If Mr. Varoufakis had John Lennon’s poetic and musical talent, this piece would have been simply “Imagine”.

Mr. Lennon had, though, the excuse of that infectious, wonderful and curable disease called youth. The eyes of the young see either human brotherhood or unbridled freedom, but neither the brutality of totalitarian state nor the solipsistic hopelessness of living in anarchy.

I visited Cuba right after the fall of the Soviet Union and witnessed prostitution in the widest sense, when your own body is the only thing you have some control over and some ability to trade with. So in my younger days I used to say that to be a communist you had to be either dishonest or foolish, not seeing that the same could apply to my Randian-Reaganesque anarcho-capitalist faith.

Prima facie, Mr. Varoufakis’s baldness should suggest he has recovered from the above disease and yet he waxes in prose about Marx and stuff. Dishonesty or lingering chronic foolishness?

Capitalism is a horribly misused term, just as rock music looked upon with contempt by a classical music lover. In reality, what collectivists like Mr. Varoufakis oppose is a society based on freedom framed by a strong but limited rule of law, including freedom to trade, and therefore own, something beyond your own body.

That liberal society has many of its roots in Mr. Varoufakis’s own birthplace way before the tradable shares arose. But the abundance and undeniable welfare progress of the last few centuries, the incredible knowledge produced by an academic class that could eat without working the fields, the “big Tech” platform he uses to spread his ideas, could not have been possible without the pooling of resources in corporations. And corporations produced and traded their goods because they could benefit the shareholders, i.e. the owners, not because of employees’ good intentions or government imposed quinquennial plans.

A society would not be less capitalistic because either beneficial ownership or voting power were assigned to employees or, worse, to a supreme leader or big brother. What such society would have, though, is little incentive to give its members what they want. Witness the way Soviet ‘firms’ produced bigger, heavier goods, to make the quantitative tonnage goals at the expense of quantity and quality.

Unfortunately, just as the crassest films and television shows keep thriving because new generations are naïve, so the imagery of big bad bosses in gated communities and loving selfless community leaders periodically enthrall new generations who have not witnessed the results of the ignorance or the errors of the past.

Myself, I do not think anyone in good faith can claim we have reached perfection (except maybe some Supreme Leaders here and there), but the road to progress is in the precarious balance between rule of law and respect for the individual, in all his/her expressions, academic, intellectual, entrepreneurial, etc., not in a totalitarian communists Utopia.