[netcan]

All well and good. There are lots and lots of ideas for making states work better, be me effective, responsible and everything else.

That all has nothing to do with this. This is about what happens when governments fail financially. Financial commitments that exceed tax revenues and no way to balance them. European austerity measures can work (as they sort of are in Ireland) when the political situation is relatively stable and the underlying financials are not too severe. But, Greece is a case where it cannot work.

Printing money (aka monetary easing) is not just an alternative to what you suggest, it's what you do when the state's financials collapse.