End of Greek Aid Package as Country Faces Demographic Crisis
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
That's Greece in a nutshell right there. Skills were never relevant, and still aren't. It's all about who you know, and what political leverage you have. The results are there for all to see. I left Greece 6 years ago, and unfortunately whenever I visit, nothing seems to change.
Even supposedly enlightened Anglo-saxon economies have their old boys networks (especially board rooms), and everywhere they exhort the idea that networking is the way to get ahead (over say, education and objective blind interview procedures).
Uhljeb in Croatian.
Most large corporations are like that and so are Western governments.
'Getting in the door' at an entry-level job in government or even in business ... there are rules here, and tech tends to be more 'skills based' as are startups. But after that you'd be surprised how many people have the jobs just because they think they deserve them.
Clearly, an illiterate person is not going to be the Director of whatever, but someone who is intelligent, a good communicator and politically suave can go very far.
It's probably much worse in Greece, and every Greek person I know has left.
The EU may be about as good for Greece as the USA is to West Viginia - sure, you may be protected and have a low-baseline standard of living, but you're going to get kind of wiped out and never recover because nobody will stay, and nobody will invest.
In these Federations, the winners are the established economic powers. Smaller that are really, really responsible (i.e. Montana, Dakotas, or Sweden and Switzerland in EU) and hold their own. Otherwise the power slips away.
Greece and Portugal are becoming retirement homes the size of nations.
It's not black and white, for sure. I lived in Greece until my 27, I had the unfortunate idea to even invest and open a business in Greece, and then I left and worked in Germany and UK for the next 6 years as a software engineer. Yes, the difference is immense. Cannot emphasize it enough. I'd never go back if things remain as they are.
You're welcome to go live and work in Greece, then tell me if "clientelism" is the same everywhere.
> Clearly, an illiterate person is not going to be the Director of whatever, but someone who is intelligent, a good communicator and politically suave can go very far.
You're in for a big surprise...
Not that it doesn't happen in The Hague in the big banks, it does, especially higher up. But once you get lower than director, there is very little of it left. There is essentially no unemployment among the educated Dutch population, and they would never do the clientism thing ... at least not for an entry level job. Where you really find it is when big companies outsource local functions, like cleaning the office, or buying large amounts of furnishings. When you look at the personal relationships between those businesses, that's where you go "wait a second ... I've seen that name before".
With 30% unemployment, of course you try to help your family with a job, especially if that's the only way to survive. And that pushes out everyone else at that level of unemployment, of course.
With 4% unemployment. How low is that ? Well, there are ~10% people with an iq < 80, in any population, which is the level where you have to repeat instructions every 2h at least. Not once, not 10x, not 1000x, but every last 2h. Nor are these people capable of correctly carrying out simple written instructions, so you cannot hang them on the wall and expect anything but disaster. (75 is considered handicapped to the point that they cannot be left alone, ever).
In the Netherlands, half of such people are employed in private businesses. That's how low the unemployment rate is there at the moment.
So no, with that sort of competition for workers, there is very little clientism at the lower levels of companies.
But this has very little to do with cultural differences or attitude differences between the Netherlands and Greece. I'm sure they mattered for the first 2 months of the problem, those differences ... perhaps ... but not for very long. Under the same pressures, the Dutch would surely do the same as the Greek.
It's similar with Portugal, or anywhere else. That said, they had a much more recent Empire. Nothing substantial changes in 2 years or even 20, apart from a collapse in government, war, invasion ... or a major treaty with the rest of the EU, which I believe will do to them what NAFTA does to Canada: make Portugal permanently less well off than the rest of Europe, but have some kind of 'bottom baseline' standard of living.
We can re-open discussion in a decade to see if there is real change.
I did take a quick look into it though and it does look positive at least to some [1]
Actually, that is not true at all.
