Last Thursday evening in Madrid, I was invited as a guest of the local ATTAC chapter to talk about the Eurozone at a public meeting. I say guest, because one would be excused for thinking that the local ATTAC President was in fact the guest given that he launched into a 25 minute diatribe, masquerading as the first question after my presentation, that attacked Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for (allegedly) ignoring taxes (no: we just say they do not fund spending) and basic income (no: we just prefer employment guarantees). While it was obvious he hadn’t actually read my book (despite claiming to be commenting on it), he also claimed that I was just another apologist for capitalism and had failed to advocate any fundamental changes to the system. It was quite a performance as you might guess, but I thought it rather odd that the president of ATTAC, which takes its name from its principal advocacy of a Tobin Tax (financial transactions tax), a small little surcharge on the Wall Street excesses, rather than a head-on attack on the legitimacy of the financial markets in general, would dare criticise others for advocating policies within the capitalist realm. I have long written about the need to control financial speculation via regulation rather than through the ‘price system’ (by taxing it). Those who think that working through the price system is the way to change behaviour are operating within neo-liberal logic. It is much more effective to just work through the legal system and ban something that is damaging to the prosperity of nations. That is the MMT position on these financial market excesses – where they just involve wealth shuffling and serve no productive purpose, the state should just legislate them into oblivion. But the so-called revolutionary ATTAC (if my understanding of the president’s ravings were correct) just wants to impose a small tax on Wall Street. And, I guess they will have to go looking for the cash in Panama or somewhere!