Destructive compasión

By Carlos Alberto Montaner*

Chávez is going to send 40 auxiliary electrical plants to his friend Daniel Ortega. They are small and inefficient, but they'll help mitigate the brownouts the Nicaraguans experience. They'll supply energy at prices subsidized by the Venezuelans. The plants will arrive from Cuba, where they cease to accomplish a similar mission. With the plants, Chávez will send crude oil to the Sandinista leader and will surely grant him a generous line of credit.

For its part, the Cuban government will offer doctors, cataract surgery, literacy programs and some fellows who teach how to pole-vault or play baseball. With those elements, Daniel Ortega will begin to expand his base of popular support. In early January, he will assume power with 60 percent of the population against him, but he is ready to overcome that inconvenience by quickly bringing together an electoral clientele that in the future will repay him -- in votes -- for the goods and services he can dispense them.

That is how revolutionary populism builds its massive support. It does not generate the conditions for society to create wealth but instead alleviates the symptoms of misery by recruiting in the process an army of grateful stomachs. That's how Perón, Chávez, Castro and that entire family of demagogues built their power system. They "give" things "free of charge," they dispense presents and invert the normal relationship between society and government. "Free," of course, is a figure of speech, because someone always has to pay for the good or service delivered. In a well-organized society, the government lives from society. In the little populist hells, society lives from government. But because governments are terrible producers and bad administrators, and because populism drains the available resources by destroying the sources of capital, the inverted spiral swirls at dizzying speeds: the more populism, the more poor people, but the more poor people, the more clients to augment the base of support. That's how the PRI ruled Mexico for 70 years. When it lost power, half the country was in miserable shape. Exactly the half of the country that supported the party. During Chavismo, the number of the Venezuelan poor has increased by 8 percent. The same rate of increase as "hard-line" Chavismo.

In addition, this obscene and counterproductive purchase of consciences is presented as a superior form of moral superiority. How can any decent person object to the distribution of food or clothing to the poor? Don't the Scriptures talk about feeding the hungry and giving water to the thirsty? Isn't compassion an admirable attitude? It depends. Compassion can be terribly destructive. A cocaine addict who displays the symptoms of abstinence alleviates his pain and anxiety with a dose of the drug, but if we give it to him all we do is to perpetuate the problem.

Of course, the first common objective of any mature society is to rescue the neediest. And there is no doubt that any responsible government must take care of the most urgent problems experienced by defenseless people. But we musn't forget that the end of poverty is never achieved by means of demagogical gestures made by populist governments.

What we have learned by observing the societies that have managed to eradicate or reduce the indices of poverty is that this objective is reached by a combination of good education, technological transferences, national and foreign investment, efficient juridical guarantees and institutions, reasonable fiscal pressure and a reduced public expenditure, in such a way that an entrepreneurial fabric will expand within the private sector, becoming increasingly denser, more competitive and sophisticated, so the workers' wages will also gradually increase.

The tragedy lies in the fact that this political message is not very attractive. It talks about responsibility, not of rights. It accentuates freedom to built one's own fate, whatever the risks, not on the passive tranquillity of someone who waits for someone else to build his life from the outside. It places the burden of happiness-building on the individual and denies the governments the power to mold our existence. That is why the battle is so difficult. The siren songs always are more pleasing to the ear. Even though they lead us to disaster.

December 31, 2006

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