Portugal's recession might have ended back in 2014 but since then economic growth has been anemic and below the eurozone average, and this in spite of the recent influx of cash due to the natinal golden visa program and a sudden tourism boom. Unemployment is still extremely high in spite of the national statistics presenting an unbelievable low rate close to structural unemployment levels, while real unemployment estinates point to a level above 20% for the whole active population and accompanied with an over 50% youth unemployment rate. This is obviously reflected on the nation's wages, which have stagnated for the past 8 years at pre-bailout levels.
Oh, and about 1% of the population has been emigrating from Portugal on average per year since the economic collapse in 2011.
The only way Portugal is booming is if you count implosion as a boom of sorts.
As antouank explained. The difference is simply immense.
> Clearly, an illiterate person is not going to be the Director of whatever, but someone who is intelligent, a good communicator and politically suave can go very far.
This is where you get wrong. There are illiterate persons (as can't even write correctly or formulate sentences) holding high executives positions.
It is really a different world in the west. Yes, patronage is still here. But if you have skills, you still get a "shot". Sometimes two. You are granted no shots on these patronage-third-world-crap-holes.
When the ECB sent people to Athens to oversee the reforms they were not welcomed.
Same as you, I left about 6 years ago, but I think things are gradually changing (albeit slowly). The state's "tit" has dried out and clientelism is not as rampant anymore, businesses that used to rely on state funded projects (and took advantage of connections) are much fewer, run of the mill shops that offer no quality of service are quickly phased-out by competition.
There's still lots of tax-evasion, undeclared employment, etc. and lots of dodgy businesses staying afloat (especially in tourism) but I still see a glimpse of change in the horizon.
The three big problems I see that make actual change hard are (a) too many young educated people have fled the country (b) the political environment is still fluid and (c) there are still many obstacles that make starting a business there unattractive. If (b) and (c) are solved, (a) will solve itself and people will come back to start again
I'm from Romania, a poorer member of the EU that faces an even greater demographic crisis. You don't hear a peep about us in the news, except for recently, when the corrupt government started beating up protestors who were asking for stronger anti-corruption measures.
Anyway, from a slightly less salty perspective: it's a real shame what happened in Greece. I think Greece and Argentina may be the only developed countries which lost the status. Hopefully Greece bounces back but I think they'd need a big mentality change (their is awfully close to ours from what I've seen).
:(
Anyway, I'll cut it out, since this whole topic and thread aren't really HN material.
Romania:
* country formed 150 years ago (with precursor states dating back 800 years)
* 20 million people
* EU, NATO member
vs
FYROM/Macedonia:
* country formed 20 years ago
* 2 million people
* neither of those things
This strikes me as comparing apples to oranges :)
They turned themselves into a different country by borrowing Euros at German market interest rates while their previous interest rates for borrowing were at 16% before they joined the Eurozone. They lived way above their means for more than 10 years, what did they expect for a country that has virtually no industry?
1. Greece did not live above it means. It did not have more debts than other countries in the EU zone, countries that did not crash 2. Greece would have been fine it it had not been forced to destroy its economy with an austerity program
> They lived way above their means
You probably are german, because that is a BILD/CDU slogan. It's very hard to qualify what that is supposed to mean. A country can not "live above their means". It can have too much debts. That wasn't the case here.
"Living about their means" is what happens when their debt levels grow exponentially:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7KXHAuORi4w/TbS897oFTGI/AAAAAAAAA...
in what world do you think this is sustainable? The US can get away with huge amount of debts because they have the dollar, which the most trusted international currency for virtually every commodity trade. Other countries don't have that luxury.
On the other hand, do you know who didn't know nothing about it? Greek people, particularly young people who are now in their 20s and 30s, and can't find a job to live as proper human beings (>30% youth unemployment). Yet, you look like you enjoy this. I, just, wish you will never face something like that in your future.
They can blame their parents and grandparents who voted for stupid and corrupt politicians. You don't need to look very far.
Its not the size of the debt or the deficit that matters but what its spent on.
Take a look at pre-2009 retirement ages, number of employees in the public sector and the wages in the public sector.
The modern standard is IPSAS or equivalents which consider what matters - the market value of the debt.
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/06/09/2161851/what-if-greec...
