A properly managed currency could allow for Greece's labor and investment market gridlock to suddenly resolve itself putting a large part of the unemployed back to work.

The type of austerity that the euro group wants leads to disinvestment. It is like forcing a person to sell his or her tools and equipment to make this year's debt payments. No longer being able to work productively anymore without tools, how is that person supposed to make next year's payments?

The ECB has prevented Greece and all economically disadvantaged regions of Europe from getting the investment they need to work and get out of their morass. At this point a considerable part of the debt is a direct result of perennial monetary strangulation and not caused by the indebted themselves.

Some people may be afraid that allowing sufficient funds for investment into Greece may result in the money being diverted into short term spending instead of into long term sustainable investment. To reuse the metaphor, the lender is afraid the borrower will not buy tools with the money and work but instead buy a vacation in Santorini. It is somewhat a valid concern but then if there is this much distrust from other members of the eurozone that people in Greece are not even given the means to work, there is zero reason to continue the relationship and Greece should default and break off.

The fact that unemployment is widespread in Europe, not just in Greece tells us that the main source of problems is the damaging monetary situation caused by the ECB, not greek laziness. Greece has already achieved a primary surplus, they went through a huge amount of pain to correct their finances. And they did it while the ECB was continuously throwing sand in their gears, keeping inflation too low and real interest rates above a rate that gets Europe to an acceptable level of employment. This disproportionately affects economically disadvantaged regions.

Monetary policy in Europe is run so that only the areas that have natural economic advantages can prosper while investment is sucked out of weaker regions and turned into idle excess fiat. If Greece, through gargantuan efforts managed to be so productive as to offset their natural disadvantage and the European economy started heating up, the ECB would tighten yet again and vacuum investment out of the next weakest region causing a similar crisis there.

Only when the ECB will have produced an acceptable level of unemployment in the eurozone will you really be able to start blaming individual countries for their economic woes. After the reforms in Greece, if the ECB did an half decent job, Greece might well have been able to pay the entirety of their debt without too much pain, and if they still didn't, then you would have had a case for corrective austerity there. But you cannot have government austerity at the same time as monetary over tightness (read private sector suffocation). That is just mathematical nonsense.

To make another darker metaphor, if there is so much distrust and resentment toward the Greeks that people think they should be made into slaves to pay for their debt, even then, it would make no sense to refuse to provide the tools and infrastructure to enable them to work. What good are non-working slaves? Of course, the relationship should break off well before we get to this extreme. Sometimes it seems like Germany doesn't mind moving towards this nonsensical non-working slaves scenario.

The only real solution will have to start with the ECB moving to a higher or better inflation target that doesn't choke their continent's economy and that allows weaker members to labor towards recovery.