A conversation between Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, and Kleyton Silva on the recent victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil!▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Now, I wonder if you could introduce yourself to the audience and the topic of our conversation today.
Hello, everybody. My name is Clayton Silva.
I'm a Brazilian national.
I live in Brazil. I'm a lawyer here, and I also have some background in economics.
I studied business administration in At Megui University in Canada.
I lived in Canada for seven years.
And I'm here to talk about the Brazilian election.
So, you know, it's funny because I was confident that he was going to win, but I always hate to say it because I'm always concerned that people are going to say, oh, it's in the bag, you know, and then they don't go out and vote.
And that was the same thing with Trump. How did you find, I guess, the post-stabbing election cycle in Brazil?
And did it work out the way that you thought it was going to?
Yeah, basically, one of the things that we noticed after the stabbing incident, that his negative views decreased a little bit.
Then what happened is the opposition party tried to raise their negative view by an attacking campaign and also pretty much like all the routine, the lefty routine about calling names, Saying he got a fascist view, fascist program.
So basically, that was pretty much the attack, trying to raise his negative view.
But actually, that didn't work out because he almost wined the first back three weeks ago.
But he didn't reach this 50% plus one vote.
So we have to We had a runoff, so that's why we had a runoff last weekend.
And what do you think were the major drivers that had people take the risk on a sort of candidate who the media was so much against?
Well, what it's really interesting when you compare the campaign spending.
Compared to the last presidential election, this election.
So, basically, we had some issues with corruption on the system.
So, we have a huge decrease on the volume of money spent on the election.
Basically, we went to 100%, actually not 100%, but almost 100% public finance election.
So, as an individual, we could make some donations for the campaigns, but it was not very considerable money.
So, basically, this campaign, he spent only a million dollars.
Actually, he raised a million dollars.
He spent less than a million dollars to be elected president.
And just to compare, last election in 2014, President Rousseff I was elected spending $120 million.
Wow. Well, and you know when somebody's spending that kind of money on an election, that there's a lot of people who expect favors in return.
So the less that someone spends on an election, usually the less corrupt they're going to be after the actual runoff.
Exactly. And basically, that's the workers' party.
The workers' party spent almost $250 billion because this $125 billion that I mentioned, it doesn't count the illegal spending.
So, they had like illegal spending, an illegal accounting, and some estimates including the illegal donations, the money spending, the spending done by cash, some estimates, the figures can reach like $250 million.
And Bolsonaro actually spent less than a million dollars because he raised a million dollars, public and private, with the private donations.
And he spent like three quarters of that, like $700,000.
How was he able to, I mean, do 1% of the spending that's been done in the past?
And I assume that the media was against him as they were against Trump.
How would you think he was able, was it leveraging social media?
Was it a lot of travel?
How was it that he was able to have such an effective campaign with so little money?
What is most interesting, that's actually what I see as a phenomenon, because The guy got stabbed like 50 days before the election.
And pretty much he spent the crucial time of the election season in a hospital or recovering at home.
And pretty much his campaign was done by the supporters.
So people through social media, through Facebook, their electors did a campaign for him.
It was pretty much like that, and also a lot of engagement on social media, especially through WhatsApp.
And also, I don't think Bolsonaro as a candidate is pretty much like a movement, because it's a rejection of the current system, a rejection of the Workers' Party, and that's what I think got him elected.
This election was really an Interesting because we didn't discuss the most crucial issue that we have in the country, which is the public debt and the need of pension reform.
We didn't discuss that.
And the campaign was pretty much like a referendum on Bolsonaro, I could say that.
And also what is one of the things most extraordinary is that Workers' Partners was able to get 45% of the votes.
I was not expecting for them to get that much of votes because they pretty much ran the country since 2002.
The last president was impeached in 2016.
And the problem, 2015 actually, and the problem is they were able to detach themselves to the recession because their socialist policies brought the country to this recession,
the extraordinary levels of public spending and the All the tax raises and everything was terrible to the economy, and they were able to detach themselves to this recession.
Not 100%, but a lot of people see the current president like their vice president elected.
If it's another party, it was a kind of a collision.
He's responsible for this recession, and that's not true, because pretty much he's trying to not get things worse.
He tried to cut a little bit of spending.
He tried to do the pension reform.
I was not able to do it, and that was the most fascinating thing, I would say, that happened.
They were able to get 45% of the votes, and I think there was too much votes for them, considering they ran the country.
It's similar throughout the democracies in the world these days, which is that what you can actually talk about is quite limited.
So Trump could talk about tax cuts, but he couldn't talk about Social Security reform in any meaningful way.
He couldn't talk about Medicare or Medicaid reform, even though these...
are within years of running out of money, some of them.
So what you can actually talk about is actually quite limited.
