because think about it why do corporations want to come to this city it's because of the community that you have created because they want to move into a community which is fun which is a good music scene that has solidarity where people are not walking on the street looking as if you know they're desperate of lost souls this is what they seek in seattle the quality of the human condition that your community has created that is an equal a quality that has no one has designed it sprang out of the history of this place you you can study the reasons why you have it but it was miracle of history and social evolution now when a company like amazon wants however to move here to enjoy this community like humanity has done so many times colonized it and then suddenly we realize that we've destroyed the very environment which i which drew us to this place and the only defense to this is collective action it is democracy it is for the people of this community to stand up and to say look to the amazons of the world you know what you're not a very good at being even selfish because the way you're going about you're going to destroy the very thing that you're coming to seattle for and we need to preserve this community and you need to pay tax and we don't want to pay taxes but you know as all of it wendell holmes once said i like paying taxes because they buy me civilization the problem with corporate logic is that it does not understand civilisation corporatism and civilization are too alien forces and the only thing that can bring some kind of the tone between co operative logic and economic and environmental and communitarian sustainability is the democratic process making them pay for instance i'm not saying that the head tax is the best way of doing it he would much preferable if we could actually tax their profits directly but given that they always hide their profits in some tax haven somewhere you have to start somewhere we can quibble about whether you should tax property make them pay higher rents whether they should pay tax and so on and so forth anyway you can see that i have been constantly being trampled on now what we also forget is that democracy is something that is absolutely deeply despised by the powerful the powerful never liked democracy as an idea wealth and assets and indeed when people talk to me about china these days it's how it's wanted democratic you know well what was the west remember capitalism grew up in the nineteenth century in this country but also in europe with the exception of england and parts of scotland where you had already started emerging at the end of the century let me remind you that in the nineteenth century liberalism was defined as the owner gee that would be powerfully competing against the idea of democracy even somebody  government and he did not encourage one person one vote ever he was actually fighting against it so liberalism was juxtaposed against democracy and it was only the great a good press for the world democracy and suddenly we started having is this this what used to be a contradiction in terms we talk about liberal democracy liberalism was against democracy led to where like saying you know second what i'm saying is that democracy has many enemies if we ever get a chance or a democratic decision making process i had either the level of the town hall or the level of our state the level on federal government we must count ourselves lucky because there are so very few points in the history in our collective history when we actually had something that examining democracy and you can see the incredible war against any vestiges of democracy anywhere where they are two years ago i mentioned some of you remember it i'm very pleased but most of you wouldn't i mentioned that when i was in government in two thousand and fifteen i was struck by two things that i heard being said by other powerful men and of course compromise because you know there are very few degrees of freedom in this world and before i said that well well i did actually say i said mr president i wake up in the morning and go to bed at night i was completely helpless i had to bail out wall street and he actually used the term that was very and presidential he said those bastards in wall street  do you know and it was like drinking a glass of political poison that was the word that he used the word the phrase he used so he was present presenting himself think about the most powerful man in the world talking to the most bankrupt minister of finance of the most devastated and insolvent bankrupt state in the world and he's presenting himself to me as powerless effectively saying that the democratic mandate he had just received in two thousand and eight meant nothing because he had to do what he had to do which is to you know employ and deploy massive socialism for the bankers while throwing the majority of the people of this country into the you know the arena there on one arena of unfertile market forces that's what he was he didn't say in those terms well that's what he meant and he was inviting me to be compromised as well but that was my interpretation but he was extremely nice about it that's the difference between the current president and then the previous it's just a question of it's anthropological the difference but i doubt that  who actually was an education for me because i used to think that these were the finance minister of the richest european country a country that has a quite brilli because i he could see we had these fears come conversations and confrontations but nevertheless i realized that he knew that what he was doing in the end was wrong by his people by my people and by the people of europe and when i said to him i pushed him and to his credit he admitted it and i said to him so what are we going to do walk and we have been elected we have a mandate a democratic mandate to do things  you know i wrote this book about my daughter more speaking to my daughter by the economy and people say to me why did you do that well my daughter really doesn't like me lecturing because she thinks that i was brought into this world to i exploited my daughter i mean she didn't do anything just in my head i was trying to imagine the time explaining things to her and she going nothing again so i tried to make it as palatable and understandable and that in the world we live they gonna me penetrate every dimension of life whether it's the head dogs in seattle the schooling system the health service what's happening in syria today relationship between the united states europe and china climate change everything goes through these if you want but not because of what's called the so i have no problem with experts i'm not a climate change denier i love science i believe that if we need to build a bridge we need experts to build it it would be stupid to build it they  if we all have you are still how will you know what to do to build a bridge the bridge will collapse and we are going to be responsible for many many deaths but the economy is not like c when engineering projects it's you don't understand it because it's mathematical