Barcelona

Libertarian Institutes all over the world - and I have visited many - are usually made up of four enthusiastic cats, a few businessmen and fewer intellectuals whose competence in economic theory and political philosophy is as splendid as their inability to salvage from the catacombs the ideas they defend, and to present them to a larger public. Carlos Alberto Montaner believes that the essential difficulty of Classical Liberal ideas in arising popular mystique and infecting various sectors of the population, as compared to Socialist ones for instance, has its roots in the fact that Liberalism contradicts common sense, the so-called cognitive evidences. As a matter of fact, how can a housewife or a clerk understand that the less control a government has over economic matters, the more orderly the economy of the country will be, and everyone's necessities will be better taken care of? Why should a mechanic or a construction worker believe that the best way for a government to help create new jobs and raise salaries is literally not to be involved with it, not to do anything - which means letting the market deal freely with the problem?

Libertarians make use of impressive statistics to demonstrate the above. But a very powerful tradition of given ideas, myths, clichés, stereotypes, prejudices and ideological fabrications -- some of great emotional fervour -- can prevail over these reasonable and rational demonstrations, as cold as a fish. Many human beings have let themselves be killed for noble causes and innumerable stupid reasons; but so far nobody seems to be willing, and no doubt ever will be willing -- to be burnt at the stake or face a firing squad in defense of statistics. Thus, I fear that many people will continue studying Marx and very few study Adam Smith. The latter was certainly closer to rational truth than the former, but his truth was insipid, confined to the realm of intelligence, while the arguments of the other thrived on the passions that kept Messianic dreams alive throughout history. How could this peaceful Scotsman ever compete against the bearded prophet of the apocalypse of history, having been against the control of government over trade and -- irony of ironies! -- having ended his life as a benign customs officer?

But if there were more Liberals with the polemical stamina and pugnacious militancy of Ambassador José O. de Meira Penna, others would speak out in this wizened Liberal cluster. This euphoric name seems to bear too heavily on the ascetic looking old gentleman whom I met one night in Curitiba, Brazil. Dressed in white, he flattered and helped the ladies to their seats. But he was not even remotely similar to the typical diplomat whom George Edwards describes as "the cocktail tiger." At the table during dinner, I heard him intervene two or three times with such refined irony, that a simple comment of his was able to transform a banal conversation into a complex discussion. That very night I started to leaf through the two books he had given me as a gift. What a surprise! I didn't put them down until I had finished them.

A Man of Great Culture

Ambassador Meira Penna is a retired Brazilian diplomat, a former professor at the University of Brasilia and a man of wide culture who has read all the great classics and modern works of literature on Liberal thought, and has made classical Liberalism a live and exciting doctrine which he uses to analyze the political and cultural problems of the present time. He is also a wonderful polemicist. In his book A Ideologia do Século XX (The Ideology of the XXth Century") he blows up, one by one, all the sorceries of populism, throwing into the same bag Marxists, Nationalists, Socialists, Fascists and Third-Worlders with reasons as overwhelming as Hayek had when dealing with Nazism and Communism in his book The Road to Serfdom. His theory is that, despite their differences, all of these doctrines share a belief in state-rule, strengthen the Nation State, reduce or annul individual sovereignty and are variables of collectivism. Under these conditions, in the long or in the short run, they are harmful and incompatible with a prosperous economy and an authentic democracy. The argument is forceful and supported by examples taken from the history of the Twentieth Century, through which Ambassador Meira Penna strides with the ability of a cat on a roof. But the most obvious cases which come to mind - and often the saddest - are almost always related to Brazil's reality, the tragedy of Brazil, a country that, on the sparkling pages of these writings, we find frustrated in its yearnings for development as a result of the foolishness and demagoguery of its rulers.

But it is Meira Penna's other book, Opção Preferencial pela Riqueza ("Preferential Option for Wealth", Rio 1991) that fascinated me even more. The Ambassador shares his intellectual curiosity over economic philosophy and liberal polities with a strong adhesion to Jung's psychoanalytical theories (he has studied at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich) and theology. The chapters of this book seek to integrate these three angles of vision, and although these efforts do not always retain the same persuasive power, they often lead to brilliant and creative findings.

The Preferential Option

The Theology of Liberation is, of course, the favoured target of Meira Penna's demolishing reasoning when he puts the "preferential option for poverty" of its defenders under scrutiny of logical analysis. He concludes that if the proponents of such a Theology were coherent with their assumptions and carried them through to their final consequences, they should openly oppose any policy that favours development and material progress of society as a whole, and adopt as models such countries as Somalia, Ruanda and Abissinia where indeed, the whole society has fallen down into a universal fraternity of shared hunger and misery. To reject wealth as being worthless, to make satans out of those who create affluence and damn them as enemies of the spirit, and to translate into political and social values the voluntary rejection of material goods, as well as scarcity and physical deprivation, might provide with a good "social conscience" some naive, or injudicious believers. But for the whole of human society, an alternative such as this can only be brought into concrete existence among a population of human ruins, or a mass of consumptive primitives. "If only the poor and their defenders are saved", stresses Meira Penna, "then, by bringing wealth to all men, the Industrial Revolution would by the same token condemn all to damnation."

The Dependency Theory

Ambassador Meira Penna is perhaps slightly cruel when he deals ironically with some Brazilian thinkers and politicians such as Hélio Jaguaribe, and the recently-elected President Fernando Henrique Cardoso who now champions theories like the decentralization of power and privatization of the economy. Just five years ago at the time of the last elections, they both supported Lula's candidacy who, had he won, would have carried out radically populist policies. And he reminds us that both of them, especially Fernando Henrique Cardoso, were great theorists and promoters of the so-called "dependency theory", the same concept that encouraged economic nationalism and the enormous growth of Statism over the whole continent, thus causing Latin America a terrible setback in its urge for development.

This is the only topic in relation to which I don't fully agree with the valiant diplomat. Why shouldn't Cardoso and Jaguaribe have learned their lessons thanks to what happened to the world during these last few years, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the myth of collectivism and State control? Not everyone is capable of seeing as clearly from the very beginning, in the midst of the intricate and conflictive realm of political ideas, philosophical systems and economic theories. For many of us, it was through hard work, perplexities, doubts, polemics and difficult revisions, that we reached conclusions which for him, as a man endowed with particular lucidity, must have seemed obvious from the very moment. What is important as far as President Cardoso is concerned, it is not what he thought and wrote. It is rather what he said and promised in his electoral campaign - the program with which he was elected. This program follows the lines of modernity. Those who, like Meira Penna, believe in the ideas and principles that it embodies, should now remind the President of it and help him carry the program through.