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May 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:52
3696 The Fall of Brazil | Felipe Moura Brasil and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Very, very pleased to bring to you the latest news on the decay of socialism in Brazil.
We're going to talk to Felipe Moura Brasil.
He is a Brazilian journalist for O Antagonista.
The Antagonist!
Great name.
And he has been ranked as the number one political influencer in Brazil on Twitter.
He's the organizer of the best-selling Brazilian book, The Minimum You Need to Know, Not to be an idiot, also known as my morning mantra.
You can check out O Antagonista at oantagonista.com, and you can follow Philippe on Twitter, twitter.com forward slash blog, D-O-P-I-M, blog, dopam.
Philippe, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you.
It's an honor.
Okay, Brazil, the world's fifth most populous country, seems to be undergoing late-stage socialist decay.
I wonder if you can take people a little bit through the history of Brazil, some of the problems of the hyperinflation and successive governments, and give people a sense of where everything that's happening now came from in history.
Actually, we had a military regime in the 70s.
The military came to power because there were conflicts with the extremist left-wing groups.
They were putting bombs and doing something like this.
And the army got into power.
And it should have...
Give the country back to democracy in six months, but they remained in power for 21 years.
So the left was against the military regime, of course, and there were atrocities in both sides, committed by both sides, like torture, murders, and they were all wrong.
But the left-wing posed themselves as people who wanted democracy in Brazil, and that's not what they wanted there.
They wanted to make Brazil a Left-wing dictatorship, just as Cuba.
And they had destructions and guns coming from Cuba.
And that's what they were trying to make.
But they changed history.
And they say they wanted democracy.
That's not what they wanted.
But after 21 years, they got the media, the universities, schools.
They teach people a wrong way.
A false history in Brazil.
And they pose themselves as this, how I am explaining.
And Dilma Rousseff, our last president, was one of them.
She was in this kind of groups, guerrilla groups, left-wing groups.
And...
And she says that she wants democracy and this.
So we had a democracy in Brazil that there's no political right-wing side.
All our political spectrum is like leftists because the right-wing side was demonized as something similar to Military dictatorship.
And now we are trying to tell people that that's not the right-wing values.
That's not even close to Ronald Reagan government or Margaret Thatcher government.
And now Brazil is having the consequences of so many left-wing government that we had here.
So they increased the size and the power of this state, and our economy was ruined by this.
Well, there was some liberalization in the early 2000s, right?
The government shrank a little bit.
It became a little bit easier to do business in Brazil, and a lot of foreign investment came pouring in.
The economy began to grow, and then everyone said, great, lots of money.
Let's start spending on social programs and infrastructure and basically bribing the population.
In return for votes, is that a fair way to characterize that transition?
Yes, because we had monetary reforms there at the beginning of the years 2000.
They were made by a left-wing government, but Brazil needed money, a huge state, and this government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is a left-wing guy, he started to make some policies like this, as you're saying.
So the Workers' Party, which is another party, They painted him as a right-wing guy that was selling Brazil to the foreigners and this kind of stuff.
But he was just doing something that the government needed to have money.
So he was selling state-run companies and divesting this.
What happened is that the Workers' Party came to government after these monetary reforms, which they fought against.
And they were lucky because the economy was in a good track and the price of Brazilian commodities were high.
And Lula da Silva, when he came to power in 2003, After the campaign in 2002, the Brazilian economy was growing.
So he fought against all the things that changed the Brazilian economy and made it Put it in a good way.
But then when he was in power, he maintained this.
And Brazil, for some years, was in a good track.
But they spent money, money, money, money, and the state became so huge that it became unsustainable.
And then we had these consequences, the inflation, debt, all the consequences of the increase of the size of the state, which got worse with his successor, Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that transition, which I think is important for people to understand before we get into the corruption scandals, which are mind-blowing.
Mind-blowing on two levels.
Number one, that they're occurring.
