BAM! Yanis Varoufakis was just confirmed as Greece’s new finance minister. I’ve been writing about Varoufakis since 2012. You can see all the posts I’ve written about him here.
First off, no he is not a libertarian. BUT he is genuine, he is not a politician (yet), and he’s got fire in his soul. That much I can tell. I’ve been fascinated with him for years because he has been the lone (and loan) voice of sense in the entire Greek mess. While he is not a libertarian and believes in government regulation, he does know and understand that the state is the entrepreneur’s biggest enemy. This much he said in a recent interview.
He’s articulate, speaks like a human being instead of in moronic soundbites and brainfarts that make you want to vomit, and his English is impeccable. And he doesn’t fake his conviction say, like Elizabeth Warren.
Oh, and he isn’t a fat disgusting lizard-looking slob of an embarrassment like his predecessor Evangelos Venizelos. (I only insult politicians for being physically repulsive.)
I mean really, which guy would you want to be a Finance Minister? This guy:
Or this guy:
No contest. He also understands how the current bailout setup is only bleeding private Greek citizens to the last drop.
What happens is this. A government spends too much money loaned to them by fractional reserve banks that are inherently unstable. The government then scares everyone into believing that if it defaults, the planet will explode. Therefore, private taxpayers are scared into giving up a bunch of money so the government can keep paying the banks their interest, which if they don’t get, could start a chain reaction of bankruptcies due to the inherent instability of fractional reserve banking. Meanwhile the private economy has no capital left to grow the economy because it’s all going to the government that keeps paying off the banks.
In the case of the Greek bailout, it is all of Europe’s taxpayers that has to finance the Greek government, so it’s much worse.
Varoufakis’s solution you can listen to here, which I wrote about almost 3 years ago. It’s a little nutty at the end where he wants to Europeanize the entire banking system which will have the effect of spreading out Greece’s government’s losses over the entire Eurozone. This will dilute the effect, but won’t solve the problem. It’ll just put it off for another decade or so until the entire continent’s governments collectively run up their debts even higher.
But in any case, it doesn’t matter. Varoufakis won’t get that far. He’ll insist on defaulting, which really is the only honest thing to do. Better say you can’t pay and go home than rob taxpayers even more just so you can keep paying interest payments a little longer while your debt keeps going up anyway. Am I sure it’s going up? Yes.
I’ll keep saying it, but once Greece defaults, there will be a crazy bond run on Italy. Italy will fall, and then the Eurozone will either split or collapse entirely.
But if anyone has the guts to push the default button and see what the hell happens, it’s Yanis. I’m totally psyched.
The Jewish Libertarian 
I have visited Greece a couple of times. I haven’t study life inside enterprises, yet I ate in eateries and been in a few stores. I haven’t notice that Greeks are lazy people. I witnessed activity and desire for good life.
Greeks are an ancient people. Maybe their economy is sagging because their workforce is fed up of employers steeling the profit on their investment of labor. That happens in every country where Employment is the Mode of Labor Utilization (MLU), but in more cultural countries employees are more likely to hate being exploited. We shall discuss this problem and its solution when we meet in a few days.
Tongue in cheek, you will have a chance to help Varoufakis rectify Greek economy.
Employers can only steal profit from workers by violating previously agreed contracts. If employer and employee agree to share profit but then employer reneges, then that is exploitation. If no profit sharing was agreed on in the first place, then to force it by law would be exploitation. It’s not that “Greeks are lazy”. It’s that the State there spends more wealth than is produced by the people. Hence bankruptcy.
Ah, Goddess Aphrodite will definitely push over Zeus day-and-night to help Varoufakis make the right decision for Greece.
I did not understand all of Mish’s site that Shimshon gave but when he implied that, based on that table which looks mysteriously competent to me, Mish said that Greece is being sacrificed as scapegoat for the others debt it resonated with my feeling about it yesterday when I finally realized why all this bashing of Greece and Greek people on euro-sites made me so upset. Like the fake humanism behind all the euro-scheme (and again! this annoying para-culture of eurowords).
If Greece bails out they will have a fixed debt, huge, but fixed. If they stay the debt will keep on moving and oscillating and the dim hope of a final pardon of it (in the name of europrinciples and Greek democracy) only ties the Greek people a second time, psychologically, and I am not sure in the name of what. That’s just my unskilled opinion of it all.
Oh, and speaking of Tsiparis stressing the German bankers, I really think that when the president of Europe said to press in 2009 after the crisis and media was questioning the existence of Europe that “you people don’t understand what EU has achieved. If it wasn’t for it, there’d be war in Europe” sounded way too threatening to make me bow at eurotemple or feel sorry for it as it shakes.