Take a look at this graph (and read the article it comes from): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#/...
1. After Greece entered Eurozone in 2001, their already large debt exploded. They had 4-14% yearly deficit - they clearly "lived way above their means".
2. In 2011 Greece themselves declared that they can no longer service their debt, e.g. they defaulted. In this sense they had "more debts than other countries in the EU zone" and they clearly would not "have been fine it it had not been forced to destroy its economy with an austerity program". If there was no bailout, they would default on their debts and their economy would totally collapse (think Venezuela style). This also goes against you claim that "[a county] can have too much debts. That wasn't the case here."
3. Greece government was until 2011 reporting fraudulent financial statistics in order to hide true extent of debt, also employing the help of international banks. Some actions were clearly fraudulent (cross currency swap at fictitious rates).
4. Greece asked other (mainly EU) countries to help her, the result was a massive reprogram of their debts (basically they got low interest rates and reprogrammed debts to 30-50 years, something you do not get at financial markets).
5. Greece negotiated a 50% "haircut" on debt owed to private banks in 2011, which amounted to a €100bn debt relief. Most affected were EU banks (Deutsche bank, BNP Paribas, etc..). So there were private entities that actually lost money on Greece. This pretty much dispels the claim that they were a victim of neoliberalists and/or capitalists.
6. Also, it's a totally false premise that a country can not "live above their means".
The leftist agenda has been to portray Greece as a victim of capitalism and/or neoliberalism. This was mostly dispelled by facts, and I rarely see this kind of propaganda in 2018.
The reality is that Greece put themselves in this situation and international community (especially EU) stepped way out of their way to help them, except offering them a massive write-off, which if happened, would be IMO a grave mistake.
It was both capitalist governments that created the crisis and capitalist governments that tried to remedy it (no government has moved away from a market economy and privatizations since the late 80ies, including SYRIZA). We Greeks are 100% absolutely right to blame capitalism and/or neoliberalism. It was a capitalist/neoliberal system that created the crisis and a capitalist/neoliberal idea (austerity) that utterly failed to remedy it (it has been almost 20 years since the crisis and there is not an end in sight).
You don't seem to realize there is such thing as "personal responsibility". Nobody forced the Greeks to borrow way more money than they could ever hope to repay. The Greek government created its own problem and hoped to get away with it. There's no world where you can make it the fault of someone else.
I never said that. The Greeks voted for such a system, I never said they didn't. But you can't say that this "leftist agenda" as you call it is wrong. It is the system that we had/have (and voted for, sure) that created and failed to solve the problem. Any leftists with this agenda are not wrong.
No one in Greece is trying to shift the blame (except for some fringe conspiracy theorists from the extreme right). That Greeks are looking for someone to blame is a popular EU myth.
I don't understand why people insult the Greek so much in this thread. Yes, the Greek state wasn't very correct, but you can make many arguments, say for example that it behaves MUCH better than the Italian state. But ... Germany can't punish Italy the same way, that would have caused a crash.
Greece is a small player in the EU that got into trouble. Almost all small players got into trouble in the same period. Many big players got into trouble too (Italy and even France both had the same issue). Greece got destroyed, made an example of, because it was the first small player to face an acute cash problem (technically Italy was actually the first, but Italy can't be made an example of safely), the rest was saved ... Let's please just stop pretending there's anything just about this situation.
Also: Greece (nor the other small players) will not recover:
https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-bond-yield
Greece's economy is "growing" at 1.7%. Interest on it's 10Y debt (that it can't pay now) is 4.3% ... It's total debt level is pretty much 185%. That means that, on average, for Greece to save itself, taxes need to rise by 1.85 * (4.3% - 1.7%), or about 5% per year.
5% per year tax rise. With an economy, in a huge global boom, growing at 1.7%.
So I'll just add to that : may God have mercy if there is even the mildest of recessions.
And the thing the whole of the EU is ignoring that the basic problems of Greece are all EU wide. Of course, they still have more of a runway, but total inability to pay for social security and pensions is not exactly a problem of Greece alone ... And the demographic disaster playing out in Europe is absurdly bad.
