After five years of this the Greek people have clearly had enough.
The terms of Greece's bailout by the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund require the Greek Government to run primary surpluses, that is, surpluses before interest costs. Those surpluses, which flow to its creditors, represent the effective cost of the public debt Greece has run up. And it is climbing.
Greece posted a small primary surplus in 2013, which is scheduled to increase to 1.5 per cent of its (shrunken) gross domestic product in 2014, 3 per cent this year and 4.5 per cent next year. It will have to be above 4 per cent of GDP over the full political cycle for "many years to come", says the IMF.
But that sort of fiscal austerity in an economy in outright depression is absurdly counterproductive.
It can only reflect some kind of collective memory loss about the 1930s.
The policymakers who have imposed it are right about the need for structural economic reform, and not just in Greece. But they treat austerity and reform as inseparably conjoined twins when they are not.
They would no doubt argue they have already cut Greece a lot of slack, in the form of concessions which have pushed out the average term of its debt and lowered the average interest rate on it.
Their concern is likely to be that substantial further concessions will trigger calls for similar relief from other struggling countries in the eurozone's periphery.
Contagion! Moral hazard!
In Spain, for example, a left-wing anti-austerity party called Podemos, very similar to Greece's Syriza, is already attracting 20 per cent support in opinion polls.
Prime Minster John Key, reporting on what he heard at the rarefied heights of the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos last week, said he detected no appetite for a substantial rewrite of the conditions Greece will face.
"The clear message was they expect Greece to meet the conditions of what has been negotiated," he said.
If so, the chances are slim that the new Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, will be able to achieve his twin goals of negotiating the forgiveness of a large portion of Greece's debt, which nominally stands at 177 per cent of GDP, while retaining the euro.
There is a material risk that after a period of fraught negotiation and brinkmanship the upshot is "Grexit" - Greece leaves the European monetary system and replaces the euro with a new drachma.
That would almost inevitably involve default on its debt, which is denominated in euros.
It would not be the first country to renege on its debt obligations.
That is never costless but it can come to be seen as the lesser evil if the alternative is no end in sight to stagnation and poverty.
A populist premier might invoke the most famous Greek, Alexander the Great: unable to untie the Gordian knot, he hacked through it with his sword instead.
So far the financial markets have been sanguine about all this.
Maybe they reckon the new Greek Government's bid to renegotiate its bailout terms will come to naught, or very little, and the status quo will prevail.
That seems naive.
Or they may be taking comfort in the fact that the great bulk of Greek public debt is held or underwritten by governments rather than private investors.
"The calculation in Berlin is that if Greece defaults it will cost the German taxpayer about 60 billion euros," says Oliver Hartwich, a German economist who heads the New Zealand Initiative think tank in Wellington.
"[Chancellor Angela] Merkel can't afford to risk that when they are currently celebrating their first balanced budget for more than 40 years.
"So what the Germans would be interested in, and what Tsipras might accept as a solution, is some fiddling on maturities."
But sooner or later there will have to be debt forgiveness, Hartwich says, and the guarantees provided by other eurozone governments will be triggered.
He also questions whether it makes any sense for Greece to retain the euro, a currency that is just too strong for them.
"The worst thing that could happen from a Brussels perspective if Greece leaves the euro is that it then does well with a new devalued currency. People flock to its beaches and buy its olive oil. Imagine you're Portuguese looking at that," Hartwich says.
A disorderly exit from the euro, perhaps involving runs on banks, would be a systemic threat to financial stability.
And an orderly one would set a precedent which would raise the risk that other weaker members of the euro area would soon be jammed in the doorway marked "Exit".
The convergence of bond yields at low levels, which has benefited the more heavily indebted European states, could be quickly unwound.
The problem is that if Berlin, Brussels and Frankfurt take an intransigent line with Greece for fear of the precedent otherwise, what would that signal about the broader European Project of ever greater integration?
If it cannot recognise and correct mistakes - which Greece's joining the euro clearly was - then it is in a lot of trouble.
Membership of the club cannot be both irreversible and intolerable.
Greece's pain
• Unemployment: 26 per cent
• Fall in GDP: 26 per cent
• Govt debt: 177 per cent of GDP
• Pensions, 2010-13: down 25 per cent
• Private sector wages down:15 per cent-plus
