Bailouts -- Against all the rules

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http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1365941-against-all-rules

Anyone who takes the trouble these days to trawl through internet forums on the economic crisis will make an interesting discovery. It is not the incredible amounts being pumped into the market or made available through various bailout funds that are provoking the greatest resentment, but the people that the money is going to: the bankers, who have been on the gravy train a long time and are now sliding into bankruptcy; the states that have lived beyond their means and are no longer getting fresh funding; the homeowners who have taken on too much credit and can no longer pay off their debts.

Misbehaviour is being rewarded instead of punished. This is essentially what Western societies have been witnessing for the last five years. In order to understand the increasing irritation with continual bailouts one must take into account not just the financial dimension of this crisis, but also the moral one.

One can better understand this with a psychological concept – the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, which denotes the contradiction between the way we imagine the world and the way the world actually works. Something similar happens in the fable of the hungry fox and the grapes growing on a vine high up a wall.

Again and again the fox leaps, snapping at the grapes, but they remain out of reach. Accustomed to getting what he wants, the fox gradually becomes annoyed by the contradiction with his self-image. What the industrialised nations are going through is not much different.