Opinion – Helio Beltrão: Anauê, je suis liberô, ce billet est vrai!

The decline of socialist ideas in these parts has promoted a ceremonious procession of socialists from less purist strands to proclaim themselves “liberal”, as recurrent articles in this sheet. Constrained by decades of disaster, they were left to abandon, for survival, the original label and adopt modern rental clothing. The choice was liberalism on the rise.

As Schumpeter said, it is “a supreme compliment, even if not on purpose, that the enemies of the free enterprise system decide to confiscate the term liberal to mean the opposite of what it stands for.” When squeezing the pseudo-liberal –which I will call Fabiano–, a reddish content indistinguishable from social democracy emerges.

“Liberalism” for Fabiano is something like wearing an Indian costume at a Carnival financed with public money. And always entitled to the whistle of the “father-State” that, he hopes, will magically provide the essential things (according to Fabiano, the State “finds” or “invents” money) and will serve as an instrument to redesign society in favor of its “noble” goals.

Roberto Campos used to say that every citizen with a Marxist background sounds like a Frenchman speaking Tupi-Guarani when he becomes liberal. “Anauê, je suis liberô, ce billet est vrai!”. And what is liberalism? According to Ludwig von Mises (Liberalismo, LVM Editora), 18th and early 19th century thinkers formulated a program that served as a guide for public policy in England and the United States, and later in the rest of the world.

Although not fully implemented, the brief supremacy of liberal ideas changed the face of the planet. It is based on the idea that civil society is basically self-regulating when citizens are free to act within the boundaries of their individual rights: the “laissez faire, laissez passer”. It is much broader than economics or the free market, as it focuses on ordinary people and their quest for happiness and prosperity.

Why fight for the liberal name? To maintain conceptual coherence when dealing with intellectual history. According to the Weberian classification of ideal types, there is a coherent line in Locke, Hume, Smith, Jefferson, Burke, Turgot, Bastiat, Nabuco, Cairu, Mises, Campos and contemporary Brazilian liberalism. But Fabiano would like, socially democratically, to replace it with an intersection of the sets formed by Keynes, Popper, Mill, Rawls and Merquior.

The focus would shift to the supremacy of “individual expression” and an “equality” imposed from above, which is entirely different from equality before the law. The fundamentally liberal concept of private property (and the freedom to use it) would be omitted in favor of the so-called “common good”, centralized decisions and interventionism. Liberalism would be diluted to the point of losing significance. There would be no consensus regarding the State’s field of action. The blow will not succeed.

The whole discussion about “liberalism” by Fabiano’s gang is about what the president said or what Lula defends. The habit of overvaluing the chief executive reveals his illiberal DNA – the old dependence on a “father of the people”. They should already know that the Executive only comes from casuism: a sectoral plan here, a tax rate increase there, a little prohibitive decree here, a price insurance there…

Liberals have a well-established program for the country and will continue to seek political avenues to implement it, with a focus on Congress and legislative houses, where structural changes are negotiated. However, they must occupy all possible spaces in the public administration. The virtual sealing can stay with the Fabians on the couch, increasingly politically correct and close to the PT.