Number two, that people are actually going to jail for it.
But we'll get to that.
For people in America, this may be a little bit hard to follow.
So let's talk about what happened with Lula and then Rousseff and how that transition occurred because he seemed to portray himself as a typical sort of barrel-chested, left-wing, populist, I'm here for the workers, but his successor, the woman he picked, seems to be going through some ethics challenges of her own these days.
Yes.
Well, Lula got to power and he started to make these social programs to transfer money from the taxpayers to poor people.
And so he posed himself as a populist that was taking people out from misery.
And so poor people believed him.
Because of this.
But while he was doing this, he was giving money from state-run banks to Brazilian most richest executives from the Brazilian biggest construction companies that Had contracts with Brazilian state-run companies too, like Petrobras, the oil company, the biggest state-run company in Brazil.
So the car wash operation run by Brazilian FBI found out that there was a cartel, that they were doing overpriced contracts to pay bribes for politicians.
And it all happened during the Workers' Party government.
So Lula is now being accused, is a defendant in five cases.
Now we have the sixth one, and he's accused of obstruction of justice, criminal organization, money laundering, corruption, everything like this.
So what he did is he posed himself as the one that people would love because he would give them money while he was making these corruption schemes with the richest people in Brazil.
Oh, and let's talk a little bit about what's going on with Petrobras, because it's a monopoly.
It's a government monopoly on oil, and the amounts involved in the briberies and the corruption are almost beyond belief.
So $800-plus million in bribes.
I've seen reports that there have been up to $20 billion stolen from the company, which is half...
So the feeding fest of these jackals on the state-run oil agency is almost beyond imagination how large, how powerful the people involved are, and how much money in the tens of billions of dollars may have been just stolen from the state agency.
Yes, so much money.
And that's the problem that we have when the state is huge in Brazil.
We have like 139 state-run companies, Workers' Party.
While they were in government, they created more.
43.
And then it became...
139.
So people inside the state, they sell favors and influence to people outside the state.
And that's what happened in lots of corruption schemes in Brazil, not only in Petrobras, but in other state-run companies too.
And the Iran is huge.
The biggest scandal in Brazilian history may be in the world.
They stole Billions of dollars of Brazilian taxpayers.
And that's terrible.
But fortunately, we had this great generation of prosecutors that have this ideal of justice, of delivering a good job, and they are...
People in Brazil, Brazilians love them because they are investigating these politicians that Brazil discovered that are corrupt.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but the scope of this, again, is something that really needs to be understood.
I know it's well understood within Brazil.
But these are the numbers that I found.
They may have changed since this report came out, right?
So of the 591 politicians in Congress, 352 are under investigation.
There are three former presidents under investigation.
In many ways, the entire political class is implicated in the wholesale theft of billions and billions of dollars from the Brazilian economy, from a variety of state-run agencies, organizations, and businesses.
It is almost unbelievable how far and how wide, in a relatively short period of time, this rot has spread.
Yes, it's incredible.
It's not the entire class because, of course, there are some innocent people, but this old politician class in Brazil, people are tired of them.
And we have presidential elections in 2018, so people are waiting for this to renew the political class because all these big parties, such as the Workers' Party, which we call PT, The initials in Portuguese,
PMDB, PSDB, these three, they have lots of corrupt politicians and tired of them, but we still don't have this leader who will come in 2018, so we are leaving this now.
The people are tired with the old political class and they still don't have a leader that come to unite the people to the 2018 elections.
That's the situation now.
Of course, we are having scandals every day because this generation of prosecutors, they found out...
Too many scandals.
And yesterday, like two days ago, two former governors were arrested.
And we are waking up with this kind of news every day now.
And the political class are trying to find a solution.
To block these investigators.
And that's what we journalists are fighting against.
Because all the big parties are trying to make new laws, just as something that happened in Italy.
We had this Investigation over there that is often used as an example by the Brazilian prosecutors.
