But that’s not the point.

The point is not even, really, whether unsustainable Grecian economic policies are better than more sustainable German ones.

The real underlying problem is that the system that now plagues Greece—the system of pensions, government doles, and halls teeming with bureaucrats—is itself an untoward Protestant imposition. But for their adoption of Prussian statism, the Greeks could go on being Greek without any difficulty. It is not merely that German sternness suggests different solutions than Greek profligacy, but that that problem itself is a German import.

It is also true that the Greeks et al owe a lot of other people money because they borrowed it, and it is not wrong or merely bourgeois to say that a tendency to believe that you don’t have to pay what you owe is a moral failing.

And this remains true even though Americans are also guilty of the same thing, and even though those who borrowed may have been led into doing it by means of a moral hazard.

Whether the loans were given out of charity or self-interest on the part of the lender is not relevant to the moral duties of the borrower.

The Greeks rioted because someone had the gall to ask them to repay what they had borrowed, instead of demanding yet more loans which they did not intend to repay.

Prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude are part of our Catholic patrimony, and the need for personal responsibility they convey runs deeper, and is more to the point, than any late ideology which would associate the Catholic faith with living wantonly off the public dole.

Mary, Southern Europeans did not invent credit, and I’ve heard Americans know a thing or two about it. The moralistic complaint is that they do not invest or accumulate enough and spend too much. Schmitz/Dawson show another possible perspective: Perhaps the ‘responsible’ ethos is Pelagianism, phariseism, rich-young-man-ism and general disbelief in providence, i.e. practical atheism.