Liberty Movement

Transcription

-Deist: This weekend we talk to Helio Beltrão, the well-known Austro-libertarian entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of Mises Brazil. We talk crony capitalism in the upcoming World Cup soccer event, and why the Liberty Movement is like a soccer team complete with goalkeepers, midfielders, forward strikers, and even coaches. -Deist: Welcome to Mises Weekends! I'm Jeff Deist and we're very happy this weekend to be speaking with Helio Beltrão from Brazil. Helio, how are you? -Beltrão: Great, Jeff, thank you for having me How are you? -Deist: I'm excellent. So, Helio's well-known I think really, almost worldwide in the libertarian movement, but I'm in a just give a little bit of background. He is, of course, the founder of Mises Brazil. He's also a fund manager, an entrepreneur both the end the financial and ideological sense, and he's someone I had the opportunity to meet a couple years back at Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 'Property and Freedom Society' conference in Bodrum, Turkey. So, we know each other a bit but your reputation proceeds you, and it's great to talk to you again. And I want to get right into this because this is an unbelievable time for Brazil, and I'd like some of your thoughts on how a the Liberty movement in Brazil, in South America more generally, sort of ties into this. The World Cup is what, a week away right now? It's interesting how aware the folks have become with these events in terms of pointing out the crony capitalism that can often be involved. And we're hearing from sort of the left anarchist side in terms of the Black Bloc protesters who have promised to disrupt things, but I'm just wondering is there also a an awakening sort of libertarian sentiment in Brazil at all involved in the opposition such as it is to the World Cup? -Beltrão: Yes, it's actually a very confusing time, I think, for Brazilians because, of course, you know Brazil is the country of football, and I'm going to use football instead of soccer, you understand that. So, the tendancy here is to conflate this media, I should call, neurosis of Brazilians with football, and the past sentiment that we have what the mongrel dog complex before we were a smaller country on the periphery. And we still have that sense of a neurosis and we are conflating thise completely with the perceptions about the current political situation and a political system. So this is really complicated to deal with. I have been surprised by how many of my friends for example, not only in the libertarian movement but friends in general, are completely opposed to root for the Brazilian team that we call 'Selecção' because they understand that that might benefit the political system or the president because you know that we have elections in October. So, this is all very confusing because I don't really think there is that much of a link between how the Brazilian team does in the World Cup and the willingness to still support the incumbent President. -Deist: That seems incredible that people would put aside how soccer mad they are. Is president Rousseff, is she directly identified with the World Cup? Is she someone who championed bringing it to Brazil? -Beltrão: Yes, she decided to champion it. Actually, the president before her, Lula, who was very popular and who is a close friend in the same party. So she is completely in identified with the World Cup in the- not the Brazilian team itself, but, let's say, the organization of the infrastructure and the World Cup in general. So, definitely she is related to the World Cup, but I think the two things might be viewed as separate; the success or failure of the Brazilian team, and whatever happens with the peaceful rooting of your own team during the World Cup and how the infrastructure deals with the tourists here. But for whatever reason, these two are mixed up completely. So, people are generally not rooting for Brazil. We don't see- It's amazing that at this point in time, in the past World Cups, not in Brazil, we always had the streets covered with flags and banners and the asphalt painted in green and yellow all over Brazil and we don't have that now. It's amazing, it's shocking for me to witness that. -Deist: Well that is shocking because certainly Americans have a perception of Brazil as 'soccer mad,' as we call it. The price tag I've seen attached to bringing the World Cup to to Brazil is about $11.5 billion. Obviously the 2016 Olympics are coming up also in Brazil. The recent games in Sochi in the former Soviet Union, the price tag there was about $50 billion US dollars. So it's interesting to me to see, at least in the US press, so much coverage of awareness in Brazil of the cronyism in these sort of globalist type events. -Beltrão: Yes, of course you understand the protests are based on a correct perception that the services that we get in Brazil for education and heath- public education and health because you we also have a vibrant private education and private health services, but the average Brazilian, the poor Brazilian, has to deal with the public education and public health. The correct perception that those services are completely bad and people died the whole time in the hospitals, and education really is, you know, no education at all, basically. So, of course there is the frustration with that, and people are saying, "Why should we as a people, as the government is taking taxpayer money, to invest in the World Cup and not invest in more hospitals and education?" Of course, we as libertarians understand the complexity of having the government do those services. But basically, we have in Brazil mainly 50% think the World Cup is good because we would have more investments, more consumption,and more visibility from Brazil. And 50% consider it bad because of this problem that I just mentioned with the public services. So, that's the frustration: these 50% think that it is bad, they are carrying it through to the streets and plan to make demonstrations and protests all over Brazil. And they're trying to do that, but, you know, Jeff, I don't think this is gonna be a real problem. The government of course understanding this is a central issue for the success of a peaceful event that all Brazilians should want to have. So they are going to be up to speed with trying to avoid that. And in fact I've heard that some libertarian that went to the last year's Confederations Cup protests, they were just there, they were not leaders or anything, they were being summoned and interrogated by the Federal Police a couple times. And the Federal Police wants to intimidate them and not for them not to get involved in further