it has a jargon that is as impenetrable as any good book on of thermodynamics to somebody who doesn't know physics there are computers day weather forecasts however the weather forecasts produce you have a mathematical model of the weather system it's inside the computer the computer is connected to very implements that measure temperature wind and i go back to my hotel downtown seattle and out as a prank i tweet that to morrow nasdaq or the wall street stock exchange is going to theory which was confirmed just because it was made public so you see that nature doesn't give a damn about predictions but society is our predictions because society is what you and i do significant economic event in the history of capital and never will therefore if there are no experts and economics is not a science what we do with what we need to do is we need each one of us to be comes to become able to tackle economic questions with a degree of it that means we have enough political and moral duty to become acquainted with the ways of capitalism this is the system we cannot mix in we live in boring life and the only way of maintaining this process of pseudo science is by convincing yourself that what you're doing science so leave them with humility with empathy with sympathy you know like lost children where in the in the church to them in a christian way they need your support but would you don't need them to convince you that they democracy it's a pain in the neck you know i got involved in the political process back in two thousand and fifteen and i can tell you that i find them extremely boring the whole the whole democratic process is a pain sitting in parliament i suppose the same thing happen and they have to knock on doors in nearby villages and say i will do anything for a loaf of bread that's the first label to mark the first time in human history when people are actually selling their labor or selling it it's becomes  immediately land became a commodity because suddenly we knew how much it was worth every acre because we knew how much it will grow and big the national the price of wool was the term internationally so the banker acquired power and not at the edison the henry ford of the world so this is what this has been happening and you as we are now in a world where the financial  economics yes of economic analysis so using that had tax example maybe they had tax is a bad idea that there are maybe taxing incomes is a better idea or trying to tax revenue in some way is a better idea so using economics to evaluate alternative options and decide on the best one where is the role of economics in this world of empowering people the role of a con a mass in empowering  people with economic knowledge well i think that you know why don't we just try something that is not often been tried common sense anybody that tries to bomb booste which is absolutely essential for civilization so we need to produce a little bit more than what we consume to replace that which we have expended so if you have a farm in order to to to have development you need at the end of the season to end up with a little bit more corn than what you started with sort of you can plant a game for the next season and so on so you have an economic surplus and the greater the comic surplus is the more you can do with you more you can invest in education the more you can invest in the things that society want so senseless is it important concept to have ok so then let's have a discussion about what that should society can be maintained themselves and we need more green energy so that we do not produce c o two and so on and so we proceed from there then the question of  never it's a big statement that and i would like somebody to disprove it you see what the supporters of a state of trying to do is try to confuse us by identifying more than you earn you're going to be in serious trouble with it's stupid to do it now but they are two thousand and eight or even today but let's go back to two thousand and eight because two thousand is a very good example of a great recession so what happens is the private sector goes into a sparse and they stop investing they fire people so in other words to put it bluntly the private sector shrinks it's expenditure expenditure what happens is the tax rate goes down so because the tax day went down initially the treasury reduced expenditure thinking that now we're going to balance the books but no because these great depression it's time to come back to right in greek the grapes of wrath we have a nazi party in parliament so this is and forget about the theories and forget about the experts who always adopt theories that suit the bankers and the powers that be we would be all better off this was a very long answer i'm sorry recovered it was no longer able to stabilize global capitalism and i was saying at the end of the book and this is what you mention that either we're going to have a new britain woods and you bretton woods that really  and that imbalance is global capitalism through cooperation between europe china and the united states or going to be in trouble and i'm afraid that we're in trouble and what do you now see that trade was the  support that parochialism is receiving all over europe in this country with trump and so on is if you want it's just nothing more than a symptom of these unsustainable growing i i know a recent interview you mentioned the idea that deflation leads to fascism and this seems to go against the popular notion that say in the in the wire my republic in germany hyperinflation lead to the fascism there  so can you explain the connection between deflation and fascism i will thank you i'll let it beat up question you my words your words are fine but you know i'm an old professor  question if you track the electoral performance of hitler's party in germany and crisis you'll find that during the period of rapid for instance local government elections as well as federal elections environmental probably suddenly you see as prices and the rate of inflation goes below zero in other words you have reduction in prices suddenly the naches go from two percent sophisticated all i'm saying is very simple for capitalism to reach a stage where prices are actually falling and falling rapidly and consistently ate must have lost its footing completely you know the working class  and that has led to the rise of the alternative for god's plan it's a racist very right means you know for a big party that has gone from zero to fifteen percent in one year and now if there were elections today that would get twenty friends by i think a lot more cement in it but if you go to the one or two you know quite as it's a huge wall there i mean what are they going to build the berlin wall looks like a walk in the park compared to what  in your own spaceship whatever and you look at this little planet it's moving and you realize that these idiots they're humans they've created all these countless borders and they this it it's in natural that right to stop people from abomination we have been doing it for a thousand years so i'm an internationalist and not a glob