“But even as Europe’s leaders unleashed their fury at the Greeks—and at the bankers who aided and abetted them—it turns out there is hardly any government that isn’t guilty of these kinds of tricks, according to OECD and EU officials,” reported the magazine.

Italy has a long history of doing the same; Belgium and Portugal have also sold future tax receipts, and even the mighty economic engine of Europe—Germany—has been accused of trying to shift “up to $60 billion of spending on public health care and jobless benefits into a special-purpose vehicle so it wouldn’t show up in the 2010 deficit.”

And America, remember, owes billions to the Chinese and has racked up a trillion dollar deficit—and counting.

It seems to be the way of governments, and the politicians who run them, to appease the people most of the time (who demand appeasement, be it fair to say, and forever wail at politicians for not appeasing them enough), and to put off the inevitable reckoning when the register comes up short at the end of the day (in terms most Greeks can understand). One commentator said Americans are spoiled and demand contradictory things: that government stay out of their lives and their pockets, but government bail them out with jobs and tax cuts and increased services when they’re out of a job and out of benefits and out of health insurance to protect them.

But, of course, it’s not just the American electorate that’s spoiled: human nature is a very contradictory thing and there is no government, no matter how perfect, that can possibly meet the impossible standards that the voting public wants. Politicians, of course, are asking for it when they run for office and then get themselves into a pickle. Yes, they get a free ride of power and privilege for a while, but the ax will soon fall, because nobody can please all of the people all of the time, though being in politics—you try.

“Hiding public debt has been around for as long as politicians have spent money,” says Newsweek, and it cites a $100 billion debt that France has kept off its books and the trillions in obligations for so-called “boomer debt” such as public health care which is never factored into government balance sheets and could add up to nearly 500 percent of the GDP in some Western countries.

Which brings us back to Greece. We had a neighbor in Greece who used to rail at the government for everything in his vengeres with us in the cool of the evening with the scent of jasmine in the air and the smell of the Greek coffee that my grandmother brewed in her battered old briki and he would consume in one ferocious vacuum-clear suck—and then expect more. “Oi kyvernisis ftei,” he would declare about everything that went wrong in his day, from the mail not getting delivered on time, to his donkey going lame, to his own stomach upset. And then he would glance at his coffee cup to see if it was filled and my poor grandmother would have to spend most of his vengera just trying to keep up with him.

She never could. And neither can any government, it seems, to keep up with its public.

Dimitri C. Michalakis