And there the politicians made some new laws to block the investigations and they were successful.
It's what we don't want to happen in Brazil, but they are trying every day.
So the reporters, columnists like I am, we are all...
Trying to find out this information and to make people know what they're trying to do to block the investigations.
That's not what we want.
We want the ones who made the wrong things, they go to jail.
That's what people in Brazil want.
Well, and there is – so this Lula, the man who – very, very popular, as you pointed, very, very popular head of the government.
So then he handpicks the woman, Rousseff, to be his successor.
And then he gets into trouble with the law.
Is it fair to say she – is the perception in Brazil that she ended up promoting him to a high government position in order to shield him?
Yes.
That's what happened and they are investigated for obstruction of justice.
In this case, Lula was already a former president.
Dilma was in power as a Brazilian president and she nominated him as a minister so he could skip away, that's how you say this, from the investigation because the ministers in Brazil are They are judged by the Supreme Court, not by these judges that are doing a great job in Brazil.
And the problem is that, such as in the United States, the judges in the Supreme Court are nominated by politicians.
So the Supreme Court in Brazil is too much politicized, like seven people.
Of the 11 ministers in Brazilian Supreme Court were nominated by Workers' Party government.
So that's all they wanted.
But fortunately, we have this great judge, Sergio Moro, which is doing a great job.
And he revealed some conversations between Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and some other So, he's still subject to the authority of the prosecutors who are going after everyone else.
Exactly.
He's a defendant in five cases and he's being interrogated.
And we have the images, the videos of him being interrogated and we point out his lies, his contradictions.
It's being...
Like this here in Brazil, every day a scandal and every day we have to point out the lies they tell people.
Right.
Because he doesn't really have arguments to defend himself because the evidence against him are so heavy, are so good, and there are so many evidence against him that he keeps acting like a populist politician.
Like he was...
Giving a speech to the people on the street, but he's being interrogated by the judge so that arguments don't work there.
And it's laughable.
And we, of course, we make lots of jokes.
I am ironic, rather.
And I make a lot of jokes about this, but the situation is sad in Brazil, of course.
Yeah, if you're being interrogated empty populist phrases, hope and change, they're not going to do you.
Social justice will not get you off the hook.
So you're dealing with slightly more intelligent and perceptive people than the general population.
Now, with Petrobras...
I think the important thing to remember, too, is that Youssef, the woman who is, I guess, still in for the time being, at the height of these corruption scandals, she was in charge, was she not, of this company, and she herself has not been, I think there's nothing direct that ties her, and she's claimed no knowledge of these scandals in the oil company, but almost every alleged or convicted offender in this Scandal in this corruption scandal is actually part of her governing coalition.
So if she didn't know about it, she sure as hell didn't choose very honest people in many cases to be in charge of Petrobras.
Yes, you're talking about Dilma Rousseff, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Each day comes out new evidence that shows that she knew everything.
They still say they don't know, they knew anything that was happening.
And what's interesting is that many partners of them were arrested.
So you have Workers' Party people arrested that And people who was there stealing money from Petrobras, they are telling the investigators what happened.
And they say Lula da Silva knew everything.
They say Dilma Rousseff knew everything.
And even the couple that were her campaign managers, they were arrested.
And now that's the biggest joke in Brazil.
A campaign manager that builds Dilma Rousseff with lies, builds her career, especially in the 2010 and 2014 elections, with lies, telling lies to the people, now are destroying her.
Now they're destroying her truth.
They're saying what she knew, what she did, and especially that she tried to inform them about The prison about that they were going to be arrested in a few days.
So she tried to inform them so maybe they could run away.
They were in República Dominicana and she sent emails writing only the draft So she didn't send the email, so they had the password.
Dilma Rousseff had the password.
The campaign manager had the password to see the email there.
She only wrote the draft.
They saw there and they erased.
Well, Dilma thought they raised but they didn't and they handled it to the investigators.
