America as Greece?

Ron Johnson, a Republican running for Feingold’s Senate seat in Wisconsin, says America is becoming Greece , collapsing in financial crisis.

True? There is this fact to add to the mix. Over at super economics blogger Megan McArdle’s web page , a commenter complained, in another context, that government tends to think of “ever-increasing spending” as “some sort of natural law we have no control over.”

To which another commenter, Rob Lyman, replied: “It’s not a natural law, but it is just as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. I mean, Oedipus didn’t have to sleep with his mother, he just got a ‘Strengthening Our Communities by Strengthening Our Families’ grant from HHS to do it.”

Alas, alas! How terrible to know , Tiresias moaned , when it does not help the knower .

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Letters

Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…

The Revival of Patristics

Stephen O. Presley

On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…

The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics

Itxu Díaz

Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…