Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
Bruce Cannon Gibney pinpoints the start of this calamity to the ascent of baby boomers to institutional helms. According to his well-researched analysis while the preceding generation had to incur in life threatening sacrifices to defend democracy and freedom, baby boomers were cuddled by decades of peace and stability. While their parents understood the value of saving to build a stable personal life and an economy, baby boomers indulged in credit.
Under this circumstances Latin America’s recovery in the aftermath of COVID19 looks like an uphill battle against an increasingly competitive world that has found new growth destinations in other geographies such as Africa.
Cleary, there are innumerable ways in which wealth contributes to the saving of lives. The fact that wealth saves lives is an undeniable truism empirically available to all of us. This makes it painfully difficult to understand why many in the political Left are so adamantly opposed to wealth growth, and so hateful of wealth creators. Let’s be clear, advocacy for policies that inhibit economic growth, infers acceptance of the resulting loss of human lives.
The rest of Latin American countries are entering their electoral challenges very much like Ecuador. They seem to forget that their region is experiencing the third wave of the other disease: Marxist populism disseminated by Cuba and enshrined in Venezuela.
China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, are regimes with an enormous concentration of coercive power in the hands of the ruling class. This coercive power has engendered the generalized presumption that the rulers are born with the right to command and the people are born with the obligation to obey. In these societies, a long history of physical and intellectual coercion has fostered memes of acquiescence.
For years we have heard that “Venezuela is not Cuba” and today Venezuela is similar -or perhaps even worse- than Cuba. Now we hear that “Argentina is not Venezuela” but the methodology that is applied to end freedom and democracy, destroy free enterprise, labor unions and private property, end the rule of law, and control the Judicial Branch in Argentina, is but a repetition of what has already been done in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.
Mr Trump in the US tried to entice US corporations to bring manufacturing back to the US with less than limited success. Cost structures and global competition did not cooperate. Mr Biden is now undoing the deregulatory efforts of Mr Trump in the environmental space thinking that this will create more jobs. Truth of the matter is that it will decrease job formation. The green economy needs competition to grow not regulation.
Over the past several decades, China, Russia, and Iran have taken advantage of the existence of regimes unfriendly to the United States. This trend must not continue.
But there are hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies also censored on account of their stand vis-à-vis the interests of internet companies. The time seems to have come to hold internet companies accountable for their restrictions to free speech. Because in the country of freedom there cannot be a bigger power than the Constitution.
Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia are narco-states, they usurp power, violate human rights, have political prisoners and exiles, they conspire against democracies, support terrorism, are self-confessed antiimperialist, and are allies of all United States’ enemies, they also conspire to change North American’s foreign policy to their favor.