So now Dilma is accused of obstruction justice.
They are corrupted people and we have these incredible stories happening here every day and even the account of the House of Cards wrote down on Twitter that it can't compete with Brazil anymore.
Now, there has also been allegations that her campaign may have been illegitimate because it was illegal money that was used to partly fund it and also that she covered up deficits in government spending by taking money from the central banks and other places.
I wonder if you could help people understand just how much of a cover-up and how much illegitimacy seems to be at the foundation of her presidency.
Yeah.
Yeah, her presidency is illegitimate.
It was built with dirty money from this corruption scheme in Petrobras.
Now the evidences are very strong about this.
There's a case in the electoral court in Brazil to decide that if the mandate was illegitimate or not.
But she was impeached, so her vice president, came into power and now this electoral court will decide that if the mandate is illegitimate for Dilma Rousseff and for Michel Temer which is her vice president and now the president of Brazil or only for her not for him we have this kind of discussions now
and Yes, we had dirty money in this campaign.
The investigation is showing this.
And you mentioned another thing about the dirty money with Dilma that I'm not remembering now.
Oh, just how she, in order to make up for some of the government deficits, she seemed to have taken money out of the central bank or other places?
Yeah, that was actually the reason why she was impeached.
So she used the money of federal banks in electoral programs and she didn't spend the money of the government with some social programs that she had to pay.
So the government She should have paid the social programs and she put the federal banks to pay it instead of the government so the government could spend the money in the campaign.
So it was all wrong and each day Brazilian people are seeing this and now she's trying even to come back to...
I was doing a video just before this interview because he's still trying to come back to presidency although all this evidence saying that Michelle Temer her vice president with She hates, of course.
She's not legitimate, but she's not legitimate too.
So that's the situation in Brazil.
People don't like her.
People don't like Michel Temer also.
People are waiting, anxious, for Brazilian 2018 elections.
Right.
And as you point out in a recent video, Philippe, the government was spending four times, four times in expenditures what it was taking in in taxes.
And were people aware of this at the time, or was it kind of wallpapered over or covered over by this money manipulation?
It was all covered up.
They always tried to pose themselves, the government, as they had lots of money because of the campaign.
The government had no money during the year of the campaign, but they didn't want to tell people about this.
So they wanted to paint the government as doing great things to Brazil, great things to people, and so she could be elected.
And she was elected.
And after the election, everything happened not as she told during the campaign.
In a few months, even people who voted for her were already with anger against her and that's what made the impeachment process so strong and the congressmen gathered together to find the solution and she was impeached after a long process and of course lots of conflicts about this.
Right.
Now, of course, commodity prices helped to buoy a lot of this stuff up.
And it's gone from its high to its low down by about half.
And I know that Brazil has, of course, with oil and soybeans and other things, a lot to do with commodity prices.
But...
This massive amount of government spending produces this illusion of an economy, this illusion of income.
It's like eating plastic fruit and thinking you're getting some nutrition.
But now the bill seems to be coming due.
In 2015, Brazil's economy shrank almost 4%.
And the nightmare for the left and for the economy as a whole and for the people is the stagflation, right?
You have high inflation and a recession.
And the worst that's happened...
In Brazil since the 1930s, the value of the currency dropped by almost 25% since Youssef took office in 2011.
People are paying 10% more a year for the necessary stuff in life.
Is there an awareness that the hangover has hit from the excessive, quote, partying of massive leftist spending from Youssef and her government?
Well...
The price of the commodities were high, and instead of making the necessary reforms, they didn't.
They just increased the size of the estate, transferred money, until it became unsustainable.
So, they waste money, waste money, waste money, and now, with cynicism, they blame the international situation, the crisis of the commodities, like, oh, we couldn't know that the commodities price were going low, so that's what happened in Brazil, and that's not true.
Of course, when the economy is good, You prepare yourself for a scenario in which the commodities will be low, and they did not do that.
