We've fallen into the mindset that the state is a bottomless pit whose spending decisions are driven by ideology rather than arithmetic. So when a right of centre government chooses not to increase benefits or pump more money into health and education, it's not because the country can't afford it, it's because they're a bunch of rich white men who despise poor people and have swallowed some Austrian economist's snake oil.
In fact, a core responsibility of a government is to manage the nation's finances prudently. Successive Greek governments were derelict in that regard and the electorate is now paying the price.
And governments have to govern, which means addressing the issues rather than playing politics. Unwilling to stop surfing the wave of populism that swept them into power, Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and his Syriza Party acted more like an opposition than a government, an anti-strategy that culminated in them urging a "No" vote in the referendum that rejected more favourable terms than Greece has now been forced to accept. This was a shameful abrogation of leadership.
But then countries sometimes get the governments they deserve. The Greeks voted for a party that insisted the crisis was about abstractions like national dignity rather than cold, hard numbers, and the solution lay in defiant posturing as opposed to biting the bullet.
For all that, it's impossible not to sympathise with the Greeks. One of the most significant of the many socio-cultural shifts of recent times was in our attitude to debt. Out went old-fashioned notions of thrift and living within our means; in came the seductive proposition that we can have it all because the day of reckoning will never arrive.
That perception has been reinforced by the spectacle of corporations that have made huge profits being bailed out when greed and recklessness brought them undone. The corporate world has made an art form of privatising profit and socialising debt.
It's also impossible not to be troubled by Germany's conduct.
Greece was among the creditor nations that in 1953 agreed to cancel half of Germany's national debt. Moreover, the terms of Germany's repayments were extraordinarily generous compared to those now imposed on Greece.
It was resolved that Germany would repay debt only out of trade surpluses and the level of repayment was capped at 3 per cent of export earnings. (Greece has been handing over up to 30 per cent of its export earnings.)
This gave the creditors an incentive to buy German, thereby creating a springboard for an export-led recovery and the prosperity that continues to this day.
Twice last century Germany was a nation on its knees. The first time it was treated with vindictiveness, the second with enlightened self-interest. The outcomes were correspondingly different.
While the 1953 agreement helped West Germany to recover from the devastation of World War II, the terms imposed by the victors after World War I - summed up by the slogan "Squeeze the German lemon till the pips squeak" - led to economic collapse and hyperinflation. Social and economic breakdown made the educated middle class receptive to extremism, which came in the form of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Germany has just been presented with an opportunity to repay a portion of its historic debt. It chose not to do so.
