Professor Elías Pino, with his characteristic dry wit, discusses his most recent work, in which he defends liberalism based on a text by Francisco Javier Yanes. Catiline Epistles (1836), where Yanes states:
“Corruption and dissipation have left many men in a situation where they now find no way to free themselves except by making revolutions at the expense of the honest property owner. (…) Men of this kind are not idolaters, but idolaters of their sordid interests: having always lived off jobs and disorder, they abhor any government whose administration they cannot influence for their own benefit. (…) These men chose the means of living off jobs and profiting at the expense of the honest and hardworking man. What was that means? A revolution. (…) The most familiar way of life in our country, they said to themselves: the people have become so accustomed to them that they no longer seem like crimes.”
It's the same old refrain from the oligarchy, who see things through a clouded lens. Those "honest and hardworking" types aren't the teachers who give private lessons, or the acrobats at traffic lights, or the woman who makes empanadas; that's just surviving, not private initiative. These aren't the landowners, terrified by the military followed by mobs, who suffer injustices. They're the ones who drive upstanding men to fill volumes of complaints about the "shortage of labor" to exploit them.
The owners advance wages and lend store equipment to the day laborers, using usury and bad faith—a system of subjugation that enslaves them and from which they flee indebted. In this land of plenty, with their skills, working one day a week, they have a way to support themselves without selling their souls. But the liberals think that servitude is the natural condition of these people. They, whose example has been enrichment through embezzlement, bribery, and deceit. I paraphrase an anonymous author of The Republican, 1843.
The liberalism proposed by the teacher, under the leadership of the blessed one and the NGO-ization of the country, cannot exorcise us, among other things because the pact with the devil was not made by the day laborers, but by the lineage of Mrs. Machado. The analysis of the jumble of complaining documents from the 19th-century pact-makers could have a better title: The failure of the oligarchyYou know, teacher, that's a damn proposal. God be with us.