So the Brazilian economy has shrinked, and we have now 14 million unemployed people.
It's terrible.
And Dilma Rousseff is trying to solve her own unemployment, trying to come back to presidency.
And we make jokes about it.
And Michel Temer, his successor, is trying to solve these problems without making the taxpayers to pay more money to the government because people are tired of paying the bill for the corruption,
for the wastes, the spending of the government and we have lots of protests about this and he's trying to make some reforms to solve the problem without making the taxes higher to Brazilian taxpayers who are in the world maybe one of the most The people that more pay taxes in the world.
And we have lots of protests about this.
And Michel Temer chose a great economic team to run Brazilian economy now.
The problem is that Michel Temer is from PMDB and he and his party, they are not saints.
And in the political area, we have still immoralities, we have still investigators that are Finding out some things about their ministers.
So the people, this old politician's class, are all in the same boat.
But the economy is going in a good way.
And it was going in a good way.
At least until one week ago, when the media showed the tape in which the president is talking to a Food company executive was being investigated.
And this guy, Joesley Batista from JBS, a huge Brazilian company, he was telling the crimes he was committing, the prosecutor he put inside the investigation to give him information about it.
And in the audio, The president agrees, he doesn't say anything like, oh, come on, I'm out of here.
He doesn't show this moral repulse.
So it was a great scandal because the president can't do this kind of stuff and their meeting was not the official agenda.
So we have a new scandal with this vice president that became the president.
And now the economy, the analysts don't know if it will make the economy bad or not.
But we have a good economic team working out for Brazil.
So we've talked about some of the good prosecutors, Felipe, who are going after these corrupt politicians.
But crime in Brazil, again, it is a country of extremes in some ways.
Crime in Brazil is truly horrendous.
I was reading a story of that guy who was theorizing.
He said, look, if you have a clean record, you can go and kill someone.
And if you have good lawyers, it's very slow.
You can actually, 10 years can go by, and maybe the statute of limitations for some crimes, you can really keep things at bay.
And this comes, I think, from a lot of the leftist ideology, which says that crime is a function of poverty and lack of opportunity.
And so you can't punish someone for committing a crime in this mindset, because it's the environment.
It's like blaming someone for losing weight, When they don't have enough to eat because they're in some horrible prison.
I mean, it's not their fault.
And so there tends to be, don't put people in jail, no consequences, lots of stringing along of criminals.
And I think one of the results of that has been this skyrocketing crime rate.
I wonder if you could tell people, not to scare off visiting the lovely country, but what is it like, especially in the big cities of Sao Paulo and so on, what is it like for crime for the average person?
Well, you're absolutely right about this left-wing ideology that poisoned our law system here in Brazil and the criminals are not well punished.
They have All the easy-going ways to not go to jail, they stay there, they remain there for a short period.
And people on the left are always saying that our prisons are overpopulated and you need to put criminal streets again, more criminals, and we are fighting to make this system better for Brazil.
Well, I live in Rio de Janeiro and of course we have here areas that you can walk on the streets.
We have a life.
We make exercises on the streets.
We have these beautiful views here.
But we never know where there will be a thief that will take your wallet.
It can happen.
Everywhere.
And of course, you have areas that are controlled by drug dealers where it's difficult to go in because of decades of inaction of the government about this.
That's the situation, the criminality, this fear that the citizens have every day to go to work, to come back late, to take a bus, the metro, this is...
This is terrible for Brazil and we are always trying to fight against it, but we need to renew this old political class to find solutions about this because they are not worried about the common citizen and They are supposed to.
They are worried about taking taxpayers' money to remain in power forever.
This taxpayers' money that's sealed in this corruption scheme is put in their campaigns.
And what's laughable is that in some parties, they are who admit that they steal money for the campaign, but not for themselves.
And so we have great stories of people inside these parties that found out that some of the guys were putting money in their pockets to enrich themselves.
