Author: Anderson Noel Riverol
Coordination, design, and editing: José Alberto León
Published by: We Are Innovation & Ciudadano Austral
One of the most popular measures among the political sector is the belief that the resources, inheritance, and wealth of people or groups considered having more economic capacity than the common one can be taken by force – using the state as the instrument for this dispossession. This assault is usually carried out through constitutional juggling that allows excessive taxes to be implemented on certain people, thus violating what we conceive in the republic as “equality before the law.”
Equality before the law is vital because it requires that every person be treated on an equal footing, regardless of background, religion, beliefs, or political position. In the same way, this principle guides that no person suffers discrimination and that their human dignity is respected.
To promote this selective discrimination against groups that are considered to have more economic resources and violate their rights, collectivist politicians often use newspeak, specifically to manipulate citizens from rhetoric and thus camouflage the violation of individual rights. Among those words of the newspeak, we have the term “super-rich”, the cual uses envy as one of the determining factors to achieve its objectives, which is to place in a lower echelon of citizens these so-called “super-rich”.
However, the further individuals are from terms that motivate resentment, envy, and anti-values. In the opposite direction, success and overcoming are exalted, the more material and spiritual wealth can be obtained as a society. In this exact order of ideas, we can quote the German sociologist Helmut Schoeck who in his work “Envy and Society” highlights:
“Most of the conquests that distinguish today’s men, with their evolved cultures and their nuanced and differentiated societies, from those of more primitive stages, that is, the history of civilization is the result of innumerable defeats of envy, that is, of the envious.”
The success of societies is not possible when the State apparatus is hated or used to take from those who have more. Among what is needed for such success is to guarantee respect for the private property of all, which begins in our own body and extends to what we create with work and intelligence.
Taking this as a reference, there was a draft agreement, promoted by parliamentarians of the Communist Party and the Broad Front, that set a tax on the “super-rich” in Congress in Chile. Despite not having been successful in previous months, the new presidency of Gabriel Boric represents a latent threat not only to fundamental rights such as property and equality before the law but to the freedom and development of Chile, which is the country with the best indicators in Latin America.
From that starting point, where the socialists and communists have the power, it is worth remembering that the narrative of the aforementioned project has as its primary focus inequality, which is used as an excuse to be able to obtain from the productive sectors an equivalent to 2.5% (as was the initial proposal), of its Patrimonio in an egalitarian epic.
The delicate thing about this struggle for equality carried out by these political groups is that it does not imply a social equalization upwards, but downwards, as has indeed happened in societies such as Venezuela. It would even be worth assessing whether this political initiative will fulfill its mission. Still, the experience of other countries highlights the obvious: There can be no prosperous nation if those who have the most are attacked and become sacrificial animals.
However, it is necessary to refer back to Dr. Schoeck when he explains the motivations of those who promote these proposals and what may be behind them:
“It has always been warned that the envious hardly feel any interest in making a kind of transfer that makes him the owner of the values envied to a third party. They would like to see the other stolen, dispossessed, plundered, humiliated, hurt, but they rarely imagine things like a transfer or own benefit of the goods of another. The chemically pure envious is not a thief or a swindler.”
Behind politicians, there are human beings who depend on their thinking and can be moved by positive or negative motivations, so it is clear that plundering is one of the worst of these motivations. Their most recent representation is in proposing excessive taxes to specific groups.
The government’s job, then, is to ensure respect for individual rights, which includes respect for the rights of those who have more and those who have nothing, all equal before the law. Cannibalism to wealth driven by low feelings such as envy or with a logic of failed ideologies of the twentieth century is not the best remedy to combat poverty, nor is it justifiable even in times of crisis.
