E' recorrente a confusao entre "laissez faire" e o liberalismo economico. Ontem vendo o Programa do Jo na Globo, que temos aqui na casa do meu anfitriao e locatario brasileiro, o "Rasputin" do governo Lula, Ze' Dirceu, enunciava novamente a confusao :

- Esta estoria de dizer que o mercado resolve tudo e bobagem !

Bom, vamos la ! Professor Hayek (muito castigado sem ser jamais lido) tenta explicar. Os grifos abaixo sao meus.

" It is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of planning (planejamento central) with a dogmatic laissez-faire attitude. The liberal argument is in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are. It is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It does not deny, but even emphasizes, that, in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required and that neither the existing nor the past legal rules are free from grave defects. Nor does it deny that, where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity. Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition's being supplanted by inferior methods of coordinating individual efforts. And it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. Indeed, one of the main arguments in favor of competition is that it dispenses with the need for "conscious social control" and that it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it."

"(...) The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action. But there is good reason why the negative requirements, the points where coercion must not be used, have been particularly stressed. (...) It is regrettable, though not difficult to explain, that in the past much less attention has been given to the positive requirements of a successful working of the competitive system than to these negative points. The functioning of a competition not only requires adequate organization of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information -- some of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise -- but it depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible. (...) In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other. Even the most essential prerequisite of its proper functioning, the prevention of fraud and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means yet fully accomplished object of legislative activity. "

Humm... o Ze Dirceu tem defendido o estado de direito em varias declaracoes publicas. Que esquizofrenia e esta ? ? ?
- posted by Joao Francisco @ 10:52 AM