And despite the rhetoric coming out of Hungary, Europe as a whole already has net-negative immigration. All of Eastern Europe, not just Greece, is losing population at an absurd rate. Moldova went from 4 million people to ~2.6 registered people (there are reasons to suspect the real number is even lower than that). But despite all the complaining, immigration into Europe is drying up and will flip into net-emigration in a few years, unless something drastic changes. For "natives" there are absurd levels of emigration even in the richest of West-European countries. The Netherlands has been losing 1.2% per year of it's native Dutch for >10 years now, with the numbers slowly rising, currently just shy of 2% per year. When immigration dries up, which isn't too far away, that will be the net population growth in Europe. And there are 2 economic relationships that we can prove have held for thousands of years. Here's one: less people, less economy.
Countrysides emptying out of people is no longer a problem faced by inner Spain exclusively, it's clearly visible in Wales, in Westphalen, in the Ardens, in Friesland ... it's everywhere and while it can't yet be described as catastrophic there (in Spain, it is catastrophic), it's rapidly getting worse and I simply don't see a realistic option of living there and neither does anyone I know. That's anecdotal, I know, and I sure hope that means it's wrong. But I fear it's not.
The future is not bright for Europe. All of Europe will be Greek in something like 10-15 years.
I'm laughing at the irony of asking French official for administrative reforms. I mean each time in France the government tries an administrative reform we're either getting strikes and protests devolving in the usual riots or a reform that's either useless or make things worse. No reforms has succeeded to bring any positive change here, so it's pretty stupid to ask the French on how to reform, it's like asking a mole what colours look like.
Here is a personal anecdote. Before finishing university, I got a job offer by a very prestigious international company. I accepted, and decided to register myself as a freelancer so that I pay my respective taxes.
But... they would not let me do that. The person at the freelancer (TEVE) office, explained to me, that since I did not finish my university I was not allowed to perform that work, remotely, for a foreign company. Doing so, would mean that I am stealing job opportunities from people like his son (yup), who finished a similar school and now are unemployed.
I went again, and again, and I was shooed away with a similar excuses. Even though according to government websites my case was legit, and there was a special clause for people working for foreign companies. But apparently something written online at a .gov website doesn't account to anything - the people at the kiosks know better. Finally, months later, I decided to hire an accountant.
It so just happened that they knew her personally. I got my license less than a week later. After 4 months of stress, being told to my face I am breaking the law and I am stealing their sons jobs, I finally had my own freelancer company registered to my name. I joked that I should register as a heart surgeon instead, it seemed that with knowing the right people it was definitely possible.
....
When I was leaving the country to come to the states, I went to the same office to de-register. Apparently the phone lines where down, but the person there wrote down my name and swore they would de-register me. Three and a half months later, and while I already had moved to the states, a letter that fined me for not paying taxes and for not paying my company fees for the last 3 months, was delivered to my parents house. Apparently I was still registered as a company owner. Oops. My dad for some reason paid that fine and didn't tell me until months later, to not "stress me".
Fucking hell Greece. I could go on and on....
So when the gears go out of sync, the real world just finds ways to pretend to match the requirements - keeping the change drivers happy- while going on with life as close to normal as possible.
I guess Greece will find an equilibrium at a lower income per capita.
This hypocrisy makes me angry. Those governments were not forced on poor Greek people by bad Jews or lizards from the space. Greek voters had a choice and they repeatedly refused a wide range of responsible trustworthy politicians that were telling the uncomfortable truth and repeatedly elected whoever would promise them the biggest free lunch.
Of course, such hypocrisy is not limited to Greece, it is rather ubiquitous in modern democracies.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. " - HL Mencken.
Presumably Greece is in the getting "it good and hard" phase.
One of the greatest things the tech industry could do to decrease the economic inequality due to location would be to embrace remote work. Imagine what even having 10 developers living in the village could do for its economy.
