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It causes me great amusement to see so many people trying to explain the economic errors of Petro’s proposals. It is true that he is a natural-born imbecile who has developed with special success his natural gifts and that his uncontainable verbosity has shown us the gigantic dimensions of his multifaceted ignorance, but the point is that his proposals are not born so much from his stupidity or ignorance as from the criminal instinct that beats in his whole being. The economic policy of Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego is criminal because it is focused on stealing the food of the poor, the property of the rich and the freedom of all.
Taking Cues from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela
Petro proposes massive monetary counterfeiting until the currency is completely destroyed, stripping it of all purchasing power, as Lenin did in Russia, as Castro did in Cuba, and as Chavez did in Venezuela. The destruction of the national currency is accompanied by the absolute prohibition of the majority of the population to have access to other currencies. Stripped of currency, people are at the mercy of the tyranny that manu-militari decides where you can live, where you can go, or what you can eat.
Petro proposes to steal the food of the poor by causing shortages and shortages through the control of rents, prices, and wages; raising tariffs so that the importation of goods and services is only available to the corrupt oligarchy that through exchange control monopolizes access to foreign currency. But the darkest thing is what he proposes in his autobiography, where he announces that he will put an end to the market economy to give way to the economy of the necessary. The thing that for many people is his socialist proclamation.
Petro’s Goal: Destroying Capitalism
The wealth of free nations, which is the wealth of the individuals who make it up, is the result of the division of labor, and this has no other limit than the extent of the market and the extent of the exchanges of the product of their labor which individuals freely and voluntarily make with those of their own nation and with those of more remote nations. The richest people are those who directly or indirectly exchange their own products, their own creations, and their own services with more and more people. There is no poorer person than the one who does not exchange anything with anyone and who is therefore condemned to supply his basic needs with his own isolated effort. This has always been the true promise of socialism and communism: to put an end to the freedom to exchange, to annihilate and suppress the human propensity to change in order to make people conform to the basics, to the minimum, to what is necessary.
It is false that socialism has failed in Cuba or Venezuela, countries whose economic and political systems Petro admires and wishes to implement in our country. The success of socialism in Cuba has been total. Three generations have already been born without the freedom to decide what they want to do with their own person, with their own work, without the possibility of freely exchanging their products and services with others. Three generations are accustomed to the basics, to what the dictatorship that oppresses them decides are their rights, their needs.
Suppressing Dissent and Embracing Socialism
The population no longer rebels or protests, since most of them have fallen, most of them, into the ominous situation of voluntary and grateful servitude to which socialist tyrants want to lead the inhabitants of the countries where they manage to impose themselves. Venezuela, the troubled Venezuela, is decidedly advancing along this path. Young Venezuelans in their twenties, the same age as the many in Colombia who vote for Petro, have not enjoyed a single second of freedom in their lives.
Socialism does not suppress the pursuit of self-interest, it represses its exercise of freedom for the majority of the population while reserving it, in varying degrees, according to the hierarchy within the nomenclature, for the members of the single governing party. It is fraudulent self-interest, as it has always been exercised by criminals, through fraud, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, and murder.
The difference is that under socialism criminals exercise their self-interest from power, from the government. All socialist rulers seeking their self-interest become immensely rich. All socialist rulers are criminals who have expropriated, which is the same as stolen, the goods of others and who every day expropriate from the subjugated the most precious of human beings’ goods: their own work. The socialist government that Petro promises would be, as it is already in Venezuela or Cuba, the government of the organized lumpen that has taken power.
Luis Guillermo Vélez Álvarez is an economist and consultant at the Center for Systemic Economics Studies (ECSIM). @LuisGuillermoVl // Luis Guillermo Vélez Álvarez es economista y consultor del Centro De Estudios En Economía Sistémica (ECSIM). @LuisGuillermoVl