Brazil has tried everything else. Now it seems ready to try liberty. Nothing ever goes in a straight line but the chances for real victories – privatization, tax cuts, trade reform, liberalization of health care and education and business enterprise – actually seem possible. And if not immediately, it is also clear that this movement is not going away. It is growing, even exponentially.If true, this would be an extremely interesting development. Brazil has, after all, the 7th largest economy in the world and it's economy is about the same size as Germany, Japan, and Russia. If Brazil somehow threw off the shackles of corruption, bureaucracy, and centralized control, something big and interesting would happen - hopefully good, possibly not (and there would certainly be losers along with the winners), but big and interesting either way.
Friday, April 14, 2017
Is Liberty Erupting in Brazil?
It sorta seemingly might be according to this article. Here's an excerpt:
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5 comments:
Clovis,
Up here in the US we have so little visibility into Brazil that I have no idea if the article is even vaguely accurate or if it's just more fake news. What's your observations?
A trump card maybe?
Bret,
To be sure, there are liberal tendencies being reinforced in the last few years. Yet, I could only laugh out loud at the naivety and far fetched optimism of the writer of that piece. I always cringe when I read something like this: "Brazil has set the bar much higher, as an example to the world.". Oh my God.
From time to time some foreigners discover Brazil, get to some unexpected experience down here, and dream up crazy and unrealistic prospects about our future. I've seen it happening many times, and I am not even that old. When the world wide optimism about our economy was running high 7 years ago, I knew they were all in for a ride.
I guess Mr. Tuckers got inside a particular bubble - of younger people in Brazil getting to know libertarian ideas and going religious about it - that has been growing very fast as of late, as he rightly observes, but only because it was a very, very small community. It will soon saturate and hit reality though.
I would like to share some of his optimism. It is disappointing to sound hopeless about our prospects for Liberty, but truthfully, I see them only diminishing. I may write why I think so in a post soon...
Clovis,
Thanks for the clarification. I was afraid it was like what you described. Oh well, it would've been interesting.
Please do post! A lot of the world ignores Brazil, but I've tried to follow it, at least a little bit, because y'all do have a major economy even if per capita GDP isn't as high as you'd like. I'm afraid that where Brazil goes, the rest of us will follow eventually.
Let's be clear: authors like Hayek are not for liberty as such but for power to adhere even more closely to money than it does anyhow.
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