Friday 27 April 2012

Numbers and percentages are human beings

One of the most important lessons, if not the most important lesson about economics, is that numbers, percentages and equations are real human beings. Almost thirty years ago, at the School of Economics, one of my teachers told me something that has been with me since then and I became acquainted with Rerum Novarum, the ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR.

Work is not only an obligation but also a fundamental right and capital and workers' interests should go hand in hand. The Encyclical was delivered at St. Peter's in Rome, the fifteenth day of May, 1891, during the fourteenth year of the office of Pope Leo XIII.

Rabid capitalism or rabid Marxism will not offer the solutions we need for a peaceful and prosperous coexistence of capital and workers because all they propose is a class war, a permanent state of confrontation that destroys lives.

Those who try to classify me as right wing or left wing don't know how wrong they are. They don't know how far away, how detached I am, from the ideas and ideologies that they criticize.

Both Capitalism and Socialism create slaves and what I propose is about the freedoms we should have to have a better life without rotten ideologies that divide us and enslave us. I take from this Encyclical the one principle that unites us to work and live together for the common good.

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