Human beings have always had an irrational tendency to mitigate events that were far from our understanding, in the same way we had to create gods to explain a large number of phenomena. Starting from this point, it is curious that with the advance of science we have been able to discover so much knowledge, but it is even more curious that we still have a tendency to mitigate any type of action.
If we start an analysis from a historical point of view we find that the idea of miracle has been habitually linked to events that defied the laws or the natural order of things. At present it would not be wrong to say that there is very little room left for such miracles, this is because we have practically been able to develop a sense of rationality and in the face of the difficulties which oppose our doesos and purposes, we resort to rational solutions, technological or otherwise, but we never expect irrational things to happen such as that a cancer is cured by prayer or that a fire is extinguished with a snowfall.
However, it is clear that the tendency to need to believe in miracles has not disappeared. Surprising as it may be, this attitude of implausibility is more than ever rooted in the political sphere, creating massive, almost inexhaustible currents of ingenuity and good intentions that those who hold and desire power take advantage of to make their own.
Like all events of a prodigious nature, this eagerness for political miracles also has its theology. The creed is based on the assertion that States do not go bankrupt because they can always resort to quantitative flexibility. It is no coincidence that this belief in the inexhaustible nature of free goods and demand has become very common in the 21st century. There is no greater example of those who believe in these nonsense than those who decide to take to the streets until God the State provides, that is, until someone assures the "injured" that their evil will be distributed among all so that there are no differences between people and no one really perceives their state of misery. Those apparently harmed by the disaster will end up winning, receiving the same, or perhaps a little more, without having to make an effort to work. No one could deny then that this is a miracle indeed worth continuing to bet on that faith that moves mountains and provides such benefits.
How is it possible that questioning and skepticism about natural behaviour do not predominate in the political arena? The problem lies in the lack of information about the functioning of the economy on the part of the ordinary citizen, who believes that politicians will solve their problems and the simpler the terms in which the "politician" will solve the economy the better for this citizen.
This attitude, which politicians know how to take advantage of with care, is what has made social policies a remedy. It is very frequent that when the public ends up falling into fraud, as is happening now in Venezuela, things will no longer have a remedy. It is a terrible observation that certain left-wing politicians do not hesitate to ruin their country in order to establish themselves forever in power by abolishing any kind of private property.
As long as people think that when they are told to increase social policies, to increase public spending, and it is done, moreover, without even carrying it out or simply doing it to launder money and generate corruption, they will be betting on that irrational miracle of the one I mentioned earlier.
Miracles have always gone well with mysteries, and the actual functioning of public spending is one of the most enormous and enigmatic that the average citizen has ever faced, completely unable to comprehend the nature of expenses that are light years away from his idea of what things are worth. Cognitive incompetence in this respect is so serious that citizens who even fail to understand how through this waste of public money ends up generating corruption, bureaucracy and economic recession.
The citizen is scandalized by corruption, but it takes time to understand that it is almost uncontrollable from the moment in which thousands of people, officials and politicians, control in their own way tens of billions of euros in policies that citizens believe they have demanded and to which they are almost always dissatisfied, because the tendency to increase in the consumption of public money is by nature irrepressible, since almost nobody cares about the waste of money that is either nobody's or always seems little to us insofar as we suppose it benefits us. The citizen does not realize that wasted money is the money that is stolen out of his pocket every time he has to pay a tax.
Public expenditure will always generate more public expenditure, in the same way that the consumption of any good will always generate an increase in the demand for the same good. What is not normal is that the citizens who pay for these enormous budgets of public policies believe that due to their miraculous nature they demand much better systems to control their effects, their profitability, their opportunity and their justice. Believing that expenditure growth always has a positive effect on everyone should already be as discredited as believing in perpetuuum mobile or in the possibilities of the "water motor" to drive cars.
As long as there are thousands or millions of votes for the cynical and/or ignorant politicians who promise us heaven by constantly increasing "social expenditures" and the policies of that genre, without ever explaining in the least what exactly they refer to, we will be threatened with ending up in places as inhospitable as Venezuela today.
