Over the past year, we have heard a real lot about the crisis in Greece. We have been inundated with loads of details about what caused the crisis there and maybe we might have thought it was all about deficit figures and debt figures.

So, after comparing their figures with ours we must have heaved a sigh of relief and reassured ourselves that we are too far from the Greek situation for us to catch the Greek disease.

Seen like that, it would indeed seem we are safe. But we, in particular, are not that far from Greece. Not even geographically, nor even geologically. Nor is our cause for concern solely due to what could happen (a threat that now seems to have receded) if the Greek economy went down the spout and took the euro with it. That seems covered by the recent pan-eurozone agreements and loan structures in which even small Malta is taking its share.

What led to the Greek crisis is indeed a matter of successive governments giving in to street pressures and fudging statistics, being lax about enforcement and allowing the national figures to go out of kilter, being cavalier about the Maastricht criteria etc.

But it is also about a whole gamut of exceedencies and stagnations which were allowed to persist and which have festered.

Difficult as it is to get the deficit and debt figures under control, it will be even more difficult to get structural changes effected. That is why over the coming months, as the austerity measures kick in, there will be even more trouble on the streets,

Listen to a description of Greece last week: “Striking truck drivers paralysed the country by cutting off fuel and food supplies. Air traffic controllers were working to rule. Picketing seamen have scared off cruise liners. Public sector unions staged their sixth general strike of the year. And all this while the country faced steep wage and pension cuts amid looming job losses.”

By taking on the truck drivers, the Greek government was sending a signal to the entire nation that it intends to break open the vested interests of the old social order, the roughly 70 established closed shops and cartels not just of truck drivers and seamen but also of lawyers, doctors, civil engineers and pharmacists, all of whom have been distorting the market, inflating fees and mark-ups and enjoying protection from competition.

In particular:

Truck drivers: No new licences have been issued since 1996, so licences change hands for about €200,000

Lawyers can work only in the district in which they are licensed, limiting competition from outside a given region.

Doctors hold a monopoly on owning and operating private clinics that carry out medical tests.

Civil engineers receive a fixed percentage of the capital cost of new buildings on which they work.

Pharmacists are guaranteed a 35 per cent profit margin on healthcare products.

For this is the rub, isn’t it? Every country has its own system, including its own system of monopolies, closed shops and cartels. In Greece, for long years, they were not tackled by successive governments, rather they were winked at. Other governments may have tackled some of similar issues, but others persist in most countries. There is no country I can think of which has absolutely no monopoly, cartels or closed shops.

On a slightly wider view, governments in most countries, led by an economic theory that spoke of light hands on the tiller rather than an intrusive government of the bad old centralised economy of the bad old days, allowed such cartels etc. to be born and to spread and dig their claws deep inside the body of the economy.

The end result, in Greece as in any other country, is that whenever such systems are allowed to spread, ultimately it is the citizen, the consumer, the individual who gets a raw deal.

Now I don’t know whether we too have our cartels, closed shops and monopolies. Some have been pulled down. Others may persist. As far as I know there has been no systematic study of the economy that uncovered the existence of such anti-economic systems in Malta. Readers may fill in the gap with their own perceptions.

But to widen the issue, all I can see around me is people not getting real value for their money after all the taxes they pay, people not getting real service, nor real protection. Whether that is because of the existence of some cartel is rather a moot point. Anyway, for such systems to exist there must somehow be a sort of silent acquiescence between the perpetrators and those who should be defending the citizen from such depredations.

To give but some examples: last Sunday the chairman of Mepa said in an interview the solution is to increase the fines for people who break the planning laws. To my way of seeing things, this is a desktop solution because the one that is really needed down at ground level is more real, effective enforcement. Many people including myself can tell many stories of ineffective, wishy-washy enforcement that at the end leaves entire areas in a state of illegality. How these illegal dwellings get water and electricity is another issue. How Mepa’s enforcement lists date back years with no effective action being taken is a slap on the face of those who obey the laws.

I will try to be careful around this issue: there are many people who are feeling they have been done badly in the financial services sector and especially in investment advice. Some years ago we had the Argentina default and many people lost real sums of money. We do not seem to have learned anything: people who should know better push any sort of advice (credit rating agencies are to blame globally: how come even as recent as a week before the Greek collapse they were still giving a AAA rating to Greek sovereign bonds?). Let me, conveniently, speak about the Argentina debacle: many people were investing hoarded money they had hid from the government. They were attracted by the high, 12 per cent, rate of interest. When everything collapsed they could not sue for they had never declared the money they invested.

There are indeed issues regarding competition, as one would expect in such a small country. At the same time, other areas have been completely, perhaps excessively, opened up to competition. Retailing is one such area: there is intense competition (and more is coming in, and not just in vans from Catania) and as a result people can shop around and get real bargains or affordable prices.

Not so in other areas. Again, readers may factor in their own experiences here – in some cases instead of competition, which one expects to find, people find real cartels acting against them, keeping prices high, squeezing out those who dare come out with a more affordable price.

Perhaps the government is the most to blame, for despite all protestations to the contrary, it is still a very significant factor in the local economy. The government says it has moved out of many sectors, but it does not say in how many sectors it is still very much and solidly planted.

The case that springs to mind is water and electricity provision where there is a huge monopoly in place, it is inefficient, there is next to no oversight on how prices are established and of course there is no competition at all. And now, the cherry on the cake as the two corporations have come together to create a billing system that adds together the inefficiency of both corporations and seems to multiply it many times over.

Unfortunately, only one paper has seen fit to send its reporter to stand in queue among the grumbling citizens waiting to put their case at Luqa. Now that Parliament has risen for summer, that should be an obligatory beat for newsrooms.

The complaints and letters to the papers tell the rest of the story – how people are charged €400 just to register the death of the head of the family, how many people then do not bother (and as a result lose the cheques the government has sent to families; how people with unused houses keep getting higher and higher bills they have no way of paying, and nor do they seem able to get the issue solved and settled.

If it’s any consolation (it isn’t) people keep getting a raw deal not just from government corporations but also from the private sector. Telecom and television operators come to mind here, as well as companies with next to no after-sales service.

And we have not spoken about the kind of service people get from government departments, the police, and so on.

In short, maybe all this does not constitute cartels, monopolies and closed shops on the Greek model but the end result is just the same – people not getting their money’s worth for all the taxes they pay. The end result is sapping all the effort, the hard work that people put in their own private lives, leading so many to just give up trying, leading so many to find rest and peace from social assistance instead of being encouraged to branch out and start a new venture.

The road to the Greek perdition is also paved by such stones.

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