7 Repairing capitalism in Europe?
nance capitalist madness. The egoistic policies of the nation states to antagonise the peoples of Europe and the other parts of the world cannot be conceived from inside a ring-fenced European entity. I thought you are the one who teaches this, for example in the“ Minotaur”. In the“ Modest Proposal” I cannot find any of these aspects. Let’ s remember:“ Brothers, you have only one enemy- the private capital – may it be Prussian, English, French or Chinese.” 18
7.2“ A Modest Proposal” to advice the political establishment
You blank out the international impacts of the state of Europe and claim to see through the“ nature of the Eurozone crisis”. You insist on“ Europe as a whole will need to be ring-fenced” 19 as a precondition for getting European capitalism stabilized. Consequently you have developed your“ Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis” 20 with European blinkers on.
For a“ ring-fenced” Europe you offer four expert policies apposite to the four main crises( Banking crisis, debt crisis, investment crisis, social crisis), which nobody will succeed to explain to common people let alone to wow them for. You keep to the central EU-institutions and advocate the nation states in full sovereignty. The special European crisis allegedly developed due to the incompetence of the European politicians in charge, or as the Manifesto reads“ a confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials and financially incompetent experts”. Unmistakably the“ Modest proposal” was designed to show them the right way out of the Eurozone crisis. Yanis, you have done what is the most prominent task of Professors of Economics, what they are payed and even honoured for with Nobel Prizes: to advice the political class and their institutions! You advise them how to“ stabilize European capitalism” and“ save it from itself”. Indeed, you advertise a magic political formula of clever simplicity:
” While broad in scope, the Modest Proposal suggests no new institutions and does not aim at redesigning the Eurozone. It needs no new rules, fiscal compacts, or troikas. It requires no prior agreement to move in a federal direction while allowing
18 See p. 18.
19 Yanis Varoufakis: The Future of Europe, at the Institute for New Economic Thinking: Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics + Politics, Berlin 2012,( youtube 13.04.2012, 2:11).
20 Extracts from the Proposal as Appendix in“ And the Weak …?” Also in German: Yanis Varoufakis / Stuart Holland / James K. Galbraith, Bescheidener Vorschlag zur Lösung der Eurokrise, München 1015.
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