And it doesn't surprise me that the leftists still get a lot of votes because people are voting on their pocketbooks, right?
They're voting on their bank accounts.
They're concerned that, I guess like everyone, everyone knows the national debts are insane and nobody wants to be the one who takes the bullet for the national debt.
The retirees don't want to be the ones, the school teachers, the government workers, they don't want to be the ones to take the bullet.
So what you can actually talk about in a practical sense is kind of limited in a way, and it's kind of frustrating for those of us who can see a wider spectrum.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Actually, that's why the campaign was foxed so much in certain social issues, like sex education in public schools.
That was a huge topic.
And because...
As a traditional left party, like the Workers' Party, tried to implement during this year.
They were in power since 2002, okay?
So in 2002, they got elected on a populist, economic left agenda.
But they tried to implement some, like, identity politics.
And so they implemented in Brazil, like, The affirmative action policy in Brazil, which we never used that.
We actually all thought about polity between the races.
And the racial thing, there was not as much racial tension there was before the workers' party got into power.
So basically, they got into power in 2002 on an economic agenda, and they tried to implement some Social agenda as well regarding identity politics, like gender issues, which was not something that was the most important thing for the families.
In 2006, they got re-elected because of a good international environment.
A lot of money was coming to Brazil through direct investments.
And so, they got re-elected.
2010 was after the recession.
So, since we did not felt the recession right away, so they were able to, Lula, in this case, President Lula, was able to elect his successor, which was President Rousseff.
But in 2014, that was the crucial moment.
Because in 2014, everybody was predicting there was some slowdown in economic growth.
And they tried to maintain the economic growth artificially so that President Rousseff was re-elected.
So they pushed the public debt through the roof.
It was unbelievable.
For instance, in 2013, we got a 50% GDP of public debt.
The public debt was about 50% of the GDP in 2013.
This year, 2018, we're going to probably close the year with 78% of public debt.
Right. Right.
I mean, this is, you know, somebody was saying the other day on Twitter that, you know, Obama sowed the seeds of the current economic growth and so on.
And it's like, well, yeah, if you double the national debt in eight years, you can create quite the illusion of economic growth.
Like the guy says, I'll just live on my credit card.
Why on earth would I bother working?
It's like, well, because eventually you've got to pay your credit card debt off and you've got to have a job usually to do that.
But this pumping of debt money into the economy to give socialism the illusion that it's working or give people the illusion that socialism was working is a very common tactic.
And, man, do you have to pay for it?
Because whoever comes in with common sense economics afterwards is usually blamed for all of the what's called austerity, which is basically just kind of a return to mathematical and fiscal sanity.
But you take a lot of heat for coming in after this drug high of debt that the leftists generally generate.
Thank you.
Yeah, and one of the things that is most unique for the Brazilian crisis is that we have a lot of mandatory spending Through the constitution.
This is something that probably a lot of your listeners will find really strange, but our constitution, Brazilian constitution, 1988 constitution, requires the government to spend money.
So basically we have like a constitutional legal document full of positive rights.
So we have like three articles that the states which rights the population has, like the article 5th, 6th and 7th.
And the 6th, it's pretty clear, they say that all the citizens have the right to public education, public health care, Food, work, housing, transportation, entertainment, public safety, social security, protection to maternity and infancy, And finally, assistance should be economically vulnerable.
So it's pretty much like you just have to breathe, then the state is going to take care of you.
It's the unicorn wish list.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had free healthcare?
And wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a roof over their head and enough to eat?
And it wouldn't be nice if nobody was poor?
And it's like, yeah, these things all would be nice.
But, you know, getting there is kind of a challenge, and just enshrining these things on a piece of paper doesn't guarantee that they magically pop into existence, but that does seem to be the fantasy.
Exactly. That's the fantasy.
And pretty much, like, the Brazilians, they buy into that.
So when you talk, like, about the left in Brazil, left in Brazil, it's socialist.
It's pretty much socialist parties, okay?
And we're talking about, like, center-right, like Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro will never criticize, for instance, like, the existence of public health care.
Because it's almost like political suicide.
Almost like it is, political suicide.
Yeah, we don't have a party that's going to say, you know what, the function of the state is just national defense.
Yeah, some courts, some police, some national defense, maybe the prison system, and that's it!
So many people are now dependent on the state.
The provision of services has now been so enmeshed in the idea of the state that people think that if you want to get rid of socialized medicine, You want there to be no healthcare system.
And if you want to get rid of public education, you don't want children to be educated.
And if you want to get rid of welfare, you don't want the poor to get help.
They've become so entwined in the idea of government that people can't imagine voluntary or peaceful or free market solutions to these issues.
And that's a tough nut to crack in terms of rhetoric.
