Thursday, May 26, 2016

So I'm more Marxist than I knew?

I don't always find Yanis Varoufakis that good in interviews:  I sometimes find his economic advice a bit hard to follow.

But here in an article that shows us The Guardian as the wild mix of the silly and the sensible that it is (see my previous post),  Varoufakis calls himself an "erratic Marxist" and seems to me to make much sense.   (I thought Jason Soon respected his views - but I hadn't realised what a polar opposite of a small government proponent he is.)   Take this paragraph, for example:
“Because what Australians do not understand is that there is a major disconnect between the United States’ official ideology and its practice. The ideology is one of free market, but the practice is one of a state that is extremely activist, and is investing very heavily in whole networks of innovation and production: the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, even the prison industrial complex. They are investing heavily through the state to create networks of value creation, and actually producing things. And Australia is moving very rapidly into divesting itself of actual production.”
And how about this paragraph (which would mark him in the mind of Sinclair Davidson and the IPA as the economic Anti-Christ):
The idea that individuals create wealth and that all governments do is come along and tax them is what Varoufakis calls “a preposterous reversal of the truth”.
“There is an amazing myth in our enterprise culture that wealth is created individually and then appropriated by the state to be distributed.
“We are conceptualising what is happening in society as if we are an archipelago of Robinson Crusoes, everybody on an island, creating our own thing individually and then a boat comes along and collects it and redistributes it. It’s not true. We are not individual producers, we produce things collectively.”
 He sounds also as if he would be completely in favour of the Labor policy on negative gearing.

I like him more than I realised. 

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