You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

"Europe ought to buy Greece and make it the federal capital"

Greece is a joke. It is also a mess. And it is about to screw up Europe. Not that Europe is at all in good shape either.

Anyway, the proposal comes from a quite coherent letter to Tuesday's Financial Times. As you can see from the headline above, the writer wants Greece to replace Belgium as the seat of Europe. But, then, what will happen to Belgium, whose only national assets are the lace industry, chocolate, and the bronze Mannekin Pis spraying his urine into a Brussels street. Without the European Union, Belgium is nothing but two nationalities fighting each other.

So Europe will not be the answer to Greece's problems. Except that it will probably have to bail Athens out of its massive debt problems, more massive than anywhere else on the continent. And more self-deluded. The finance minister believes the tax-errant rich will cure his case of dehydration. But the tax errant rich just don't do those things unless they are threatened with jail, where the ship owners have not yet been.

Do you want to find out more substantial info on Greece? Read an article, "Greeks Bearing Economic Burdens," also in the FT.