Néstor Suárez: The Ideological Bases for a new opposition
The author is an economist. Msc and PhD in Economics , member of the Country Plan Commission and advisor to the Energy and Mines Commission of the National Assembly of Venezuela. @NestorSuarezRB
I am pleased to have the opportunity to present to my readers an essay written by a fighter of my same generation who in our Zulia land and for partisan political reasons of our adolescence, we call the CREM generation. Nestor Suárez has shown to continue being a fighter for his beliefs, for his political conceptions as well as those later conceived by his studies at prestigious universities around the world.
Today he presents us with this essay which has been called «The ideological bases for a new opposition.» which is considered really interesting and demonstrates in unison his courage by letting us see in a naked and open way what he considers would be a social way to revive our nation as a real society. Personally, I must confess that a good part of his proposal is mine. Thank you very much Nestor Suarez for writing. Thank you very much for writing topics on which we may or may not agree but that our dying nation clearly needs.
Dr. Raul Ochoa Cuenca. Juriste.
Troisième cycle en économie du développement.
Institut d’études du développement de la Sorbonne.
Université de Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne.
September 5, 2021
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For many years, Venezuelan politics fell into a misunderstood pragmatism, where everything is labeled «social» to win votes. Thus democracy and justice must be social, but also education, medicine, art and sports.
Just as F.A. Hayek will demonstrate, if social means that these activities do not take place in the air but within society, the social is an inevitable context, but if by social we mean state redistribution of wealth, that is Socialism, and this is ideological smuggling and a semantic fraud.
Politicians, businessmen, intellectuals and the media in our country have not wanted to hear or understand it, but Ludwig Von Mises was right: moderate Socialism is still Socialism, and therefore it is unstable, because its economic leadership leads to failure, and its failure leads directly to radical Socialism if there is no politically liberal alternative available. And in these last 20 years the destruction and failure of the Government is public and notorious.
The deterioration of the economy is remarkable, the scenario is one of chaos, an unprecedented economic situation in the world. The 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Richard Thaler, said it was the greatest economic disaster ever seen in human history.
VENEZUELA IN THE GREATEST MATERIAL POVERTY
The country with the largest certified oil reserves on the planet, and with many other natural resources in abundance, of all kinds, is mired in the greatest material poverty and the blackest spiritual poverty. Today we have a confused and anarchized society, and a Government with no interest in getting the country out of Poverty, seeking only to stay in power at any cost.
But the opposition that is supposed to represent us and most of its leaders have also failed. But why have they failed? Very simple: because the ideological floor that sustains all its Policies, proposals and strategies, is the old ideology of democratic Socialism.
Unfortunately that does not work, it is necessary to «Reset», and that can only be done by an opposition with new ideological bases. May I build a great Unit that can take up the great challenge to Socialism of the XXI Century and pass Venezuela to the first world.
You cannot fight something with nothing. The opposition has not had a program capable of arousing the sympathy, warmth and enthusiasm of millions of Venezuelans who do not identify with the current socialist government, but have not been attracted to the opposition offer either.
Socialism has been imposed gradually and democratically, and with the consent of the people, previously indoctrinated. Prefers deception to violence.
In Venezuela it began to be practiced in 1958, when the democratic Socialist and Christian Socialist political parties took power. However, seeking stability, the political and economic elites negotiated and reconciled their respective privileges, in a hybrid system, of social mercantilism or mercantilist Socialism. Although the trend was the predominance of politics over the economy, and Socialism over commercialism. Wealth remained scarce because under state rule little is produced and is poorly distributed. The poverty continued.
And also corruption, an inseparable companion of statism or Socialism, not of Liberal Capitalism. And also the discontent. However, propaganda and Marxist indoctrination always pointed to the same culprit: Capitalism, accused of impoverishing, exploiting, corrupt and savage.
Poor and ignorant middle class people were told that wealth is oil. Thus the people were confused, and believed the fantasies of a statism without corruption, a true democracy, and a «social justice» that would redistribute the oil money. And then in 1998 there was another system change.
COMMUNAZIFASCISM
It is the not so democratic modality, which goes faster to total Socialism. Using coercion and the use of force. In Venezuela we started in 1998.
The Government established a hard line, and it destroyed the institutions and has done everything possible to deceive and establish its system or new order according to them. But too many people know the truth of this destruction, even though there are few media outlets that dare to say so objectively. But as a Chinese proverb says, you cannot wrap fire with paper. Too many people internally and externally know the truth.
We must get out of the Socialist deceptions.
Learning is easy, the difficult thing is unlearning. And it is essential to unlearn the deceptions, in order to learn the objective truth. The first deception is that there is no objective truth. If there is: truth is reality. But errors and falsehoods about truth and reality serve as a pretext for lazy people not to study, scoundrels to cover up their misdeeds, and weather vanes to change sides at their convenience.
Democracy is not perfect, and the people make mistakes many times
You have to change the system for a better system, not worse. We must get out of this destruction and move to a Free Market system, also called Liberal Capitalism or Free Market, characterized by these three features: Limited Governments, Free Markets, and private institutions separated from the State. To produce wealth in abundance, and well distributed.
Why doesn’t the message reach the people?
It does not come for many reasons: one is the intense and frontal propaganda of the left against Capitalism, in education, the media, in the churches, etc. But another reason is that we have not had a Liberal message containing a «Program,» that is, a list of concrete reforms to put on the table, and say, «This is what we want.» Without a Liberal Program or Proposal, we cannot do anything.
