A chronicle of an inevitable contrast between the profitability of political power and the burdens imposed on productive citizens
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano
“If I told you that in my country a person, of any sex, with no formal education, no employment references, and even with serious criminal convictions, can obtain a position with a monthly compensation of US$10,000, including free travel with expenses paid, and can bring relatives and close associates into well-paid positions under their authority…”
The description does not belong to the realm of fiction or dystopian satire. It portrays with surgical precision the most perverse incentive available to those who know themselves incapable of succeeding in life and develop a safeguard: living off the State (that is, off everyone else).
Contemporary statism has sunk its parasitic teeth into the institutional fabric of our societies.
When politics becomes the only highly profitable and risk-free business, the structure of a nation’s moral and economic priorities is completely inverted.
The systematic advance of state intervention operates like an implacable pincer.
On the one hand, the treasury drains resources from the productive economy through insatiable tax voracity. On the other, the regulatory framework consolidates corporate privileges, protecting major players and closing off genuine consumer markets.
In this climate of suffocation, citizens’ aspirations mutate: merit, saving, and entrepreneurial risk give way to the safer and more profitable desire to secure a sinecure within the political-public apparatus.
The Ordeal of the Ordinary Citizen in the Labor Market
While the upper reaches of politics dispense incomes comparable to those of the international upper bourgeoisie to individuals lacking any qualification whatsoever, the ordinary citizen—and especially the young person trying to make an honest way forward—endures a Kafkaesque ordeal simply to earn a living.
To meet the demands of the bureaucratic dungeon for entering the formal market, the worker or small entrepreneur must overcome a wall of certifications, permits, and suffocating social charges. Where political office requires neither a résumé nor a clean record, the private market demands relentless accountability and punishes error with insolvency.
If citizens manage to produce and exchange value, a scandalous portion of their income is confiscated to sustain the state machinery. Quite literally, their daily effort finances the travel allowances, transportation, and salaries of those who belong to the caste and their circles of close associates.
Trapped between a predatory treasury and domestic markets increasingly closed by regulations tailored to oligopolies, genuine effort becomes a struggle for survival against a system designed to extract rents, not to allow them to be generated.
The Challenge of Transcending the Trap
Bringing these two realities together lays bare the intimate nature of statism. We are not facing a mere administrative deviation, but plunder: a deliberate mechanism for transferring wealth from those who produce to those who rule.
Faced with this state of affairs, resignation is not an option, nor is waiting for handouts from a power that survives by fleecing others.
True emancipation requires intellectually and economically deserting the patronage game.
By escaping the heavy structure of the intervened market, globalizing talent through the knowledge economy, and seeking refuge in hyperspecialization and technological advancement, the individual recovers what statism seeks to take away: sovereignty over one’s own destiny.
Statism and patronage
Pressure on productive citizens
Individual sovereignty
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