One area that this would for sure revitalize would be Middle America. There are towns and counties that are in a deep economic recession, but have lots of cheap land and housing. Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, developers making 6 figures worry about whether they can afford a shack. Remote work would be a great boon for both workers and communities.
Could it potentially increase house prices and make them unaffordable for other people?
I guarantee that this village has no internet (other than 3/4G with a data cap).
If you go easy on the netflix/youtube/videoconferencing you're good.
Amazingly enough voice-only hangouts work pretty well at 32kbps.
One problem I do se though is what if such a developer wants to start a family? I'm not sure the availability of schools is too good in such areas.
India isn't exactly the most advanced country. Can't imagine why internet would be a problem in any affluent country anymore.
Regarding team collaboration, that's a different story and nobody has science to actually back up local teams vs remote teams, anyway.
They are beautiful for a trip, but not to live forever.
As a matter of fact, Greece is not attractive for a young person to live and work here.
The same could be said of the 10K small villages in America, or billion in the rest of the world.
In rural areas I think you have to start thinking more concretely about what "economy" means. With smaller populations things are much more micro than macro. One huge difference between rural and urban areas is that people are much more self sufficient, which makes economic numbers difficult to compare. For instance somebody with an income of $5,000 is generally going to be living a pretty miserable life in the city. On the other hand that can easily be more than enough to live extremely comfortably, even given comparable costs for what's purchased, in a rural area. And the reason is self sufficiency.
In a rural area that person likely already owns their home (80%+ home ownership in rural areas [1]) and activities come entertainment like hunting, fishing, and agriculture can provide immense amounts of resources. For instance just a single large whitetail deer can easily yield more than 100 pounds of edible meat. A single catfish and you're looking at 5-10 pounds of food, and so on. And the overhead costs there are completely negligible. The hunting license costs way more than everything else combined (once you already have your guns, rods, tackle, etc). Get into things like raising chickens and pigs, and you literally will never have to pay a dime for food again if you don't want.
$5,000 ends up meaning very different things, even if we ignore localized inflation. It's just you don't need to buy as much. Of course the corollary there is that notions like "economy" start to mean different things. If people don't need, or want, to buy as much - then economic growth is not a very good indicator of how well a place is doing. We take the view that people must not only constantly want more, but also buy more, earn more, and spend more. Growth, growth, growth! What of people that are, "Nah - thanks, but I'm okay with what I have"? So now we stick a guy earning 6 figures into the middle of all of this. I'm not really sure his effect is going to be, but it seems a bit simplistic to simply immediately equate more money with success.
[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
Are these widely available in Greece?
> Get into things like raising chickens and pigs, and you literally will never have to pay a dime for food again if you don't want.
Have you actually done this? I know people who have tiny farms as a hobby, and people who've retired from smallholding because it was uneconomic, and people who live in remote areas of Scotland .. and this resembles none of their lives. You might not have to pay for food (of a few types at certain times of the year), but you can't grow your own petrol or heating oil.
In any case, the point I was making is that not everybody wants or needs change. Some people for certain do, and I do actually agree with you (though I doubt you agree with yourself!) - going to the city and getting a job that pays way more than you'd earn in a rural area is an easy option. It's precisely what my parent did. But when looking at those that remain, you can't really compare economic systems since it's just so entirely different. And trying to 'better' rural America by implanting 6 figure remoters is going to have unclear implications.
There don't seem to be any easy solutions. Taxing the "winners" of economic growth to pay those who've lost out as a result sounds great but is impossible when they're not even in the same country.
A) There is a liberal party in Greece (just as much as there is a liberal party in Germany or France), the people just don't vote for it.
B) Liberalism and "laissez-faire thinking" are right wing, I can't see another way of thinking about that.
I am a recent (after-crisis) Greek immigrant and the assumptions made by the article are not true for me. It is not the wages (I am a professional in an area where there are a lot of good paying jobs, even in Greece) or the bad public sector (you learn to deal with that) that is keeping me away from Greece. It is the beyond-imagination terrible working conditions. Why would I leave my union-protected job in Germany to work twice as many hours (paid overtime is not a thing in Greece) with 0 job stability?
Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough are two obvious examples of this shift.
I don't know where these people have gone, maybe they went to the Democratic party, but collectivist ideas like welfare, free education, and single-payer healthcare aren't really "economic liberal" positions.
Likewise, one of the things which makes no sense to me about American politics are sentences like “liberals want to take away our guns” (sarcastic use of the name?) in response to limited control; in comparison, the UK is so anti-gun even the police don’t usually have any.
One of the other left-right splits we see in American news is on the topic of gay marriage (left-wing pro, right-wing anti). In the UK, gay marriage was legalised by the most right-wing of the major parties.
Most people refer to left/right in terms of it being a snapshot between two competing power centers which occur in democracies.
You could try going down the path of common narritives or meta-narritives of the left/right but you usually end up conceptually a lot higher than some like Socialized healthcare.
Hitler's germany had forms of socialized healthcare, does that make his government left-wing? He was a vegan who promoted environmentalism and animal rights, is hitler left wing?
It's kind of silly espicially when you look at a country like america's political history and how the democrats of 200 years ago seem more like the republicans of today.
> Likewise, one of the things which makes no sense to me about American politics are sentences like “liberals want to take away our guns” (sarcastic use of the name?) in response to limited control; in comparison, the UK is so anti-gun even the police don’t usually have any.
They don't want to end up like the UK where you need a license to watch tv, own a knife, stack rocks on the beach or put rubbish in your own van. They look at a city like london where crime has skyrocketed and pensioners are being arrested for defending themselves in their own homes and wonder what on earth is wrong with the brits.
Because despite what a lot of gun control people bang on about, getting rid of guns doesn't get rid of crimes. So who cares if less people are scared by a gunshots, if more people end up being violently attacked with knives? Makes absolutely no sense why anyone would be proud of reducing gun crime while ignoring the overall rise in violent crime.
> One of the other left-right splits we see in American news is on the topic of gay marriage (left-wing pro, right-wing anti). In the UK, gay marriage was legalised by the most right-wing of the major parties.
Gay marriage is another example of being a liberal policy and this kind of proves it. The modern western left will usually be ahead of the curve on this because they appeal heavily to minorities and gays are kind of setup to be the minority compared to hetrosexuals.
In the end though it's a violation of "human rights" and the freedom of the individual under liberalism and the only way you can counter that is to introduce non-liberal arguments such as traditionalism which could then argue that it's important to maintain the monogamous man/female relationship structure.
Maybe via liberalism you could claim that the rights of the child are harmed by the lack of a biological father/mother to raise them but i think that's a bit of a stretch in most cases.
Mainly what’s wrong is a lot of straw men in the news reports. TV licenses are a thing, but the rest of your examples are things I’ve never heard of or which misrepresent reality.
At best they are meta-narratives about the potential of man (EG: The left focusing the moldability of humanity, and the right mostly focused the immutability of humanity) and at worst serve as a snapshot of a particular countries two competing power centers.
To apply left/right understanding from one country to another in anything but a meta-narrative level will usually be a fools errand.
I've disabused myself of the schpiel that is the concept of liberty. It means nothing today because is has been abused as a concept.
I like to think of it now as simply more state intervention vs less state intervention.
It means a lot to those who can understand the liberalism is the underpinning ideology of the west post enlightenment. All you have to do is understand russia and china's rejections of liberalism to understand that liberalism isn't just some buzz word that pops up randomly on left/right politics.
> I've disabused myself of the schpiel that is the concept of liberty. It means nothing today because is has been abused as a concept.
I mean I can help you understand liberty. Consider before the enlightenment we operated under a system of formal monarchism, where everything within the borders of the state were owned by the king who got his authority from the divine.
A liberal government does the complete opposite, it's authority in leadership comes from the people which are assumed to be independent sovereign agents.
The contrast between these two systems and the role of liberty should be obvious to most. While a formalized system of monarchy doesn't really exist today, countries like China don't fit into the liberal government category either.
