How to Teach the Greeks to Pay Taxes

Any volunteers?

One’s heart goes out to the Greeks. The whole world is pouncing on them – for behaving the way they have always behaved. What have they done wrong?

It’s not hard to compose a bill of indictment – from full pensions to undertakers after retiring at the age of fifty (this is pure invention) – to having an enviable climate more conducive to philosophizing in the sun, drinking ouzo, than to manufacturing things the world needs.

All this is Platonic.

The Ottomans never taught them how to pay taxes during the half-millennium they had the opportunity to do so. But their heart was never in it. In the late nineteenth century, when they were moribund, they themselves farmed out tax-collecting to the French who were good at it.

Now the Chinese have entered the field. Are they the right teachers? Is tax-collecting a Chinese art?

One Response to How to Teach the Greeks to Pay Taxes

  1. Horace Krever

    But who is to say that the world doesn’t need ouzo?

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