State Fantasy Meets Economic Reality

A critique of public spending, debt and political blindness in a world already transformed.

The Great Illusion and Stubborn Reality: The Cost of State Fantasy
By Dr. Nelson J. Mosco Castellano

Look, gentlemen, let us speak clearly once and for all!
Because in this country we love living in the limbo of beautiful words while the railway track ends ten meters ahead of us.
For years we have heard talk about “social sensitivity,” the “delicate balance,” and an endless number of new rights invented every morning at the desks of Montevideo’s bureaucracy.
All of that sounds fantastic for a barricade speech or an intellectual gathering.
But reality, that old and stubborn reality that does not vote in ideological congresses, tells us something else: someone has to pay the bill.
The drama of the current government, trapped in the networks of the MPP and a left that still has not discovered that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, is that they intend to finance paradise with someone else’s wallet.
And worse still: with a wallet that is already empty.
The story of the deficit and the institutional credit card
What is the fiscal deficit, gentlemen?
Let us not deceive ourselves with the technicalities of CEPAL economists.
The fiscal deficit is, quite simply, spending what one does not have.
It is the ruler who goes to the bar, orders champagne for everyone, and when the bill arrives, pulls out a credit card in the name of his children and grandchildren.
That is public debt!
An immoral burden that we place on generations not yet born in order to sustain the whims of the present.
Governing through debt to keep the boys from the state corporation or the education unions happy is not progressivism; it is irresponsibility the size of the Centenario Stadium.
They tell us it is to “protect the social sphere.”
A lie!
They do it because they lack the political courage to look inside the black box of the State and begin cutting the fat.
Black holes and the “new agenda”
To the usual black holes —public companies that pretend to be first-world oil or telecommunications firms but that we pay for through the most expensive tariffs in Latin America, the blind pit of social security that nobody wants to seriously reform for fear of losing three votes— we now add the “new rights agenda.”
Just look how perverse the matter is!
No one in their right mind can oppose people living better or having their individual freedoms respected. Of course not, I am a liberal by birth!
But creating a right by law does not make money rain from the sky.
Every time Parliament votes for a new “right” that requires a secretariat, a body of inspectors, a subsidy or a friendly NGO to manage it, what they are really voting for is a new tax on the rural worker from Artigas, on the dairy farmer from San José or on the shopkeeper from Rivera who gets up at five in the morning to work.
We are building an explosive mixture.
On one side, an elephantine and politically correct bureaucracy that consumes resources like an eight-cylinder engine; on the other, a suffocated productive apparatus, from which ever more “fiscal effort” is demanded. Have we all gone mad?
How can a country grow if the person who produces is crushed with taxes in order to sustain the person who lives off the State counter?
The fate of illusion
History does not forgive, and economics forgives even less.
When the left confuses economics with astrology, the collapse is mathematical.
If Orsi and his advisers believe they will be able to surf this wave while maintaining the “delicate balance” between the radical wing of the PCU and the MPP demanding more spending and the international markets demanding sanity, they are going to crash straight into the wall.
Capital has no homeland, gentlemen, and it has no patience either.
The day investors smell that Uruguay prefers dogma to discipline, they will take their money to Paraguay, Estonia or anywhere else where those who take risks are respected.
And then I want to see them explaining utopia in the middle of a recession, with the investment grade lost and inflation eating away the wages of the poorest; because —remember this well— inflation is the most unjust tax, the one that always strikes the unfortunate person who has no way to defend himself.
We must stop with the poetry. Uruguay does not need more “agendas” or “socialist dialogue”; it needs more market, fewer regulations, the breaking of state monopolies that make life more expensive, and openness to the world with a comfortable pair of shoes to go out and sell our work without asking anyone’s permission.
Everything else is the old recipe of Latin American socialism: distributing poverty in the name of equality.
And they are not going to sell me that bill of goods!
But look also at the complete picture, gentlemen, because the matter is even more serious!
These people are governing with the rear-view mirror on, looking at the nineties or at theories from the sixties, while the outside world is catching fire and running over us at the speed of light.
They are not seeing the change of era!
Here is the continuation of that warning, pressing the finger into the wound of the international scenario:
The storm outside and closed eyes within
We have to look at the world map, for heaven’s sake!
We are in the middle of international chaos unlike anything seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cold War.
The order we knew is over.
Global trade is fragmenting into hard blocs, supply chains are breaking because of distant wars that nevertheless hit us in the price of fuel and freight, and the great powers are playing chess with the rules of the most rancid protectionism.
And what are we doing?
We are discussing whether the future retiree can retire just a little earlier, or whether the statute of a public employee should include three or four more days of leave.
It is madness!
Uruguay is a nutshell boat in a raging ocean.
It always has been.
Our only historical salvation has been lucidity, the speed to react to change and the flexibility to jump before the wave falls on us.
But today, this government’s lack of foresight in the face of the change of era is alarming.
We are going through a brutal technological and geopolitical revolution —artificial intelligence dismantling entire labor markets, automation, the urgent need to make Mercosur more flexible so we can seek bilateral agreements with whoever is willing— and here the answer is immobilism.
The MPP and its allies are terrified of the future because the future cannot be regulated by a three-paragraph decree nor submitted to a union assembly.
The paralysis of “in the meantime”
Instead of preparing the country for the impact, modernizing education so that young people are not left outside the labor world that is coming, deregulating so that technology companies can settle here without the State driving them crazy with paperwork, we remain stuck in the “in the meantime.”
We continue spending what we do not have to sustain a model that has already died in the rest of the planet.
When international chaos truly strikes —and believe me, it will strike, because stubborn reality always hits twice as hard when it finds you distracted— that fiscal deficit and that debt burden they now treat so lightly will become a deadly trap.
It will catch us weakened, expensive, tied hand and foot by corporations that defend only their own little patch, and without a single lifebuoy on the horizon.
Not understanding that the world has changed, that the old welfare recipes financed by the commodity tailwind no longer exist, is the greatest sin of this leadership.
Utopia is not only incapable of producing itself at home; it is a voluntary blindness before the tsunami coming from outside.
Wake up, gentlemen in government, because the future has already arrived and is charging us the toll!

The real cost of public spending.
Debt as a generational burden.
Uruguay before global change.

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