The country that is the cradle of democracy has decided to ask the people if the financial markets have the right to rule over them.

Predictably the response has been a mixture of fury and disbelief. 'You are asking the people what they think? We tell you what to think' is the implicit message.

The great absurdity of modern geo-economics is that the world of money, which is just a human construct, is being treated like a natural force that must be obeyed, much as we have to respect the law of gravity.

One might call it the cart-before-the-horse syndrome. Money is supposed to serve us, but increasingly we are becoming servants to those who run it.

Few are being asked to be more servile than the Greeks. When the IMF came in with what is amusingly referred to as its austerity 'plan', the Greek economy was expected to grow at over 2 per cent, unemployment was below 9 per cent and the debt was about 120 per cent of GDP.

By 2014, after the 'plan' had taken effect, the country's economy had shrunk by a quarter, unemployment was over 25 per cent, youth unemployment was over 50 per cent and the debt had risen to over 170 per cent of GDP.

The IMF's abject failure to provide a sound strategy was hardly a surprise. IMF prescriptions have a long history of failing, and countries that ignore them are often the ones that do surprisingly well.

One especially prominent example was the reaction of Malaysian prime Mahathir during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. He was roundly criticised for ignoring the IMF prescriptions, instead fixing the currency and imposing capital controls.

Malaysia performed best during the crisis and it was later hailed as a master stroke. It is almost a case of the best strategy is to ask the IMF what to do, then do the opposite. Continue reading

• David James is a business journalist with a PhD in English literature. He edits Personal Super Investor.

The idea that someone was a "homosexual" for life or had this feature as a permanent identity would have struck them as more than odd. In other words, "homosexuality", for which a word in Greek did not exist at the time (or in any other language until the late 19th century), was purely transitory. It appears that many of these mentoring relationships in ancient Greece were chaste and that the ones that were not rarely involved sodomy. Homosexual relationships between mature male adults were not accepted. This is hardly the idealized homosexual paradise that contemporary "gay" advocates harken back to in an attempt to legitimize behavior that would have scandalized the Greeks.

What is especially ironic is that ancient Greece's greatest contribution to Western civilization was philosophy, which discovered that the mind can know things, as distinct from just having opinions about them, that objective reality exists, and that there is some purpose implied in its construction.

The very idea of Nature and natural law arose as a product of this philosophy, whose first and perhaps greatest exponents, Socrates and Plato, were unambiguous in their condemnation of homosexual acts as unnatural. In the Laws, Plato's last book, the Athenian speaker says that, "I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust." (Laws636C; see also Symposium of Xenophon, 8:34, Plato's Symposium, 219B-D). Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet
• Image: CathNews USA