As a Latin American libertarian, one has to hear a plethora of reasons for the conditions of material poverty that our countries share in varying degrees. Some blame the climate (you know, people in colder countries have it harder so they learn to be more "disciplined" and "organized" because they have…winter), the lack of real crises ("like Japan and Germany, that really had something to shock them into reason"), an imperialist past that crippled our culture and institutions, and so forth.
Without dismissing those aspects completely, it is clear that the answer for the wealth vs. poverty dilemma lies elsewhere, since nations/territories such as Switzerland, Hong-Kong, Spain and Sweden have nothing in common besides being far more prosperous than the average Latin American country. The only elements in common among the countries that are better off are two: ideas and the institutions that result from them. Nothing else.
But there is a rationale for the relative backwardness of our region that seems plainly foolish to me, one that I would like to single out: that we are young countries/races, so we have yet to mature and become full-grown (as in "IMF net funders" for example) so we can take our deserved place in the international order. Of course, Latin America is a cornucopia of mercantilist (at best) and downright Marxist (at worst?) political, academic and opinion-setting elites. Must this, however, imply something on "being young" or immature as countries or races? Murray N. Rothbard rejected the idea that some countries are "young" and others are "old." As the principled individualist that he was, he would have abhorred the idea of a collective mind or subconscious that would be capable of establishing a collective memory. I share that sentiment.
Education
Mérida, México and Quito, Ecuador, just to name two cities, had set up universities at least two hundred years before Canada and the U.S. The same goes for the cities themselves, and of course governments. So, why aren't we more advanced in the economic and technological fields than the English-speaking countries mentioned above? The reason is that knowledge needs to be transmitted and developed in a way far different from the vertical paradigm we inherited from Spain and Portugal.
It is not the same to have a university as to have a free market of ideas such as the U.S. truly had until the Progressive Era or Europe itself had during the XIX century. Such a free market is capable of transmitting knowledge to and from individual minds, in a way that makes experience, research, thinking and customs a part of a growing body of knowledge readily available for the following generations.
Political preferences
The same goes for political preferences. How can people in Perú be considering reelecting Alán Garcia – the Keynesian who almost wrecked their economy in the late 1980s – as their president again? And what about leftism and statism in general, in a backswing in the region: can't our countries learn the lessons of the past?
The problem is that with nationalists, protectionists and Marxists involved in history book writing, media coverage, and academic involvement, the roots of Garcia's destructive Keynesianism (a redundancy, I know) were never truly identified.
Thus, the channels that convey information from some individuals to others (via the family, schools, the media, etc.) never had the correct information to start with. Older people may remember, and young ones may try to read into the past, but if the paradigm is at odds with reason and the ethics of liberty, then it will only repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Conclusion
There is no collective wisdom. There can be individual assessments of better or worse things. This knowledge is being continually transmitted and it definitely shapes our institutions and our ways of looking at the world.
Countries do not learn lessons. People do. And only an open society can successfully enrich itself for the present and the future.
May 19, 2006
