Because they tried everything but the simplicity of the free market

Its ATMs are running out of cash, its banks are considering raiding customers' accounts to come up with some, any money, and its flamboyant leftist finance minister has been asked not to attend any more meetings of his EU counterparts.

Still, the Greek populace chose to use yesterday's referendum to give the middle finger to its creditors, as if it has some kind of inherent right to maintain a state of pseudo-normalcy financed by somebody else.

Not that the creditors are a model of sensible living.  Most of the rest of Europe is just Greece Lite:

A radical left-wing government in Greece is betting that more moderate European Socialists will meet their demands rather than risk opening a chasm that will expose the economic unsustainablity of the existing system. The Greek economy may be a fraud, but it’s a fraud built on a bigger Euro fraud.

And that’s a familiar pattern.

This is the way that public sector unions browbeat their Democratic allies in Chicago, New York and California to extract insane concessions from their unworkable budgets. The budgets are already bankrupting cities and states, so why not tear off free cosmetic surgery or $80k salaries from the mess?

Greece is just treating the European experiment the way that the California Teachers Association treats the state. It’s a giant corrupt piggy bank, so why not raid it? It’s going to go bankrupt, but it will anyway.

That’s the typical mindset in Socialist countries. The average Russian stole as much as he could under Communism because the entire system was built on theft. Much of Greece dodges taxes because they’re certainly that the money will just go to corrupt public officials. And they’re usually right.

When everyone is convinced that the system is corrupt, they take out as much as they can while putting back in as little as they can. That’s true in Greece, in the old USSR and in Obama’s America.

And the pattern manifests itself with utter predictability in the Caribbean as well:

A number of factors have contributed to this sorry state of affairs. Puerto Rico’s government spends too much relative to its income, and the commonwealth is plagued by familiar problems: dysfunctional tax and regulatory policies imposed by Congress, excessive pension and benefits promises offered to government employees as a cowardly way to keep compensation increases off the books; a political environment dominated by public-sector unions, which threw out Luis Fortuño, the last governor to make a halfway serious attempt at fiscal reform; an economy hampered by relatively low work-force participation, with the concomitant loss of private-sector production; an electorate susceptible to gimmicky non-solutions that promise real results without real reform; brain drain as its most skilled, energetic, and entrepreneurial residents leave as quickly as they can for better economic opportunities elsewhere in the United States.

And the debate about whether Puerto Rico's status should bring it further into the post-Ameroican orbit or move it closer to autonomy is complicated by a neediness that hobbles its ability to chart its own destiny:

Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and Puerto Rico’s bonds, reduced to junk status though they may be, are held mainly by American financial institutions ranging from pension funds to insurance companies. A bailout cannot be countenanced, but neither can Washington play the role of economic Pontius Pilate and wash its collective hands of this matter. It may be that Puerto Rico should be an independent commonwealth, but it isn’t one.

And China's model of a sort-of free market within a one-party Marxist state structure is showing its most serious cracks ever. 

The lessons for a post-America enamored with planned decline are fairly obvious.  It starts with talk of some kind of "right" to things to which it is definitionally impossible to have a right: health care, "affordable" housing, water, "clean" air.  The end of that road is the faucets of Detroit yielding at best a little squeaking noise when turned on, ACA co-ops and exchanges folding, bundles of bad mortgages causing bank failures, regulations, crafted with the explicit intent of bankrupting the organizations on which they're imposed, being inflicted by the unelected tyrants of an out-of-control executive-branch agency on the coal industry.

There is always some grandiose excuse for not trying the simplest model of them all: letting people keep what they earn and do what they want with it.

If that is ever tried anywhere in the world in its pure form, that place will astound the rest of humankind, and maybe prod it to grow up and consider freedom.