Fairness misunderstood.

I found a short story on a site I visit frequently that made me think about the problem of equity when misunderstood and into the clutches of populism. I'm going to quote it as I read it on the Spanish site:

Long ago in ancient Rome, there was a small town of about 100 inhabitants.

They met in the fall and winter was approaching. Due to these circumstances, the town mayor begins preparations. To start, decide to take inventory.

He chooses certain members of the community and sends them to count, house by house, warehouse by warehouse and barn by barn; to estimate the town's food reserves.

Looking at the statistics, he is surprised to see that the town owned 100 chickens. Of which, half belonged to a single person. The other 50 hens were distributed among the other 99 inhabitants.

The mayor, surprised, perceives this as an injustice and forces the hens to be distributed equally. There were 100 chickens and 100 inhabitants, so each inhabitant received a hen.

Of the 100 inhabitants:

50 are delighted with the mayor's gesture and enjoy having a delicious chicken for dinner.

Another 49 appreciate the gesture, and decide to starve somewhat; to let your hen lay eggs, so you can eat one egg a day.

However, only 1 person decides to go hungry for a few weeks. So letting your hen lay eggs, and waiting for the eggs to hatch chickens. Which would grow and become chickens.

Just two months later, the town owned 100 chickens. Of which, half belonged to a single person.

There is no point in distributing wealth. What we need to do is educate people so that they can lift themselves out of poverty. We have to learn to sacrifice a little and then have more.

[Source of the image and the text in Spanish] (https://es.quora.com/Si-el-dinero-del-mundo-se-repartiera-equitaticamente-todos-tendr%C3%ADamos-una-vida-digna/ answer / Agustin-Niccolini)

This story has made me remember what happened in #Venezuela with the massive expropriation of farms, industries, businesses and buildings during the past decade, under the government of XXI Century Socialism, which at the time postulated that it was a redistribution for achieve higher productivity and improve the country's economy.

I can summarize the result by explaining that it was a thunderous failure, it hurt private productivity and the productivity of public companies, which were never very good, it went to the bottom and reached ZERO production in recent years, as it is read, simply does not occur.

Thanks to this misunderstood equity, this country has been classified as the one with the most miserable economy in the world for more than 4 years in a row, it is the one that has the worst perception for private investment, whether of national or international capital. This is something very important when I learn from the news that the intention is to promote private investment of international capital in the current government, which is still from the party of XXI Century Socialism or Chavismo, a Latin American left movement that used the high income of dollars from the production and sale of oil to finance its influence and expand its proposal in different countries and continents.

Let's go back to the chicken issue, it is a very marked problem in Latin American political and popular thought that of short-term satisfaction and the refusal of people to suffer for a while to achieve better crops or more valuable results, in part they do not I can blame, after all, life is very fragile and in this context in which we live there is a lot of violence and personal insecurity, so you never know what day you have bad luck and some criminal is responsible for killing you when trying to steal from you, or a police or military chooses you to collect some extortion and can kill you during the kidnapping or can simply kill you to vent anger because you have nothing to steal from you.

Seeing that, it can be understood that ordinary people want to enjoy things quickly, because they do not believe that they will live long to enjoy it later, but it also seems to me that it is a bit selfish, because they never seem to think about leaving an inheritance to serve them. their offspring to start life with better opportunities or resources.