The alliances and the forces that defend the status quo in Greece are exceptionally strong. This observation, which is backed up by numerous anecdotal evidence from everyday life in Greece and, in the end, by the inability to promote effectively reforms, is the starting point of any analysis of the Greek realities today. In Greece there are numerous groups that act like the Vikings, in the sense that they grab anything they can while roaming freely through various aspects of social and economic activity. At the same time the existence of pockets of rent is widespread throughout the economy as a result of government regulations that aim specifically to create such pockets of rent by the obstruction of free competition, but also by the effective reduction of transparency and accountability in the management of public money in a way that allows the proliferation of pork-barreling.
These pools of rent are claimed by the many small, but well placed and organized, groups that succeed to earn significant rents, and therefore have a strong motive to maintain the status quo and oppose any reforms that will lead to the removal of these pools of rent. These groups draw a significant advantage from their small size, as they do not contain free riders that could undermine their agenda or fail to contribute actively to their interests. These groups exhaust most of their available time and power in defending a comfortable income that does not require them to provide work that is commensurate in quality and effort to this income or, in some extreme cases, that requires providing any work at all.
These groups promote legislation that will favor them, and seek new opportunities that could increase their rents. In this effort, they rationally invest time and money to influence policy makers and the administration that will pass legislation to make their rents “legal” (in the sense that the law will dictate the rents’ creation, levy them on unfortunate subjects – usually individuals who work for the private sector and entrepreneurs – and then distribute these rents with “socially objective criteria” to the established beneficiaries, that is themselves).
Unlike lobbyists, these groups do not enjoy a fixed and clear position in the system. However they usually consist of formations and alliances of smaller groups that occasionally merge unofficially and ad-hoc, whenever their interests are aligned in their search for new rents and/or their defense of existing rents. It is this peculiar attribute that allows them to enjoy, on the one hand, the benefits of small size and the absence of free riders, while on the other hand, have the clout that larger constellations of such groups can muster whenever any reforms must be resisted.
These groups act within the society with a it and run” strategy, exactly like the first Vikings, whenever they spot a pool of rent, such as an uncompetitive market for example. They also form immediately loose alliances with other groups whenever any pool of rent is threatened by a reform, as they realize that the groups whose rent they defend today will also rush to support them as soon as their pool of rent is threatened by another reform-minded politician or a European Union legislation/directive. In this process, these groups fully take advantage of both the lack of checks in the system that would allow the interested general public to object to such a raid and the meticulously established lack of transparency.
The absolute lack of separation of the executive and legislative branch in Greek politics is only one attribute that has been introduced in order to remove any checks and balances from the system. Further, the fact that not all court decisions are published and thus offered to the public’s scrutiny, together with the fact that the minutes of the committees of the parliament are also not published, are only basic examples of how the lack of transparency has been effectively and meticulously established in Greece. The lack of transparency is crucial to support the argument that the legislative initiatives that so blatantly favor specific groups are in place to protect the interests of the general public, which would, supposedly, suffer greatly in the case of a “neoliberal” onslaught on their basic subsistence.
Transparency would reveal the sums that these groups collect without any effort or professional merit and how these sums burden the general public in order to provide an effortless and comfortable living to the members of the fortunate interest groups. The acquisition of these rents takes any convenient form. It can be legal as long as legislation, which is passed effectively unchecked, creates a legal rent or shuns competition in a market and allocates privileged access to this market to the beneficiary interest group. And it can be illegal, in which case it often also takes the form of corruption.
But it should be noted that thanks to the, again, meticulous undermining of the rule of law, the interest groups deem that illegal rents are broadly as attractive as the legal rents. In these cases of illegal activity the rent is obtained through suffocating blackmailing of the lawmakers and the executive, and blunt horse-trading with the administration, in the sense of Tullock (2005): it is taken as a given that nobody will ever report the breaking of the law and in the rare case that this happens no punishment or remedy will be enforced in any effective way.
