We deserve it

We deserve it

" They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

Benjamin Franklin

By Andrés F. Guevara B.

I will start from a sad premise: Venezuelans do not deserve freedom. And is that during the pseudo-state established by the Bolivarian socialism, little or nothing has been done to defend the sacred value of liberty.

There are staunch critics of the Bolivarian socialism. I correct. There are staunch critics of the President of the Republic. People criticize him day and night. Often, you may hear that the president is an ignorant, a chatterbox, a continental Santa Claus.

Surprisingly, the gentleman, the much-vaunted and criticized, was superimposed on the most lucid minds of Venezuelan intellectuals. Every analysis has failed to explain how the "ignorant" has more than a decade in power.

The problem, in our view, lies in the fact that people criticize the man but not the system. The chavezcentrismo public opinion has neglected the backbone of the crisis: the historical evidence shows that socialism, in all its aspects, creates doom and misery to the people who adopt it as a system of government.

The chavezcentrismo reflects a harsh reality. Currently, most of the Venezuelan political forces are socialists. For over sixty years, both political parties and the electorate have been adopted as a substrate for their governments ideas of social democracy, social Christianity and, recently, communism.

Faced with this range of options, those who struggle for power can not deny their own ideas. So they claim that Chávez administration it is not socialism, that “true” socialism is what is observed in European countries, with Sweden and Spain as a paragon of dreaming.

There is a terrible cliché that most intellectuals are leftwing. The image of the establisment critical, nested in an air of ineffable knowledge, calls for a "fair world". These intellectuals have created the idea that there are two lefts, and that the world should move toward the moderate left to which they belong.

These intellectuals have legitimized the discourse of Bolivarian socialism. Conscious or not, every time they say that the "plan" employee is wrong, but you must use another "plan", that the State should be the primary guarantor of health, education, labor rights, social rights and a host of clichés, progressive intellectuals tend to legitimize the power structure of Bolivarian socialism.

If there has been a champion of statism that’s the President of the Republic. But his statism did not come from nowhere. It succeeds because the population seconds it. As dogma of faith, now seems indisputable that the “Social” State must intervene in neuralgic areas involved in the life of the individual.

A semantic subtlety. But behind the discourse of intellectuals are hidden enemies of freedom.

It is unfortunate that it is in professional, academic and cultural circles in which these ideas are more widespread. Behind preparation of these educated men, hides the fatal conceit (Hayek) to believe that thanks to their intervention the nation will be saved from its ill-fated destiny. It seems that the higher degree of culture, the greater the degree of belief in big government in Venezuelan intellectuals.

If after sixty years of statism the most prepared in Venezuela continue to believe that interventionism is the solution, what hope is left?

Within the "elite" in Venezuela, almost none. Their privileges, obtained as a result of its proximity to the state, will hardly separate them from their statist conception. They will pray to the gods that Bolivarian revolution succumb to stand up on its ruins as another planner leadership. In the interlude, while they can, they will survive as collaborators.

The only glimmer of light may lie in the poorest. They are who feel must the state power. The poor are who suffer the consequences of statism. If we can settle in the lower strata the idea of freedom, the entrepreneurship over the grant, creation of wealth over the distribution, responsibility over the gift, you may shatter the ideals of the progressive establishment.

This is a complex task. It implies reversing a speech established for decades and, incidentally, supported mainly by those in power to spread ideas. We cling to a quote of Bastiat: "The plans differ, the planners are all alike." Don’t be an accomplice of the underground tyrants.