A freedom that was expanded under Francoism and that socialism now intends to curtail

There is one right common to all free people that socialism, in all its forms, is incapable of understanding. That right is called private property.

Private property and freedom of movement

Private property is not only linked to prosperity, but it also facilitates other freedoms. One of these is the freedom that comes with having your own means of transportation, whether it's a car, a motorcycle, a van, or an SUV. This freedom allows us to travel to other places whenever we want, thus developing a human right: freedom of movement. The possibility of owning your own car is now within reach of many people. We enjoy this thanks to the prosperity generated by the free market system, which has made what was once a luxury available to very few accessible to everyone.

The difference between Francoism and communist dictatorships

Interestingly, in Spain the real boom of the private car occurred under Francoism, a regime that was strictly a dictatorship, with the lack of political freedoms that this entailed, but which offered many more freedoms than communist dictatorships, starting with a much greater respect for private property, since it maintained the capitalist economic system in Spain. As the famous writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and survivor of the Soviet Gulag, said during his visit to Spain on March 20, 1976, just four months after Franco's death and when Francoist institutions were still intact:

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski also said so in 1974,who was a member of the communist ranks and ended up in exile when he began to distance himself from that totalitarian ideology. In a reply to the British Marxist historian Edward Thompson about Spain (Franco was still alive), he wrote:

"I hate to say it, but that regime, undoubtedly oppressive and undemocratic, offers its citizens more freedom than any socialist country (perhaps with the exception of Yugoslavia). In saying this, I feel not envy, but shame, because I still remember the drama of the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish have open borders (no matter the reason, which in this case is the thirty million tourists who visit the country every year), and no totalitarian regime can function with open borders."

The government of Pedro Sánchez wants to restrict private cars....

That freedom that was extended under Franco's regime in Spain (although it may seem paradoxical that a dictatorship should generalize a freedom), now socialism seems determined to take it away from us. As Libre Mercado pointed out yesterday, the "blackout" decree approved by Pedro Sánchez's government this Monday anticipates restrictions on private automobiles, stating in Part II of its introduction that it is a means of transport that "has associated with a series of very high external costs that current society cannot bear".

... while Sánchez travels around in cars, planes and helicopters that we all pay for

After stating that, the aforementioned decree proposes to give "a boost to public transportation, increasing aid to citizens, to help promote the shift to a safer, more reliable, comfortable, economical, and sustainable means of transport than the private vehicle." All this while https://www.outono.net/elentir/2022/07/29/sanchez-usa-un-helicoptero-para-volar-25-km-tras-pedir-a-los-espanoles-que-ahorren-energia/Pedro Sánchez abuses the helicopters and airplanes that we all pay for, even using them for short trips that he could make in an official car or even on the "public transportation" he proposes to Spaniards. By doing this, Sánchez is imitating the political elite of communist dictatorships like Cuba and Venezuela, who live a life of luxury while keeping their people in poverty.

The left wants private cars to be a luxury for the rich and those in power

What this decree essentially says, without much preamble, is that a government formed by socialists and communists wants Spaniards to abandon their private vehicles, pushing us to use "public transport" that would deprive us of the independence and freedom of movement that, paradoxically, the Franco regime made widespread by making cars accessible to the entire middle class. This very week, the pro-government newspaper El País has proposed the bicycle as a substitute for the car, using Copenhagen, a flat city of 569,000 inhabitants, as an example. What would happen if that were done in a hilly city like Vigo, or in a city like Madrid, with 3.3 million inhabitants and where many people have to make long commutes to work every day?

It is certainly curious to observe that in Spain, socialism is promoting a society in which only the rich and those in power can afford the luxury of owning a car, and it is doing so thanks to the votes of many people with limited resources who believed the lie that the left was the great defender of equality and the poor. What is proven, once again, is that socialism is the greatest generator of inequality and misery in the world. One only needs to look at what has happened in countries like Cuba and Venezuela, once wealthy nations that have been driven into poverty by socialism. This misery affects everyone except the political class, as selfish, insensitive, and detached from the problems of ordinary citizens as Sánchez is in Spain.

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Photo: Darwin Vegher.