Populism represents a disgrace for any country fallen into their hands. It generates expectations, and these later do not correspond to reality. Populism destroys the future because it spends savings, like a drunkard in a tavern with two beautiful blonde women on each leg. Populism destroys the infrastructure that helps create an environment of prosperity, and worse, corrupts the main asset of a society: its people.
The populist faces the doctor, the free market and from the clientelist networks incites the country to immerse itself in waste, spending, monetarism to create inorganic money, controls; that is, everything that will sooner or later cause the very heart of the economy to explode into a thousand pieces.
Populism ruins nations, once lust ends. With the hard days, the stampede arises. Only the government of Hugo Chávez, from 1998 to 2012, caused the exodus of one million people; and that of Maduro has expelled some four million young people. And so these Venezuelans let the history of their country be written by others.
The remedy against populism is the free market, which discourages demagogic measures. But as happens to the doctor that the patient questions, the free market is accused of being an enemy of the people. The populist is applauded who, hiding the negative consequences of his interventionism, advises the "popular" measures because apparently -I will speak of this- offer a momentary utility.
Under this kind of hoax, populism becomes the policy that destroys capital. Advises to increase the endowment of the present at the expense of the future. It is exactly what happens in the case of the maracucho friend we are talking about. Its greater consumption in the present of greaves, mayonnaise and hamburgers corresponded to the worsening of the conditions in the future.
Those of us who defend economic freedom seek to end poverty with the right measures. On the other hand, populism does not have as its object the citizen or his prosperity but the maintenance of the caudillo's power. Populism is not interested in the economic freedom of the people, but in that the caudillo stays in power, even when to stay in power, they must end the country, like Alexis Tsipras in Greece in 2014 or Chavismo in Venezuela .
A populist is a sorcerer, a charlatan bent on confusing politics in the Sermon on the Mount. The problems of a globalized world, where the so-called national states are increasingly dependent on this phenomenon, is that they can not be proposed for the problems of the economy, Caribbean spells.
In August 2016, while I was serving in the secret service of my country, the newspaper La Razón de España, consulted me about the phenomenon of populism that now threatened that country. When the questionnaire arrived I tried to be elegant in the answer but ended up saying what I really thought: << That populism is accepted in Latin American countries encouraged by demagogues, it is understandable, but that in Spain there are people voting for "Podemos" - represented by populism, is at least disconcerting >>.
I had read the full program of Podemos: Threats to bankers, more taxes for the rich, economic protectionism. The old verse: the poor are poorer because the rich are rich and the problem is solved by drowning the rich and giving money to the poor. The only problem that money can not solve is poverty, a crude example is Venezuela.
The announcement of the kingdom of a society where those who work must finance those who do not work. Those who work come to feel that they can not have surpluses because that is a sin that must be punished with more taxes, and those who do not work find out, that they can live without work because others will do it for them, they will finance their house, education through the Robin Hood State. Such a society is barbarism, a preaching to delay, chaos and misery.
Robin Hood, like all we have read the story we know, even if he gave to the poor, he was a thief, a gang member.
For me the case of "Podemos" in Spain was really worth a comedy. In any part of the rational world, its main leader then, Pablo Iglesias, would be with his long hair, with a fustian, in a corner giving a tambourine and playing the guitar, never aspiring to the government of Spain. Some hippies, literally speaking, tried to govern Spain with equivalent measures to disarm a Mercedes Benz to put the tires to a village wagon without electricity.
A doctor can not be an impromptu, a jungle herbivore. For populism, unprepared youth and incendiary discourse are enough to save the world. Promising Paradise as an evangelist, from politics, is simple. Governing is a complex issue. The Venezuelans handed power to Hugo Chávez, a forty-year-old youth who preached as Juan the Baptist in the desert, and left Venezuela as a people whose only feeling in the world was compassion for their tragedy.
Alexis de Tocqueville, warned in his Democracy in America: << It is evident that our rulers are not satisfied with leading the people, it would seem that they consider themselves responsible for the actions and the individual destiny of the subjects, and who have wanted to undertake the task of direct their lives >>.
Tocqueville before Ayn Rand, Von Mises, Hayeck and Friedman, could observe what would be the danger of the mobs in power, the empire of the demagogues.
Tocqueville was alarmed by the tendency to believe, as was believed in the America that analyzed, that democratic institutions had the obligation to mix citizens in both private life and public life, and to force them to lead a common life. Tocqueville said: << This would imply a crude and tyrannical interpretation of democratic equality >>.
That crude and tyrannical interpretation of equality, arrived, is called populism, and is acclaimed by all the destroyers of the free man. According to the populists, the mob, the stadium, the majorities, can decide and impose against nature and reason. Vox populi, vox dei, they say to justify their excesses.
Under this primitive logic, a referendum could be held to decide whether all children in a school should receive a religion class. This populist logic violates the right of an individual to be agnostic, for example, only because the majority decides to impose on them to receive ideas in which they are not interested.
The liberal logic in turn consists of: What, if you live, and let live, that is, if a referendum decides a type of religious thought, but leaves the agnostic free to enter or not to that class, thus assessing his right to initiative and free accession.
But if this example does not satisfy them, the populists could hold a referendum to consider that homosexuality is an aberration and that homosexuals should be forced to refrain from having sexual intercourse between them. This can be very democratic but disrespects this person's right to their individual freedom.
Populism is the abuse of the jungle and the preaching of chaos. Never deprives the reason but the feeling, passion, the most primitive values of man. That is why he is a friend of barriers, nationalism and walls. Consequently, it can not respect the free market, and globalization.
The eternal demagogic preaching of the populists of the world: Spending, control, protection. Alert and be careful with this .....