfunction" and how Jack Lew of the Most Equal Comrade's nomenklatura attributes it to "bitter division."

Again, this is a smokescreen.  The plain fact is that post-America is saddled with its own version of Syriza, and its agenda is planned decline. This fading of leadership is on purpose.

And so the peak of civilization recedes into the ever-more-hazy past, and we spin tales to comfort us about how culpability is just a relative thing, and besides, decline is actually rather pleasant.

Until the Huns appear on the scene.  Which, by the way, they have.