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So if a state cannot only spend more than it takes in, year after year, but more than it can ever hope to fund out of its own resources — more, even, than others would willingly lend it — then there really are no limits. Should Greece exit from the euro, at least while Syriza remains in power, I suppose we will see the furthest extension of this, in which it will cover any shortfall simply by printing the money.

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The Greek approach has repeatedly been contrasted in media accounts with that of Germany, its largest lender and one of Europe’s most prosperous states — though not, as you might imagine, to Germany’s favour. Germany’s insistence that Greece mend its ways, its unwillingness to make new loans, still less forgive the old, without some assurance that Greece will be any more likely to repay the former than it has the latter, is presented as a kind of bizarre fetish, an obtuse cult-worship of balanced budgets.

From which we must conclude that it is Greece, impoverished and indebted as it is, that has pursued the right economic policy and Germany, and others like it, that have it wrong.

The notion that Greece has been brought to its present humiliation, not by its own excesses but by the stupidity and cruelty of its lenders, is by now near-universal. It reflects a peculiarly simplistic view of the economy as merely the sum of its parts — consumption, investment, government spending, the trade balance — with no interplay between them: if government spending goes up, it must add to the gross domestic product; if it goes down, it must subtract. This reductionist focus on aggregates — how much is spent, not how well it is spent — would be misleading enough in itself, but the hydraulic imagery with which it is usually expressed leaves out a rather important element: for governments to “inject” money “into” the economy, they must, one way or the other, siphon it out of it.