Name: 【TED】Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up (Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up | Yanis Varoufakis)
Uploaded: 2017-03-28T17:47:06.000Z
Duration: 19 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted.

not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is,

but we see it as part of our society's furniture.

We tend to think of it as an intransigent given.

We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy.

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing

have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt

that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism,

Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods,

Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece --

in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister,

I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process --

with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece.

I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew,

indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me

that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.

an economic case for an authentic democracy.

I want to ask you to join me in believing again

are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy --

that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy.

allow me to point out an interesting paradox

that is threatening our economies as we speak.

is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow

over the United States, Europe, the whole world.

belonging to rich savers and to corporations,

into the productive activities that can generate the incomes

from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts

and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs,

in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone,

we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars

things like industrial plants, machinery,

roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth.

until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion

that has been slushing around in the same countries,

doing absolutely nothing during the same period

except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.

So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash

form twin peaks,  failing to cancel each other out

through the normal operation of the markets.

more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe

reinforces the pessimism of the investors,

who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing --

who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle

that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him.

and indeed to finance all these technologies,

which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.

Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer?

as the constitution in which the free and the poor,

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【TED】Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up (Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up | Yanis Varoufakis)

authentic

relevant

absolutely

massive