The Devil's Excrement

Translated liberally from an article in page 2-6 of today’s El Universal:

From Savage Neoliberalism to the Populism of a Savage

by Oscar Garcia Mendoza

In some latter time, which I hope will not be too distant, I would like to read an essay entitled like this article which evidently will summarize the disaster that we are living.

Many times a relative of mine described his wife sayng that she was crazy, but that she was very dangerous because she was a coherent nut. She would say things that seemed reasonable, but they were not and that was her danger. I don’t want to say that we have not noticed this with our leader, but many that do not have this perception or don’t know him believe that what he says has some degree of reason and believe from him the most incredible things.

Liberalism is good administartion. Assigning limited resources to unlimited needs. And better yet , except in evident cases, is that those resources be managed by the private sector rather than the state.

Argentina is now shown as the symbol of the bad things about globalization. This is not the case: The President of Uruguay, without wanting all of us to, know gave hi opinion:” what we have in Argentina is a bunch of thieves”. With this, neither theory or practice will ever work. Argentina is the example of the what is bad about corruption, not of what is bad about neoliberalism. Our case is the same. The Venezuelan case is the case of hypercorruption. The only things that has saved this Government is high oil prices. When they drop, we will all be screwed, but these “populists” will not care.

The economic and political slide is quite large and the decisions are getting worse every day. One small one reflects a lot: Changing the keeping of official statistics from the Venezuelan Central Bank (which are not too trustworthy) to the Central Government. Why don’t you be sincere: Eliminate them. Give the numbers you want. The  citizens don’t eat numbers but foodstuffs and they will know anyway.

Patience. There is no illness that lasts 100 years nor body that can resist it.

This entry was posted on September 22, 2002 at 6:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized.