There are no sweet promises that cost the citizen nothing, the State does not produce anything, it only takes and distributes according to its own criteria.
Socialism has failed. Socialism has failed every time it has been tried to be implemented. The younger generation, less fearful and less susceptible to the ghosts of the past, has become more aware of the path to communism that has governed Portugal for 21 of the last 28 years: expropriations of private property provided for in the “More Housing” programme as a means of solving the housing problem caused by the lack of supply; centralisation of power in the central State, completely alienated from real life but excessively intervening in it; public education and healthcare by default, and therefore eternally insufficient to meet demand; high taxes to finance public services that cannot be dispensed with and that have not been subscribed to; low wages, barriers to the creation of businesses and investments…
The Portuguese fear change, and this resignation has been quite convenient for the bipartisanship that has limited itself to managing the country: Portugal has not grown for about 20 years. It is being managed, in fits and starts, without structural reforms, with short-term thinking by politicians who rotate portfolios, ministries, advisory positions… the same faces.
Portugal is one of the poorest countries in the European Union and that is why 20% of Portuguese people already live outside the country where they were born.
That said, especially the younger generation, they no longer have anything to fear: Socialism has failed. And so, like the rest of Europe, all the polls point to a growth of more right-wing parties.
The diagnosis has been made, the solution has not been correctly identified.
The country’s problem is Statism, which is so central to Socialist ideology that it is confused with it, but it is not exclusive to it. Politicians are naturally driven by the desire for power, and a society in which the State provides everything makes citizens addicted to the State, dependent on heroic and saviour politicians. In a country with low salaries, being a professional politician is tempting and, therefore, this dependence on the State is convenient.
What promise will a politician have if he or she depends little on himself or herself?
There are no sweet promises that cost the citizen nothing. The State does not produce anything, it only takes and distributes according to its own criteria.
The interventionism that the main political forces in Portugal defend for their own convenience implies proposals that are certainly not unfamiliar to you:
More regulations, price controls, granting of subsidies, interfering in the free functioning of supply and demand, resulting in distortions that harm economic efficiency. This leads to shortages of goods and services, inflation, and imbalances in the market.
In a practical example:
When political parties propose increasing minimum wages, they are in fact imposing on private companies the obligation to pay an employee a certain amount, regardless of whether the employer wants or can pay that amount. If this is not the case, the company will lay off employees. So, suppose the heroic State decides to intervene again and prohibit layoffs? If the company is international and the State’s impositions are not convenient, it will simply leave Portugal and its workers; if it is small, it will close down or resort to fraud as a last resort to survive.
When we understand that the State produces nothing and offers nothing that it has not previously taken from citizens in taxes, it is deducible that it is in the interest of the people to reduce it to essential functions.
The Portuguese do not need to pay for an airline they do not use, or for a television channel they do not watch. Nor is it up to the Portuguese to use the money taken from them to save unviable companies whose poor management or the market itself has rendered them irrelevant… But politicians will make you believe that there will always be a clientele serving themselves in the meanders…
From the left to the right.