Bolivia and Wisconsin

What do Bolivia and Wisconsin have in common? Though they are located on the same continent, their governments are on extreme opposite sides of the political spectrum. However, they share the concern that every national and state government should have about maintaining a healthy balance between the revenues and expenditures necessary to maintain a low rate of inflation and to avoid making citizens pay the cost for the growing public debt. This has caused Evo Morales a great decrease in popularity and triggered national unrest that hasn’t let up in two months.

In Wisconsin, the local government wants to eliminate the ability for labor unions to negotiate collective contracts. The situation is similar to what is happening in Venezuela, but manifested in another form.

Just as it is impossible for a perfect economic market to exist in reality — where, for example, no individual has enough influence to affect the price of a product and where there are oligopolies and enormous businesses or countries that can impose their own conditions — in political matters, the same is true. There are citizens that are more equal than others.

Above all, there are groups that can have access to portions of the public budget outside of what has been allocated to them. The (good) politician has to make the most of these imperfections for the benefit of the majority, in spite of some groups putting pressure on them. For that reason political power needs counterweights.

The case of Bolivia is just like that of Ireland, where the country’s most important political party has been limited to its minimum expression because voters assume that their economic problems will disappear that way. In Bolivia, people are not happy with the way that the government distributes the little it has or with the people who want more without paying more for it. Even though gasoline will bring more revenues to the government so it can operate, in its place employees want to pass a minimum wage of $80 more than $1,000, without giving consideration to where this money will come from. In Wisconsin, the fiscal deficit is $3.6 billion, and Bolivia’s is $2 billion. There is no way to safely eliminate this deficit without raising revenues and reducing spending, which requires consensus.

The unions are filled with the politics of Wisconsin, Bolivia and Venezuela, but only the U.S. admits to this directly. Here, without announcement, the discussion about contracts has frozen with the political left and right united.