Economist Yanis Varoufakis posted the conclusion of his speech to British Euroceptics this week with the warning “the cruellest God is the one who grants us our wishes”.
In a time of austerity this is something we all should carefully consider. Some of these people need to be careful about their wishes;
- Those renters hoping for property prices to drop 40% may get their wish, but such a crash will leave the economy in ruins and the renters themselves without a job to service their mortgage.
- Landlords who fantasise about rents tripling, not realising that ripping disposable income out of their tenants’ wallets will also push the economy into recession and hurt their property values.
- Politicians obsessing about AAA credit ratings without understanding that this locks a government into the narrow, failed ideologies of the ratings agencies – the world’s most incompetent and corrupt organisations.
- Business leaders demanding that workers be thankful for getting $1 a hour, forgetting that Henry Ford started paying his workers so they could buy his cars and pay executive bonuses.
- Retired folk reducing their assets to get pensions because “they’ve paid their taxes” who then find life on the aged pension isn’t so great after all.
- Middle classes urging the government to subsidise their private school fees and medical insurance because “they pay their taxes” and end up paying even more taxes.
Yanis himself is an interesting guy, having amongst other things taught economics in Sydney for 12 years before returning to Greece;
In 2000 a combination of nostalgia and abhorrence of the conservative turn of the land down under (under the government of that awful little man, John Howard) led me to return to Greece.
John Howard himself wished for Australia to return to the “white picket fence” conservative, insular nation of the 1950s. He got his wish and Australians decided they liked the past so much they decided to take the economy back to an 1850s structure of living off the sheep’s iron ore train’s back.
Today Australia’s inward looking and insular with an economy increasingly based upon mineral exports and property speculation. With both the export markets and property prices now wobbling we might be about to find the cost of our wishes being granted.