Yeah, and in Brazil we have like public-run hospitals, which are terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.
And you have public-run hospitals, you have public-run schools.
This system is really centralized because that's kind of a historical tradition of Brazil.
So since the colonial time, we always have this centralized government.
It's different from the United States, where the government is more decentralized.
Maybe not nowadays, but historically, 13 colonies got independent.
Brazil passed from the Portuguese king to his son, Prince Pedro.
He took over power and pretty much became an absolute monarchist.
And that goes from there.
Everything is really centralized in Brazil and comes from the top, from the federal government.
And people expect the government to intervene in their lives.
And that's a culture.
There must be change if you want to really integrate and develop a world.
But aren't people basically terrified of Venezuela?
I mean, isn't that the big giant Titanic warning sign that people are like, whoa, so this is where this leads?
And people kind of, I mean, I think a lot of Americans are terrified of what's happening in Europe and Great Britain.
Is there not that same, like, if we look at the smoke of the horizon and the Mordor and Nazgul-haunted Hellscape that is Venezuela.
Isn't there that fear that it's going to get this way?
Is Bolsonaro somewhat of a reaction to that, do you think?
Yeah, he is a reaction.
Basically, Venezuela was one of the most talking points, one of the things that was most debated through the social media, because we know what is happening there.
Because we have some migrants that come from Venezuela to Brazil, so we understand the issue.
We understand how people are there.
It's poor. And all the former two presidents, like Lula and Rousseff, both of them defended Chavez and defended Maduro.
So, we associate them, but you know, there's people that think, oh no, that's Venezuela, that's another country.
There's always that big part of the population that can't, it's almost you cannot reason with that.
Well, they think that somehow the mathematics is different in Brazil than it is in Venezuela, or that human nature is very different, or somehow, it's the old thing.
Socialism didn't work over there, but by God, it's going to work here.
And it is, like, I don't know how many times we need to learn this lesson, but I hope it's not one more time for Brazil.
So how much do you think he's going to be able to get done relative to his agenda?
Because, I mean, we see with Trump, and we saw with Thatcher, but we see with Trump that as soon as he gets into power, the left start inventing these conspiracy theories like Russia meddled with the election and so on, and they try to hound people out of the administration, they try and cripple him with endless investigations, and they try and burden people with huge legal debts so that they all think twice about going to work for Trump and so on.
What's the left going to do, do you think, in Brazil to try and...
Interfere with what Bolsonaro, I think, has been given a mandate to do.
Basically, the most difficult part of his agenda, it should do the constitutional reforms, because to change the pension system, you have to change the constitution.
To decrease the level of public spending, you have to change the constitution.
So that's the big, big challenge.
And so if you're going to make an amendment to the constitution...
By the way, our constitution was dated from 1988.
In 30 years, we had 100 amendments already.
Because our Constitution pretty much covers everything, every aspect of your life.
It's on the Constitution.
It's unbelievable. We have sections about sports, about Public communication, public social communication, governmental communication.
It's unbelievable.
Financial system, it's on the Constitution as well.
So we have 200 articles in the Constitution.
So basically, we have to approve an amendment.
It's necessary 67% of all lawmakers in the House, in the Senate, to pass an amendment.
And that's a lot of votes.
That's a lot of votes. I'm not sure he's going to have all the votes to make all the changes.
Basically, the crucial thing is the pension reform.
Basically, of all the entitlement spending, 50% go to Social Security.
So we have to decrease this.
If you don't decrease the spending, the spending level on the social security, basically the country is going to Bankrupt like in two or three years.
Oh, that soon. It's still a kind of hazy distance for a lot of people in America, but it really is within this election cycle.
And that's generally when politicians finally got up their asses to do something, is when it's in this election cycle that the disaster could occur, because otherwise they just skate through to the next one and blame the enemy if they lose.
In Brazilians, they have like a I'm not sure if it's a cultural tradition yet.
I'm not sure about that yet.
But we have like a tendency to postpone gratification.
So we always wait to the last minute to make the chance.
Usually we do the chance, but it's like always waiting for the last minute.
So you're always procrastinating and that's not a good thing, especially when talking about public policies.
Now, I guess another question that I have regarding where Brazil is and where it's going is, do people remember enough that they know that if they can't solve these problems of democracy, that most likely there's going to be another military interlude in the country's governance?
That's a good question, because, you know, like we had one, two...
Five presidents from 1989 to now, after we started electing presidents again, and two were not able to finish their mandates.
So I don't think that that's something that is plausible at the moment.
Usually, the left always talks about that, and it's, no, I'm going to vote for the democracy, I'm going to vote for the leftist party.
But actually, they are the ones that are anti-democratic.
So basically, in their agenda for the presidential election, they were talking about having a new constitution.