And they said, no, that's immoral.
But if you put the stolen money in the party campaigns, oh, that's okay.
That's great.
So that's the best morality we have in these old parties is this one.
The people that don't accept you to put money in your own pocket.
But in the parties, okay.
Well, of course, if you put money in the party, you get the political power, which allows you to exploit the corruption, so the money ends up in your own pocket either way.
And one thing that struck me, doing the research for this conversation, Philippe, one thing that struck me is that, is there an awareness that some of the corruption starts with the people?
Because there are all of these people who make these wonderful speeches.
There's economic injustice, and we want social justice, and there are rich people that are rich because they stole from the poor people.
And we're going to go to the rich people.
We're going to take their money.
We're going to give it to the poor people, which is basically just bribing people with other people's money in return for their vote.
So to me, you know, I see all these pots and pans clanging away in windows and so on, and I'm sure that some people are, you know, honest and honorable and justified.
But the corruption, even to vote these leftists in, why do they get voted in?
Because they promise, quote, free stuff.
And so the bribery starts from the politicians to the people.
And I don't know if people have really connected those dots yet, that they've enabled corruption in the government because they've been corrupted themselves with the promise of other people's money.
Yeah, connect the dots is the problem in Brazil.
We don't have very well-educated people, and people believe in the promises of Of these populist politicians and they don't connect the cause with the consequence.
But now, after 14 years of workers' parliament, things are starting to change.
That's what I said in my PragerU video.
People, even in poor areas, are saying that the big state is a problem, they don't want to pay more taxes.
But of course, Lula da Silva has his electorate, people who believe him, who thinks all the accusations against him were invented by the media, because that's his narrative.
And so people still believe this kind of promises and we don't have so many options of honest politicians in which they can believe.
And that's a problem.
An education problem that we are trying to solve out To solve.
Telling people how these things work.
Showing in video what they say in contrast of what they do.
And that's what I'm doing here every day.
Making my own videos at home and doing interviews and writing about it.
So people can Be prepared for the next elections and show them the lists, the names of these corrupted politicians.
Well, and this is really interesting to me because I visited Brazil a few years ago and gave a speech and had a debate with Professor Safatley, who I think could be safely said to be a little bit on the left.
And I had some wonderful meetings, wonderful meetings with a very bright and very committed and very eloquent group of Brazilians who knew their Mises, some even their Rothbard, and were very, very keen on small government, free markets, human very keen on small government, free markets, human liberty.
And it was a very, very powerful thing for me to see.
They seemed in some ways even more energetic and lively and optimistic than even libertarians in America and so on.
And by the way, a little bit better dressed.
But that perhaps is a topic for another time.
And so can you tell me a little bit about the libertarian movement or the free market movement or the small government movement in Brazil?
How is it doing at least in the couple of years since I've been there?
Well, it's getting bigger, of course, but the problem is you have to connect with people.
You should know how to talk to the common citizen.
And these people who want to show the economic part of the story, They don't have these abilities to talk with people such as the populist politicians have.
So we have this kind of problem because small government, free market, it all seems too much abstract for the common citizen.
And that's where they lose the debate.
And we have to show some Practical examples of how it happens and that's what I'm trying to do here every day.
Because Lula da Silva, he speaks, he makes soccer analogies, comparisons with music and movies and people.
He gets attention of the people.
He has disabilities to talk to people.
And if you talk to people as a bank manager...
You'll have a huge problem to connect with the common citizen.
And that's why the Workers' Party won four elections, because they are competitors.
They couldn't talk to the common citizen.
They were talking about abstractions.
And people want to know what will happen with their street, what will happen with their What they buy in the market, how they will take care of their home, how they will take care of their child.
And that's the things that are interesting to the common people.
So these people who read Mad Mises and other free market books, People who defend these ideas, they have this difficult.
And I think they should go to the streets more, they should talk to more people, they should listen to more popular music, they should...
