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.

Where are they from and where do they get off sticking their nose into an American city's attempt to climb out of bankruptcy?

The water-is-a-human-right crowd in Detroit got a little help from the stink in' UN:

Detroit officials are fuming after two visiting United Nations lawyers scolded the city for cutting off water to delinquent customers and described the shut-offs as a “human rights” violation. 

The response follows a three-day visit to Detroit -- which desperately is trying to bail itself out of bankruptcy -- from two representatives with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“It is contrary to human rights to disconnect water from people who simply do not have the means to pay their bills,” Catarina de Albuquerque, one of the two representatives, said Monday at the conclusion of their visit. 

“I heard testimonies from poor, African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices -- to pay the water bill or to pay their rent.”

But the mayor's office blasted the U.N. review as one-sided. Alexis Wiley, Mayor Mike Duggan’s top aide, said the city is "very disappointed" with them. 

"They weren't interested in the facts," she said. "They took a position and never once [before Monday] reached out to the city for data."

The policy change shuts off water to businesses and residents who either are 60 days past due or owe more than $150.

Detroit -- the country's largest municipality to file for bankruptcy -- reports making 27,000 shut-offs from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30.

Nowhere in the linked article does it say where Ms. de Albquerque or her fellow "rapporteur" are from.  If it's not America, they need to take their globalist asses back to whatever utopia they call home.

Our tax money goes for this garbage.

Water madness in Detroit

It would take more peeling back the layers than there is really space for in a post on this specific aspect of Detroit's situation.  You know the basics:  the 1967 race riot that began driving industry out of the city, 50 years of corruption and mismanagement, unsustainable pension packages in both the governmental sector and the auto industry.

The upshot: shrinkage to the point where what was once America's fifth largest city is now smaller than Columbus, Ohio.  Bankruptcy and a shell government that has had to step aside for a team of crisis-management experts.  Huge swaths of blocks of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, both commercial and residential.

So in March, the city water service served notice that customers more than two months behind on water bills would be cut off.

This led to downtown protests along Grand Avenue last week.

Nurses wanted to work the public-health angle:

A group called National Nurses United, which led a march and protest downtown Friday near Cobo Center, said the shut-offs pose a public health emergency and demanded an immediate moratorium on them. The group’s co-president, Jean Ross, has called the shut-offs an “attack on the basic human right of access to safe, clean water.”

Others wanted to do the demonize-corporations thing, as well as turn their municipal sovereignty over to an obsolete and ineffective global entity:

Demonstrators chanted “Who’s on their side? Corporations. Who’s on our side? United Nations.”

A prominent Freedom-Hater politician wants to make individual households' personal financial business the state's business:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer on Friday called for a moratorium on Detroit’s water shut-offs until city officials can assess who has the financial means to pay off delinquent accounts — and who doesn’t.

Memo to Schauer:  By definition, if they have the means to pay and a lick of sense, their water is still on.

Two main things that need to be yelled at maximum volume about this little scenario:

One is the LITD First Law of Economics:  The money has to come from somewhere.  Just has to.  And, due to the reasons cited in paragraph one of this post, neither producer nor consumer has any.  So the water ain't happening.

The other is that there is no right to water, just like there is no right to health care, a job or "affordable" housing.  It's impossible by definition to have a right to something that requires your fellow human being to do something.

I got into this with somebody on FB and that person tried to tie it in with the right to life.  Here's the relationship between hydrogen oxide: You should be able to seek to obtain water with the expectation that you won't be killed while doing so.

Sheesh.

Detroit is a perfect example of the importance of a geographic and political entity coming to its senses about economics before the consequences are so flippin' dire.