The Spanish government does not want the private sector to improve
Ideologies prevent certain realities from being seen because they involve interests. The usefulness of discipline, or that of effort, comes late, but is awarded. Virtue is the habit of doing things well; vice is the habit of doing things badly. Making a mistake is not a vice; doing good is not a virtue. Both virtue and vice are social when they have repercussions for others. If I squander all my money, there will be consequences for my personal economy. Yet if public money is squandered, it affects us all because we have paid taxes.
Virtue needs faith; we need to spent time on it without seeing its usefulness, like discipline, effort and the habit of thinking. Making the effort and exercising discipline obtain subsequent extraordinary rewards, which allow high profits under frequent suboptimal conditions. What is beautiful, good and useful converge, albeit at different rates. What is beautiful might be instantaneous for some and invisible for others; what is good and useful need experience in need. Beauty expires. What is useful may also expire because of advancing technology. Digitisation does away with the need to visit our bank, it saves time and we can gain productivity. What is good remains over time. The treasures of eternal truths must be preserved: everything changes; you do not wish others what you do not wish for yourself; eliminate what is surplus; the individual risk that redounds to someone else’s benefit must be rewarded; error is the start of gaining knowledge.
Because of education and the mass media, today most of the population in Spain does not want to learn the truth because it is unpleasant, and knowing reality is being invited to uncertainty, perhaps to fear, but the truth is necessary to be free. Many Spaniards obey and become used to authoritarian interests because they have not had to fight for any freedom. PP’s distractions, Justice being occupied, the Catholic Church’s submission and “buying” the mass media are all sufficient for repeated lies to become official truths. Millions of Spaniards vote squanderers, to the point that public jobs and pensions lower as they did with Zapatero in government, when pensions dropped by 35%. la mayoría de la población no quiere conocer la verdad porque es desagradable, conocer la realidad es una invitación a la incertidumbre, si no al miedo, pero la verdad es necesaria para ser libre. Muchos españoles obedecen y se acomodan a intereses autoritarios porque no han tenido que luchar por ninguna libertad. La distracción del PP, la ocupación de la Justicia, la sumisión de la Iglesia católica, la “compra” de los medios de comunicación, basta para que la repetición de mentiras se convierten en verdades oficiales. Millones de españoles votan a derrochadores, hasta que los empleos y pensiones públicas se reduzcan como ocurrió con Zapatero, las pensiones se redujeron un 35%.
The aesthetic principle of “remove what is surplus” is attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). This principle is a distillation that allows beauty, usefulness and goodness converge. The last of these three neither squanders nor covers, the second does because you need no more and the first does because it is simple, and lacks nothing essential. Counterintuitive habits exist because they need virtues to accumulate. Light is seen better after having suffered the dark because of effort, discipline, faith. Obviously, light is beyond the scope of all those who have not practiced such habits or have not had faith.
This principle of removing what is surplus is one of them, but there are others. For example, true capitalism, which is not based on consuming, but on saving, delaying consumption, is for investing in capital and producing better. It is not intuitive and needs sacrifices being made because spending instead of saving is more tempting. Socialism is based on spending and what they call distributing (taking off some to give to others). As it deceives by removing from the most capable and giving to the incapable, the medium-term result is always ruin because there are more of the latter, who get used to this scheme, and there are fewer of the former, who feel fed up and not at all motivated. Let’s imagine that Spain is a field and the government is its farmer; the capitalist waters with sprinklers, saves water and tries to improve production by investing in fertilisers. The socialist floods poorly fertile areas by squandering water on them and removes irrigation from fertile areas. The result is worse harvests, but more water being used. In this example, water acts as taxes and fertilisers as tax incentives.
Another counterintuitive principle is there is no profit without taking a risk. Profit might be made or not, but it firstly requires seeing the possibility (which might go beyond some people’s scope), and then being daring and working well. Many people do not see the possibility, others do not dare, and only some see, dare and work well, but might later make mistakes, to make a profit. And there lies the mystery of entrepreneurship. Today in Spain, these counterintuitive truths are not taught because education does not invite anyone to run risks. People are taught that making mistakes is failure, shame, even though that is precisely the principle of knowledge. The result of this is no entrepreneurship, no innovation, because innovation without risk does not exist. The vice of ranking prevents innovation by ensuring that a quantity hinders quality.
Excellence, which is the habit of doing things well, is slow, involves having to make the effort, and having discipline, faith and goodness. It falls beyond the scope of the majority because it requires having much virtue and not being in a hurry. Nothing that cannot be free can be excellent. Indoctrinating students in a given direction is of interest. Unconditional obedience to power, statism that identifies the common good with the continuous increase in the public sector, deceiving what is private all lead to suspicions of what is bad, which is learnt in public education. If this type of management continues, we will see complete communism. Any increase made in the public sector involves raising taxes, which do away with private activity. Excellence only occurs in the private sector.
What is social is not public, but that which serves people’s needs. Gratuitousness does not exist, and it is not social either because some pay what others do not.
Generosity is possible only if people are prosperous, but not when everyone is needy and relies on the state. Charity existed before states did. Charity organisations existed before modern states did, and now reach places where the state does not touch. The greater the state, the more corruption there is because there is no transparency, something that authoritarians do not have to display. As there is no privilege beyond power, some try to take advantage by taking short cuts.
Generosity is possible only if people are prosperous, but not when everyone is needy and relies on the state. Charity existed before states did. Charity organisations existed before modern states did, and now reach places where the state does not touch. The greater the state, the more corruption there is because there is no transparency, something that authoritarians do not have to display. As there is no privilege beyond power, some try to take advantage by taking short cuts.
Spain subsidises university training by 80% and 1,100 Spanish university graduates emigrate abroad every day because they cannot find decent jobs. Spain squanders public university education expenses when its debt never stops growing; interests on Spanish public debt will consume 109 million euros a day in the next General State Budgets. More than 100,000 million euros are spent on subsidies, half of which are patronage expenses that are sources of corruption and tax evasion. If what is surplus is not removed, taxes go up, business productivity lowers, and jobs and private firms disappear.
Look at any socialist; (s)he identifies any service improvement with spending more, and even accuses the opposition of privatising, as if that were a synonym of something bad
Would Spaniards be any worse off if Spanish TV (TVE) were privatised? They would save 1,100 million euros a year and the value of its sale would be invested in other needs. If the Spanish birth rate has been dropping for decades, how can they justify that there are more pre-university teachers than ever and students arrive at university with less knowledge? Instead of doing more with less, Spain does less with more public spending. The socialist open-doors policy for illegal immigrants is saturating public services because it uses up budgets, and increases crime and citizen insecurity. It is a Trojan Horse of international terrorism; 15 million Spanish families have private health insurance because the Spanish public health service is inefficient. If private property is not respected, fewer homes will be available to rent, owned by Spaniards who purchased another property as an investment or towards their pension. Land can be made available by making it ready to build on and to fiscally stimulate the creation of new private housing. Accesses to large cities close to empty zones can be improved and could be filled with housing with access to Internet services, which would support the primary sector, and abandoned areas would once again arise. For years, investments of 100,000 million euros could have been invested in providing the emptied rural Spain with services by improving communications, without adding taxes, and by simply privatising TVE and cutting by half patronage subsidies. Illegal immigration must be stopped; 70% are unemployed, are paid a subsidy, saturate social