They're talking about controlling the press.
So, they are the ones that are not in favor of free speech.
They are the ones that are not in favor of democracy.
And they're always projecting to the other party, you know, to the other side of the aisle.
And pretty much the tactics that we see on the On the last spot in Europe, in the US, we see here now.
I think it's because of the globalization and the communication.
It's so much improved.
They have a global agenda for that.
And is the media in...
Actually for... No, go ahead. Go ahead.
Sorry. And one of the things that it's about, it's not a global agenda, but you have a regional agenda, which is called URSAL. It's U-R-S-A-L. It would be like USSR for Latin America countries.
So that will include Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, all those countries under like a socialist republic, United Republics, you know.
And there was something that was envisioned back in 1989 by Fidel Castro and Lula at the time.
And that's kind of a movement to try to integrate.
That's why he used their The influence that Brazil had in the last decade, and also Venezuela, when the oil was like $150 a barrel, Venezuela was like an economic powerhouse because of the high oil prices.
And he tried to buy influence in other countries, like in Ecuador, like in Bolivia, both countries, Brazil and Venezuela.
And also Cuba.
Cuba was pretty much the intellectual behind this kind of a movement.
They don't have any money in Cuba, obviously.
But Fidel Castro was pretty much the boss behind the movement, trying to extend the socialist influence in South America and in those countries.
No, the leftists always love a super state, wherein they can control any possibility of competition among member states, and where they can all just hide responsibility and bureaucracy and corruption.
It's like the EU, right? They just want this super state to make sure that they can impose their rules, because otherwise, countries that are more sensible are going to start attracting investment and even populations from countries that are less successful.
So they just want to squelch Even the remote free market of countries operating under different policies, and that's a tragically common thing because, of course, in Central America, you have, I mean, the two widest, I think, Examples of social systems are Cuba and Chile, right? I mean, Chile, to some degree, free market, you know, Cuba, of course, communistic.
And these are kind of hard lessons to miss, you know, in terms of how these countries are doing.
I mean, even if you throw Argentina out the window, Argentina, of course, had had the same per capita income as America up until the 1930s and was a huge powerhouse and had a very, very bright future ahead of it.
And it constantly keeps getting undercut in Central America and South America, constantly gets keeping keeps getting interrupted and undercut by all of these leftist policies, even though the examples are very clear.
But I guess it's as clear as the USSR was to Europe and they still make the same mistakes.
Yes, that's right.
Actually, I was checking the numbers, some data for Brazil ahead of the call, and pretty much our situation is not pretty good concerning the economy and everything.
Basically, If you take a look on the Heritage Foundation Economic Index, we see that we have a huge problem with the fiscal health, and that's pretty much like the most important issue that we have right now.
But also, we have issues regarding the government integrity, that we have a lot of corruption in the country.
It's not only public corruption, but I would say also Through the corporations we have corruption as well.
And so we have a lot of homework to do if you want to really get out of this mess, I would say.
And I think also the culture change must be done.
We must change our I think we lack personal responsibility in Brazil.
We have to see the government as the last option, not the first option to fix our problems.
We need all those constitutional reforms to do, because somebody once asked me, oh, you are favoring a new constitution?
Yes and no.
Yes, if it's going to be better, but no if it's going to make a worse constitution.
So, if we have a A leftist government, a leftist president again.
I mean, they try to do a new constitution.
They can make worse than the ones that we have right now.
So pretty much like I prefer to work at the moment since I don't see the Brazilians really change regarding to the function of the state, like their view of the state, of the government role.
And in their lives, I prefer to work with this constitution than to have a new one that is going to be worse for us.
Well, I appreciate the update.
I'll give you the last word, which is what is it that you would like to say?
It was a fairly substantial Brazilian audience to this conversation.
What is it that you would like to say to them in terms of what they need to be aware of moving forward and where they should put their political energies to the greatest effect?
I think the conversations that we have in our everyday are really important.
So I'm doing a master's program here in Brazil, and you always have discussions.
And pretty much I try to promote my ideas of personal responsibility, of liberalism, the classical liberalism.
And those discussions, they are important because unless you run for a public office, you're not going to impact as much as you...
The most effective way to impact your life, to change your country, is to have Those changes, small changes through this conversation that you have in your everyday life.
So you have with your friends, you try to educate them on those principles and that's really important, I see.
Well, I really, really appreciate it.
Please feel free to stay in touch and keep me up to date on what's going on.
It is quite an exciting time for this globalism versus nationalism debate and the possibility of re-emerging free markets throughout the world.
It feels like a real pivotal moment in history and I really, really do appreciate your perspective on this and thanks so much for the conversation.
Thank you, Stefan, for the opportunity to talk about Brazil and thank you for the show.