They should pay attention in sports.
They should go to the movies because they should use this when they are trying to sell these kind of ideas.
And here in Brazil, the left still controls the culture.
And they control the culture.
Because of this, they know that a song that people...
It's much more useful to them politically than a huge article that six or seven people will read.
The right in Brazil and these classic economic liberals and libertarians, they have a marketing problem.
And I think it's similar to what happens in the United States.
Sometimes the right have this problem too.
I think Andrew Klavan and Ben Shapiro, they talk about it very much, and that happens in Brazil too.
Right.
Of course, another big problem is that with every successive leftist government, you get more and more people dependent on income redistribution, dependent on state checks, dependent on state money.
And then if you say, well, let's privatize, let's liberalize, let's make things more free market, they look at that check they're getting every month and they think it's going to go up in flames.
And that bribery class that people who've adapted themselves, their livelihoods, their existence, their health care, just about everything may depend, single motherhood, they may depend on the government.
And undoing that, you know, it's a lot easier to get people addicted to government money than to get them off.
Government money.
And after, as you say, a decade and a half or more, peeling this stuff back becomes very challenging.
Exactly.
It's very, very challenging to show people that you offer them the opportunities, but they will have to work to earn their own money and not be independent on the government.
And Lula da Silva and His partners, they're all saying that they took millions of people out from misery, which they did not.
The economic reforms made it.
And when you put people in social programs that they receive money without working, You didn't take them out from misery because they are dependent on the state and that's still some kind of misery.
And that's the challenge.
You made the point.
It's very hard to convince these people that some other way is better for them and for the country and they might be rich.
They might get rich, but they don't believe they can get rich.
They believe they should take this amount of money the government delivers and take care of their child, then stay at home and whatever.
Yeah, no, it's like the people who give you heroin for a toothache.
It's like, hey, your tooth feels better now, doesn't it?
It's like, yes, but the problem hasn't been solved and the rot is just going to get worse.
And then when you finally do run out of heroin, your life is going to be a big mess.
But convincing people – and it's funny because in societies – To get men in particular to make big giant sacrifices, to go to war, to, you know, do all of these things.
People say, well, you know, we have to have – men will make the sacrifices and men will go and risk their lives for war.
But getting people dependent on the state – and there's a lot of women in that.
It's not only women.
But getting people dependent on the state to make – 1% of the sacrifices that men have to make in war seems an almost impossible task.
If you could declare it a war, it's like you could solve the whole problem.
But because it relies on individual conscience and morality, it becomes a lot tougher to solve.
Those kinds of sacrifices that people need to make to withdraw from this kind of money, it's really hard to make that case unless there's a real extremity, even worse than what's going on in Venezuela.
And of course, everyone hopes it doesn't go that far.
Yes, and that's the point, because you can't start to do this.
You can't let people, intellectuals, they can't let a government start to do this with so many people, like it happens in Brazil with 50 million people, because it's too hard afterwards to convince them the other way around.
So that's one of the reasons I made this video for Prager University, to show Americans to don't...
Don't come in Brazilian way.
Don't go this way.
Because it's too bad.
And what happened here in Brazil is that people...
I say a sentence like, socialism always works at the beginning.
Because people feel happy when they receive their amount of money.
But what happens is the stage goes huge.
Of course, these populists make their corruption schemes.
And then we don't have money anymore.
Because the income is shorter than...
the spending are bigger than the income.
So people get poorer again.
And that's what happened in Brazil.
They got money.
Oh, I took them out from misery.
And after a few years, they are back in misery.
Yeah, it's like the guy who stops going to work and just runs up debts on his credit cards and says, well, I've really figured it out.
I mean, I can't believe these suckers get up every morning and go off to work.
It's ridiculous.
You should just lie by the pool having my tires like I do.
But then when the bill comes due, the lie is revealed.
Yeah, and What's interesting about this is that some people remember the government of Lula da Silva as the government in which they had this money.
