From Bloomberg, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip P. Ella]
Panagiotis Karkatsoulis, who works in the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform and e-Governance and teaches at the National School of Public Administration, has some well founded theories about where Greece went wrong. One long-standing habit of government that helped the country become almost unmanageable, according to Karkatsoulis, is its disdain for parliament: new rules and regulations in Greece have long been created by ministerial order and presidential decree rather than through parliamentary process.
About 70 percent of regulations were approved directly by ministers between 1975 and 2005, and just 2 percent were the result of parliamentary actions, Karkatsoulis says in this OECD presentation. Regions, prefectures and the president account for the remaining rule changes. More than 30 years of scant coordination has resulted in a morass of contradictory rules and a lack of legal clarity.
A profile of Karkatsoulis in Le Monde explains how the first government of George Papandreou in 2009 had 15 ministers, 9 vice-ministers and 21 adjunct ministers, along with 78 general or special secretaries, 1,200 counselors, 149 directorate generals and 886 directorates — this for a population of just over 11 million, or the same number of people as those living in Cuba. The resulting mesh of interdependencies for decision making has made governing Greece increasingly difficult.
The chart above from Mr. Karkatsoulis has been labeled as the ‘Macaroni’ chart.
This serves as a great example of how the Gordian Knot of arbitrary rules and regulations, which has been emblematic of a political economy built on an unsustainable parasitical relationship, ultimately ends up in a crisis.
Printing money via devaluation, as prescribed by the mainstream, will not solve the issue of excessive regulations, red tape and bureaucratic barnacles, as well as property rights, free markets and the rule of law.
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