protests. So, in general I think we're not going to have a big problem just as far as protests, violent protests, and demonstrations. -Deist: Shifting gears a little bit in terms of perception, I'd love to talk to you a bit about Brazilian libertarianism. Now, when you found- not long after you founded Mises Brazil, you were actually up here in Auburn and you gave a speech entitled, 'Starfish and the Spider,' and we've got it on our website at Mises.org; I would encourage anybody to look at it because it's a great speech. And you talked, among other things, in that speech about sort of conceptual tactics for libertarians, and one of your messages was: Hey, you know, libertarianism means different things to different people in different cultures and it ought to be couched and sold as such. In other words, is there sort of a Brazilian flavor to liberty that's not like the American or Western centric flavor of Liberty? -Beltrão: I would say that Brazilians are more pragmatic so they tend to value a little bit more than the US, the consequentialist approach rather than the etiological approach, or, let's say, the natural law approach, or objectivist approach. So, Brazilians tend to be a little bit more pragmatic in that sense, and I think then in Brazil the consequentialist approach has a little bit more advantage to pursue that. So yeah, we need to localize the approaches. But of course what we do at Mises Brazil, and we have been very successful, I would guess for the time we've been around, is to use the Mises Institute as a benchmark and not try to reinvent things. And that is, I think, was the key for the success that we've had recently. To have the Mises Institute as a model. So, that's how I view the movement in Brazil. It's going very well we have, now, it's amazing, we have maybe 20 Institutes or organized organizations, promoting Liberty in Brazil, only Brazil. So it's amazing what's going on here. Of course, we're still small, but I think we are doing the right stuff here. -Deist: Well, Helio, when you talk about a more pragmatic approach to bringing people to Liberty, as an outsider, I look at a country like Brazil obviously very rich in resources, tons natural beauty, this incredible physical culture, you know, football, and outdoors, and beach life, and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, and beautiful weather, and all these things that Americans sort of think of when they think of Brazil, but we also think of like almost a sprawling megacity of São Paulo that becomes almost unworkable. And obviously, some extreme wealth, some extreme poverty, we have that in the US as well, of course. And it seems to me like there are a lot of strong libertarian arguments to fixing or at least ameliorating those day to day practical problems, like transport, you mentioned when we're offline earlier get getting around, getting hotels for the World Cup, those are the kind of maybe practical areas where where Liberty might be a good sell in a place like Brazil. -Beltrão: It is, I still don't think we are there yet because in the last year's demonstration regarding transport, though we had as presence of libertarians arguing for private solutions, in the end the voice that was stronger was, "We want free transportation." So, it's still not time for it yet. And I've actually been using, because of the World Cup, and analogy, if you'll allow me a few minutes. The analogy between the libertarian movement and football, and soccer, and the World Cup, is that we are competing against different teams, you know, the Keynesian team, the Interventionist team, the Marxist team. And the analogy is as follows: Each team has its goalkeeper, and the goalkeeper are the great minds that have been with us, for example, in our team it would be Mises and Hayek. The defense would be the present-day PHDs that are actually in academia and pursuing a different ideas to market. The midfield would be the guys related to culture: the writers, journalists, TV anchors, and and people like that. And the attack would be the politicians. The politicians that basically wait for the ball to get to their foot, and they were just push it inside the goal. The coach and the infrastructure of the club would be the think tanks, like Mises Brazil. And of course our competition also has their own teams, and coaches, and infrastructure. And of course, the crowd are the fans of our doctrine. I think we still don't have a good team because we have the best goalkeeper, we have some pretty good infrastructure, you know the think tanks, defense is still lacking, I would say, in the libertarian movement, we don't have many PHDs in the academia in Brazil. Still, we have maybe 4 or 5 Washington professors in the academia in Brazil, which is Marxist dominated amazingly, not neo-classical and Brazil's not marxist. And the midfield, we are starting to have some very good writers and journalists and TV anchors, so we have a good midfield. We still are not there to get the ball to the attackers, to the politicians to make changes in the law that would impact the system in our favor. Of course, we are not in their generation that will implement anarcho- capitalism, so everything that we want to have implemented would have to go through the democratic process, but still we don't have a full fledged team that would allow politicians to capitalize and implement that. Of course you know politicians I say are the animal with the best nose, the best olfactory organs; they always know what people want. So when we have a good team then there is gonna be a lot of politicians saying that they were libertarian since they were little kids and they will be willing to push that ball into the goal. But it's not yet time, we have to be patient: there are no shortcuts, and we have to be patient. I think in one, two, three generations we'll to do it, but still unfortunately we are not there yet -Deist: Helio, when you talk about patience, I think that the lesson here is that liberty is a long game. I mean, we've lost our freedoms sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly, but to he process of getting them back is is not always easy, and it's something, I think, we all have to be invested in. In part, that means doing the hard work of organizing and educating folks, and for that we are all very grateful that you have have spent so much of your own time and so much up your own energy in not only creating Mises Brazil, but really in being a very well-known, and a very well thought of Austro-libertarian around the world. And folks, with that we will leave it, and we'd love to talk Helio again sometime. Thanks for your time. -Beltrão: Thank you very much Jeff.