My understanding is that Greece's creditors have been asking for reforms all along, but nothing much has happened. For example, Greece's average retirement age has been 61. Meanwhile Spain and Germany are 67 and have discussed 69. (There was also corruption allowing certain people to retire as early as 50!) These people will then receive government pensions for the rest of their life. You can earn a full pension by working 35 years in Greece, while 45 in Germany, and get 80% of your wage as a pension in Greece, while in Germany it's 46%. The actual pension payments in Euros are similar or even greater in Greece. These are some examples of the divide that upsets Greece's creditors [1].

The Greek government has proposed raising the retirement age only recently, basically this week, as part of these last minute emergency proposals. If Greece was seriously committed to reform, they would have passed these reforms independently a long time ago in order to balance their budget, rather than as a condition of receiving more bailout money.

Instead, Greece took no action, and allowed their population to continue retiring at the average age of 61, paid for by EU taxpayers retiring years later. These taxpayers had to work a decade longer than Greeks for a pension that's half the size of what Greece pays its retired citizens. Only now in the weeks leading up to a possible default do they actually propose to take serious action or implement reasonable reform. It is my impression that this is why EU sees Greece as irresponsible: they're not doing what they need to be doing on their own to balance their budget.

How differently might things have turned out if they started seriously solving these problems in 2010? Greece has been "living large", distributing the IMF money as pension payments to their citizens that could never have been supported with the government's own tax income. Greece has also raised pension payments by a significant % during years when countries like Germany raised them 0%.

> why are the Greeks required to pay the price for this disastrous intervention?

Greece took on the loans, believing the loans to be in their interest. They're expected to pay the loans back, like anyone is. They can't, and so they're asking to borrow even more money. The question is, why should other European taxpayers shoulder the burden by loaning Greece even more money? It seems quite reasonable to me that Greece's creditors want a reasonable assurance that the money will actually be paid back in order to continue lending. You aren't going to lend money to someone who you know will just spend it, and not treat it like a loan. Greece's creditors want to hear specific details about how Greece will pay the money back, and what changes they'll make to their budget to accomplish that. This is in the context of Greece making few effective reforms in the time since their original loans. They keep saying "We'll change, we'll change", but prove politically incapable of making the hard decisions. So time passes and now their back is up against the wall. (This Spiegel article had some details: [2] )

If Greece has no credible plan for paying back the loans, then they won't get more loans, and they can default and accept the consequences. If they want to borrow more money, then they can accept the conditions that the money comes with. Are they really "entitled" to more?

Greece should have passed reforms and fixed its economy as part of receiving the original IMF loans. Instead, it wallowed in corruption and inefficiency. Its populist governments pandered to the people with all kinds of ridiculous concessions that are now proving to be impossible to sustain with a balanced budget. There is a very high rate of tax evasion that Greece also hasn't fixed, and special interests are entrenched.

It's a terrible situation all around, but morally I see Greece as having undertaken the loans by their own discretion, and having undertaken the responsibility to reform their economy in order to pay them back. Perhaps the pain is necessary to drive the right behavior - because nothing seems to have been happening without it. Even if there was nothing Greece could have done, and nothing Greece can do, it's still not the responsibility of other European taxpayers to continue to bail them out with loans.

A sovereign nation is responsible for itself, and a sovereign nation that takes on loans should do so believing the loans and loan conditions are in the nation's interest, and should uphold its end of the bargain by following the conditions and paying back the loans. EU banks have never asked Greece to take any particular dogmatic path to balancing their budget, they just want a balanced budget that enables Greece to repay the loans. They are understandably concerned that there is no credible plan for Greece to do this, and reluctant to loan Greece any more money while that's the case.

If you're saying that Greece should never have taken on any loans at all, even originally, then maybe in retrospect you're right, but it's hard to say. On the other hand, perhaps things would have turned out great if Greece had made appropriate reforms after receiving the original loans. Or maybe things would have been far, far worse without the loans. The loans were made when Greece was in the midst of a serious recession originally, after all. Who knows? Regardless of all of that, Greece is a sovereign nation and made the decision about how to proceed, and whether to take on loans, for itself. The loans have a fairly low interest rate, 3.6%. It's not as if IMF is a loan shark. That said, IMF could be more generous and lower the interest rate to equal their costs.

No one is going to invade Greece if they default and fail to pay back what they owe, but neither will anyone lend them more money going forward. To lend them more money, they want a credible, data-driven answer and reform commitment to "How will you pay this back?"

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/greece-germany-pensions-2010-...

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-commission-pre...