Why the Spanish public education system produces socialism
Hegel (1770-1831) said that the French Revolution was devised by philosophers. Its consequences were not good for being based on contradictory principles: equality and freedom. Humans can only be equal and free at birth and when we die because, in life, we imitate those better off than us and wish to be those whom we are not. Our condition has nothing to do with equality: children of the same parents do not always look like; we desire and envy what we do not have; we despite what abounds; we value what is hard to achieve, and more so if we lose it. We seek short cuts with no moral constraints. Being aware of death transforms us; curiosity makes us uneasy. We have to learn to survive, enjoy ourselves, make friends; the finiteness of life vanishes. Necessity sharpens our ingenuity, said Gracián (1601-1658). Spinoza (1632-1677) warned us that the best we can do is to follow our own interests by seeking cooperation with others. Equality for mankind is only possible by imposition. Even then it would not exist because those exercising power would rule by making the rest slaves. Candidates to be masters sell us equality, now and previously, to deceive us, and we give them power by voting them. Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was right when he demonstrated the economics of socialism to be impossible. In Spain, the Austrian School of Economics (ASE) teaching and the liberal principles of Adam Smith (1723-1790) are voluntarily excluded from public teaching. Spanish public university departments are monopolised by an overwhelming socialist majority, which ignores ASE’s teaching where individual freedom substitutes socialist planned economy. Apart from ideological socialists, there is a crowd of unaware socialists. Some civil servants who do not necessarily vote socialists, act as if they were which, in practice, contributes to more public spending, and to the State replacing private initiatives. Being rooted in socialist unawareness does not lie in the good for Spain because patriotism has been caricatured as the extreme rightwing by socialist propaganda. Politicised education, a secure salary and barely reading easily make civil servants numb. However, civil servants are above all Spaniards. Legions of trade unionists from the public sector, freed or not, take an interest in further improving their privileges. Hegemony and socialist arrogance are such that they identify reducing the superfluous and inefficient public sector as the demon of privatisation despite Spanish public debt being devastating. Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote in his philosophical dictionary a venomous truth: “If all men then were without needs, they would thus be necessarily equal”. Fortunately, free people have needs, pastimes, we desire, we wish to choose, we do not need an omnipresent state that deprives us of freedom and takes from us property we have purchased after paying very high taxes. Human needs make enterprising people take the initiative to meet them by incurring the risk of producing goods that are bought, or not, at agreed prices. This is how commerce and prosperity emerge. How can prosperous countries prevent socialism? The most efficient instrument is apparently the Constitution. It is not by chance that the freest and most prosperous country to date has been the USA, whose constitutional principles are in tune with A. Smith’s liberal ideas and with ASE’s subjectivism. The free market or capitalism system is based on the doctrine that everyone is important, especially from the law and political points of view. As individual sovereign beings, we do not live with the permission of the government or of any master. All individuals have the basic right to private property that has been honestly purchased. The economic idea of free commerce lies in individuals, providing it is pacific and legal. The following are simply unthinkable in the USA: squatters occupying private homes; legal male/female asymmetry; positive discriminations; the Head of the Prosecution Service depending on the government; pardoning separatist criminals. The North American hegemony declines by the diffusion of socialist ideas transmitted by the European academic elites who emigrated to American universities half way through the past century, and who extended fear of individualism.
Enviado a Las Provincias en Agosto de 2023.