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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I'd draw a distinction between debts incurred by a democratically elected government and otherwise.

I also think reparations are fundamentally different than loans. Comparing war reparations to loans is blurring the lines to make a political point.

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Think of it like this: when a country needs to 'borrow', they're selling bonds. An investment vehicle. If you buy bad bonds as a typical investor, no one bails you out - you lose your investment. That's how it should have gone for Greece. Their 'investors' should have lost during the crisis, like everyone else, instead the Euro governments bailed them out and created this prolonged mess...

That ingores the impact on the poor and pensioners of Greece. Just let them starve?

They wouldn't starve. Many countries have survived a default without people starving. Presumably, in the case of a Greek default, the government would be using the money to pay pensioners and give welfare instead of paying bond-holders...

Sorry, I misread what you were saying. I agree.

The bond holders with Greek government bonds did lose, their debt was restructured with a 50% haircut. It was the bank loans that were bailed out.

The Nazi government was more or less democratically elected, at least as much as Greece's government.

Germany had loans forgiven less than one decade after they were systematically killing tens of thousands of people per day in gas chambers, human ovens, or worse and barely twelve years after they had firebombed London and other cities, resulting in 40,000 dead civilians.

This is beyond ridiculous and in fact insulting to recent Greek governments. Come on, do you really think the media landscape and average knowledge of voters in 1933 in Germany was anywhere comparable to elections in Greece from 1990 onwards? Germany only became democratic after the 1st world war, had totally unstable governments, a head of state who openly did not believe in democracy (Hindenburg), the great depression hit and SA troops were beating people up in the streets.

I wonder why Germany never suffered any consequences for what they did in WW2.

Oh, wait. They did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference

Okay, but why are you doing backflips to avoid placing any blame on reckless creditors? If idiotic European governments elected to bail out the private, sub-prime lenders whose bets in Greece had gone bad (due, in large part, to the credit bubble inflated by the same lenders) why should the Greek people pay for a shitty decision made by French and German politicians?

> I'd draw a distinction between debts incurred by a democratically elected government and otherwise.

I think that's a good point in principle, but remember that the Greece's poor suffer the most. Drive through a poor neighorhood in town and consider how much influence the residents have over national economic policy.

No one's questioning that Greece's poor will be hit the hardest. But neither does it help them to blur the meanings of reparations and debt for the sake of creating a scape-goat.

What makes you think they will be helped by loans if they are made to Greece? Won't those funds just go to a slightly different permutation of politically connected folks? Moreover, you point to the poor in Greece. Why should they be privileged over the slightly poorer in, say, Bulgaria, who will hear a fractional brunt of a Greek bailout?

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