Because sometimes the effects of the actions that you take on government only happens in the next government.
So people blame...
And this Lula da Silva electorate, they blame Dilma Rousseff and they think that if Lula is back, they will have that money again because they had this money during his government.
But it was his politics choices that made this crisis that we are living today.
And that's even harder to explain to people.
Well, let's say somebody comes in and wants to cut the government by 10%.
Well, everyone's going to say, that's austerity, that's terrible, that's horrible.
But when the government has been spending four times more than it takes in in taxes, cutting 10% doesn't even begin to solve the problem, and people use this ridiculous word, austerity.
well, you can't have 10 pieces of cheesecake tomorrow.
You can only have nine pieces of cheesecake tomorrow.
It's like, you're starving me to death.
It's not austerity.
It's like a basic tiny bit of restraint from insane spending.
I mean, I don't know how this word austerity was invented to imagine people are starving to death when you cut back on their ridiculous spending.
Yes.
I think we have this cultural challenge to teach people that it's important to work.
It's important to make your own efforts and to be a good guy, to...
Make things to other people, too, when you make a product.
And we got to say that the poor people, the mother that make a cake and sell to their neighbor, she can make a company of this if the government is not in her way, if she doesn't need to pay so many taxes.
But the government...
Make this taxes so high that poor people can't make their own companies and then they offer the alternative of giving them money without work.
That's terrible.
Of course, leftist governments love to keep people dependent on government money because that way they'll keep voting for the left.
They really are drug dealers of this horrible drug called fiat currency and debt and inflation and they make people dependent on this drug and it saps their will for independence, for energy, for effort, for pride.
I mean, you can't look in the mirror and feel good about yourself when you're parasitical through the state on people who are actually working hard for a living.
It destroys, I think, at a soul level, it really works to undermine people, and it makes them frightened of freedom and responsibility and work.
How much it corrupts people internally, I think, is even stronger than what it does in the mere passing across of bribes.
That's only money.
But what it does to people's souls I think is much harder to recover from.
Yes, and they don't work too.
They don't have this career of works.
They became politicians selling promises, and then they are in the government transferring money from people who made their own companies, from people that made jobs, and they're transferring this money to their electorate.
And stealing other taxpayers' money through the state-run companies or whatever.
So they're not workers and they sell these promises to remain in power forever.
That's what happened in Brazil.
That's the mentality.
We need to change.
But of course, as we are speaking here, we have these marketing problems.
We have this problem to convince people that this is not a good way and it's not even a good way for them.
In like 10 years or like 5 years, 10 years, they will become poor again and they will have difficulty to live.
And they'll be in debt.
So I really appreciate the work that you do.
I want to remind people, check out the website for O Antagonista, oantagonista.com.
You can follow Philippe's excellent Twitter at twitter.com forward slash blogdopim, B-L-O-G-D-O-P. Thank you for the work you've done.
You can check out his Prager University video.
We'll link to that below.
It's a great explanation of what's going on.
I really appreciate the more in-depth explanation.
I hope you'll keep us posted on what's going on in Brazil.
It is very, very important, not just for South Central America, for the Americas, for the future of freedom as a whole.
This is a very big country with a very energetic population, and it is certainly my hope that we can do everything we can to push it more towards freedom and away from socialism.
So listen up, millennials.
This is a guy with experience.
This is a guy who's seen – oh, Bernie Sanders supporters – this is the guy who's seen up close.
Everything that you want.
And he's bringing back tales from the front and of a wounded culture and a wounded country.
You need to listen to this because this is not where we want to go as a culture, as a country, as a society, as a species.
So thank you very much, Philippe.
Of course, a great pleasure to chat today.
You're welcome.
It's an honor for me.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate the job you're doing and I have only a few opportunities to show what's happening in Brazil to other people in the world and it's like an alert to people.
So don't go this way and please help us to put Brazil on track again.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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