> I like to think of it now as simply more state intervention vs less state intervention.
As a reformed Anarcho-Capitalist, I find such a view to be incredibly limiting. What about if the government classified social media companies as utilities?
It would be a large increase in government intervention, but those like Alex Jones and his supporters would see that as a huge gain in liberty while some on the other side would say their liberty is being violated by the existence of people like him on these websites.
What you could say contrasts the two takes is that one is valuing freedom from, and the other freedom to.
I've got no cognitive dissonance on this issue and to me it doesn't matter which govt. takes over. The state is the state and you want less of it, never more.
> A liberal government does the complete opposite, it's authority in leadership comes from the people which are assumed to be independent sovereign agents.
Nope. No such thing as a liberal government. It is an oxymoron as far AFAIC. Government by its very definition requires that the people give up some freedoms and allow a degree(large or small) of state intervention. I want less of it. Only the judiciary & law enforcement - and even then, way less of it than we have now. Everything else people should do for themselves at absolute local levels or even better, at the familial level. The King was the original sin but I'll still take a monarchical govt. over a democratic govt. any day.
> As a reformed Anarcho-Capitalist
Why did you abandon ancap ideology? I get that it may not be plausible to attain it in its entirety, but I still view it as an ideal - something to aspire to and get as close as possible to. Ideals are good to have because they act as a north star of sorts.
What is the purpose of the judiciary and law enforcement if there is no legislative power? If there are no laws for the former to apply and the later to enforce—which is the case if there is no authority to create law—then they are pure waste.
The FUNDAMENTAL law should be immutable.
Write once and it never changes. No need for senators, mps and all those other useless positions that only consume from tax payers. If there are other nuances - because there'll be unforeseen occurrences and paradigm shifts like the advent of technology and its implications - then we rely on the judiciary and future similar occurrences rely on precedent to come to a judgement.
Also, arbitration can really solve some of these cases in free market environment where parties involved can agree on an arbitrator and their differences can be resolved.
Classical liberalism is considered right wing in Europe because most of the the classical liberals are also culturally conservative (against gay marriage ect...) and globalist. Although plenty of socialists are not that open either. It's just a weird mix and really depend on the situation of each countries.
The "far right" is also most of the time anti-liberal, and sometimes even adopt socialist stances on matters such as public administrations, anti-privatization, universal healthcare... while making immigration policies their first concern.
The politics of Europe and USA are very different at the national level. In Europe people change sides more often and there is room for a 3rd, 4th main party unlike the 2 party system in US.
If you don't, then you are pretty much by virtue of being illiberal or as you say anti-liberal then you will be considered either far-right or far-left.
If we wanted to create a truly liberal government we might have institutions where you were given the option of paying an education tax. And if you paid this tax, then you would be able to opt in to public education benefits which would be equitably distributed and could approach "free" depending on how many people paid in and the cost of the education institute any given student was pursuing. However, if you chose to opt out of this tax, you would be obligated to pay the costs and fees all on your own.
Instead proponents of "free" things tend to take the view that we should forcefully demand one segment of society pay for this "free" thing for the rest of society, and threaten them with violence or imprisonment if they refuse. There might be completely reasonable justifications for this, but I think it is a stretch to call this a liberal view once we consider what we actually mean by "free".
And if you opt out of the public education tax, every time you want to see a doctor or cross a bridge or use a computer program, you have to pay a contribution to the student loans of the people who wrote it?
(The history of public education in the west goes back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system and wasn't originally "redistributive" in the modern sense at all, more the tail end of feudalism)
I would say these two aspects definitially are hallmarks of liberalism.
Your next steps go down a libertarian or "right" path but if we were to add to our bucket of values some form of egalitarianism, which is quite common amongst those on the "left" or "progressive/socialist" you would end up going down a completely different path of conclusions.
In the end you would still both be operating under the pretense of liberalism, but i'm sure there would be disagreements about who is truly being liberal :P
(Again we have the problem of political labels)