The government has taken two new steps in its populist campaign against the free market.
The veto of private management of public hospitals and the destruction of food and transport prices in emergencies are not isolated episodes until the shift culminates: Pedro Sánchez He is building, piece by piece, a radically interventionist state that stifles private initiative and condemns Spain to economic paralysis.
The offensive against the call of “sanidad de las garras speculadoras” reveals the logic of Sánchez’s plan.
Because the executive does not correct specific abuses or improve competencies. Deslegitima de raíz that private companies manage public hospitalsalthough they have few transparent contracts with defined and evaluable objectives.
If the model of concessions is enforced, direct public administration becomes dogma and a clear message is sent to opponents. in Spain Entering strategic sectors penetrates a political minefield.
The result will be predictable. Less ability to manage better, less incentive to innovate in services, less capacity to mobilize private capital where the public sector does not supply it.
If it maintains peor of the the status quo (hope lists, work restrictions, red tape) and you give up exploring alternatives. If you promise the citizen “more public services”, he always gets it: more good and more services.
The new law also goes in the same direction, which makes it possible to obtain maximum prices for food and transport in an emergency, which could be as low as possible over time in exceptional and stressful situations.
Because the moral imperative to avoid abuse is low, the government arrogates the power to make decisions How much can society do in an exceptional context?.
The problem is not just technical (price controls generate biases and distortions that economic theory is well aware of), but institutional. It is normal that the vigilant political power and pricing condition always have a “just cause” to do so.
But the executive has shown that interventionism is not limited to health care or specific crises.
He identified houses in “tension zones”, restricted the seasons and built a labyrinth of restrictions on temporary contracts, sought tourist accommodation and housing.
Through SEPI, it reserved a growing title in the capital and the boards of strategic companies (Indra, Telefónica).
It multiplied the number of public employees and supported the activity of tradesmen and businesses with costs and extraordinary fees to banks and energy companies.
At the same time, the government got rid of private education in all its forms. Extracts the creation of private universities with discouraging case requirements, announces norms to “stop chiringuitos” in FP and refer to control over the academic offer.
Including the most intimate area (pornography consumption online) seeks to design verification strategies that, more than protecting minors, open the door to unprecedented surveillance of citizens’ digital lives.
This whole mosaic makes up the plan de país. A model in which the state is not a neutral referee, but the main player, generally at the expense and in direct competition of the private sector, the only truly productive one.
A model in which prices, contracts, ownership and business decisions require more intense political protection.
It is a contemporary translation of old socialist theses, which reality has refuted at one time or another: defeat brings benefit, harm to entrepreneurs, the illusion that the hyperactive BOE’s prosperity can be ordered.
The implications for the modern economy are clear. Incertidumbre regulatoryia drags inversion broad reptile.
Price controls discourage supply where it is most needed.
The demonization of profit raises talent and capital in countries where business is not a deportation of political risk.
The constant increase in the weight of the public sector (in the workforce, in gastronomy, in the presence of businesses) reduces the space needed to develop a lean, diverse and competitive production structure.
Spain will not be paralyzed for a day, but the risk of a slide is a slow suffocation. Less potential growth, less productivity, policy-driven innovation, companies that specialize in finding regulatory advantages in order to compete.
Sánchez’s intervention does not protect us from desafíos XXI. century. We are led to a ephemeral 20th century mental escapades, incompatible with a country that aspires to be dynamic, open and prosperous.
The defender of a free economy today is not an ideological extravagance, it is a practical necessity. Spain requires more competence, more legal certainty, more respect for horror and risk, no more decrees that suspect everything that does not control the government.
Every hospital closed to the private sector, every high price, every “strategic” enterprise colonized by the state is one step closer to the model that history has shown at a turning point: the model of socialism.
And how much later it runs It will be more expensive to restore the economic momentum that land as our commodity has.
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