It seems that we Liberals have been busy attacking each other, and criticizing statist measures and policies.
And as there have not been Liberal parties with sufficient entity either, many drift towards two pitiful deviations: 1.- to the center, with a faded democratic message, increasingly similar to that of social-democracy, or 2.- to the extreme Anarcho-Capitalist, almost always tinged with militant and aggressive Neo-atheism, very close to the harshest expressions of cultural Marxism.
We Liberals haven’t defined our offers.
Liberals should not be afraid to show ourselves for what we really are: anti-establishment.
It is what the majority is looking for, and that is why the left win, the toughest, because people vote for them, believing that they are. And they are not. The antisystems really are us. But we have to work intelligently by telling the truth.
The Liberals promote Free Market Capitalism, as opposed to Socialism, communism and the left in general, and any other form of statism, that is, the invasion of the State in spheres that are private by natural right, and the enslavement of its institutions by means of the usurpation of functions, powers and private resources. This includes Global Socialism: «New World Order.»
The Three Pillars are:
1.- Limited Governments, politically.
2.- Free markets, economically. AND
3.- Private property in social matters.
A Mission or Project is:
Change the system, through the Great Devolution of functions, powers and resources to civil society. This in application of restorative justice to all those aggrieved by the historical usurpation of functions, powers and resources by statism.
Two Policies:
1.- Repeal the bad laws, what have been the instruments of the Great Usurpation.
2.- Promote the Five Reforms, derived from the three pillars, which are also five public policies and five electoral offers: First, the Politics (State, Government and Parties), Second, the Economy and three Social reforms, The Third, Education at all levels, the Fourth, for medical care in all its branches, and specialties, and the Fifth, in Social Security (retirements and pensions).
One of the reasons to Repeal the bad laws is that they prevent these Five Reforms, which must be done simultaneously.
To be successful, and to be durable, economic reforms need to be accompanied by Reforms in Politics, education, health, etc. . And for that, complete, ideological, representative, programmatic and electoral political parties are needed, and very well structured, and committed to the transition.
It is not the State that has to defend Free Market Capitalism, but the Liberal right-wing political parties. They do not yet exist in Latin America, but they do exist in other latitudes, such as Southeast Asia.
In Taiwan, the glorious old Kuomintang party or KMT.
In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP).
In Japan, the economic recovery was due to the Liberal Party, founded in 1945.
The same in England, when Margaret Thatcher conquered the heads of her conservative party for Liberalism, and produced the great recovery of the British economy.
ECONOMIC MIRACLE
What our countries need in Latin America and in particular today in Venezuela is an economic miracle that allows us to:
1.- Eradicate the poverty that overwhelms us, and that is the breeding ground for subversion
2.- Being independent from the ups and downs of geopolitics that this socialist regime got us into
3.- Integrate ourselves into the First World, not in the midst of erroneous ideological models or recipes, but through free trade. But above all, we need to create the conditions that allow us to face the challenge of economic growth and provide real opportunities for young people to progress.
That economic miracle is freedom so that everyone can seek happiness from it, there is no mystery to success.
The excuses are over for those who did not accept that the free market and a competitive economy do work to raise the standard of living of the poorest.
Venezuelans cannot keep improvising and expecting more destruction and humiliation. The socialist paradise is not of this world. Does not exist.
Centuries may pass and governments pass, what will never happen will be the way or recipe to create prosperity and create wealth.
The true hope of the poor is Free Market Capitalism.
In Venezuela, we must eradicate Statism, and now Socialism and Communism. The Ideological Bases for a new opposition to build our Own Path to Prosperity and move to the First World is Free Market Capitalism. Only in this way can freedom and democratic coexistence be guaranteed.
This is the great challenge and challenge of the opposition.
African lions, as African countries taking off to the first world are called, were copied from China, and China from Asian tigers, and Asian tigers, from postwar German, European, and Japanese miracles. All these countries bet on a strong investment of both public and private capital, in technological development. The recipe for prosperity is universal.
In Venezuela there are still opportunities, and we still have time.
But we must all contribute. And in this sense, there is something we can do: support a coherent plan of the first world, of great technological development as in Israel, China, Singapore, South Korea, Ireland, etc.
The time of oil is running out. We have lost our oil export window. Recovering it requires large investments and state-of-the-art technology. The technology that will provide clean and renewable energy is here to stay, therefore it is our responsibility to integrate or disappear as a country with First World options.
That is why our north must be to create a nation of extremely high technological development, it is time.
We can make it ? Yes.
And much faster than we think. The technology to integrate into the First World has already been demonstrated in countries such as China and Israel, where thanks to technological advances, Israel in less than 20 years has achieved great development and entrepreneurship at the level of Silicon Valley, and in China, the region from Shenzhen, which we had the privilege of visiting when we were invited by Chinese private companies, is one of the cities or special economic zones of Free Market and of greater technological development in the world. The important thing is to have an orderly plan and take action.
It is a long road, but we have to take the first step. At the Center for Studies on Supply Economy, in collaboration with other institutions, we have been working for many years and outlining these 5 Reforms in depth because half-way reforms have already been tried and are not useful.
The Opposition in Venezuela has never opposed the rulers. That is why we insist on these Ideological Bases that the opposition must adopt, to build a Unit that is effective in its Policies and strategies. A Unit that can take up the great challenge that lies ahead and move Venezuela to the First World. If we want to Change Government, we need an opposition with new First World Ideological Bases.