Europe at the crossroads: liberal recipes for the modern world
The Rafael del Pino Foundation, Free Market Road Show and the Juan de Mariana Institute organised, on 7 May 2019 at 16.30, the event "Free Market Road Show Madrid 2019: Europe at the crossroads: liberal recipes for the modern world".
The event was structured according to the following programme:
17.00 Welcome
17.05 (Un)Regulation in the Europe of the Future Cyntia Ortiz ToledoPublic Affairs Manager, Japanese Tobacco International
17.20 (Un)Regulation in the Spain of the future Rosa Guiradolawyer, economist and founder of Legal Sharing Manuel LlamasEditor-in-chief of conomics at Libertad Digital Diego Sánchez de la Cruzeconomic journalist and CEO of Smart Regulation Forum Eduardo Fernández LuiñaDirector of the Juan de Mariana Institute (moderator)
18.45 The rise of authoritarianism in Europe Juan Pina, president of Fundalib Angel RiveroProfessor of Political Science and Administration at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Ignacio Sánchez-CuencaDirector of the Juan March Institute of Social Sciences at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Irune AriñoDeputy Director of the Juan de Mariana Institute (moderator)
20.15 Future challenges for the Spanish economy Juan Ramón Ralloeconomist and founding member of the Juan de Mariana Institute. Rubén Mansoeconomist, founder of the Mansolivar law firm and coordinator of Vox's economic programme. Carlos Cuestajournalist (moderator)
Summary:
On 7 May 2018, the Free Market Road Show 2019 took place at the Rafael del Pino Foundation, the central theme of which was "Europe at the crossroads". The first part of the event was entitled "(Un)Regulation in the Europe of the future" and started with the intervention of Cyntia Ortiz Toledo, public affairs manager of Japanese Tobacco International, who indicated that the question is not more or less regulation; the question is whether regulation is necessary and adequate. Why do states regulate? Economic theory says that the state intervenes with regulation to correct market failures and make an effective allocation of scarce resources. But what happens when there is no market failure, when the objectives are not clear and the instrument is not appropriate? A government failure occurs. This is what happens when there is excessive regulation. In addition, we have the regulatory layers. The regulator pursues an objective with regulation, but when it does not achieve it, it adds another regulatory layer, and another one, and so on. The state also intervenes in situations where it does not have to intervene, or regulates spheres that normally have to be personal decisions. According to the "nanny state" index, which includes three criteria -nicotine, diet and alcohol-, the worst state is Finland and the best is Germany. Where is Spain? 23rd out of 28. It is not such a nanny state. As far as the index of economic freedom is concerned, Spain is 57th out of 180 countries measured. And according to the World Bank's Doing Business, Spain is number 30 out of 190 countries. It really is a country that has freedom and promotes free enterprise. These are encouraging indices. An example of when regulation becomes excessive, unnecessary and poorly regulated is the tobacco industry. One of the most heavily regulated industries to protect public health. One of the policies that has been implemented is plain packaging - one standard package for all brands - which is to disenfranchise an industry. But the brand is the most valuable thing a company has. To deprive a company of that right is a very serious matter because it opens the door for the same kind of violations to spread to other sectors. In Europe, the generic package has already been adopted by several countries and in the world there are already seventeen. The first of these was Australia in 2012. In Europe we have the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Hungary and Slovenia. The latter two have delayed implementation. In Australia, the regulator sought to reduce smoking, to discourage minors from using tobacco, but they sought to do so by characterising the pack as an advertisement and therefore banning it. This makes more intellectual property infringements possible. But the results were not what was hoped for. Australia has had a declining trend in tobacco consumption for more than twenty years. What was expected was that this trend would accelerate with the introduction of plain packaging. What happened is that the trend stagnated. Moreover, when you lose the brand, the ultimate factor is price, which means that cheaper and cheaper products are sold. But the cheapest product is illegal, the one that doesn't pay taxes, the one that doesn't take care of sanitary quality, the one that sells tobacco to minors. And those behind these brands are usually criminal groups who profit from these situations. This is what happens in Australia, to the extent that 15% of the total consumption in Australia is illegal. This represents an amount of 1.46 billion dollars. In Spain, the tax revenue involved in tobacco is ten billion euros. This is the cost of the Madrid-Barcelona AVE high-speed train. In France, illicit trade has tripled. The figures for the United Kingdom are very similar. This policy has therefore not achieved its objectives, but it has a very high cost for the state and for society. How can all this be prevented? The regulator has to clearly justify why it is going to regulate, analyse non-regulatory options and, to do this, the regulator must keep in mind the OECD's three disciplines of good regulation: public consultation, because regulators do not know everything; regulatory impact, or cost benefit analysis; and ex post analysis, or whether the regulation has achieved its objectives or not. <strong>Round Table</strong> This was followed by a round table discussion on the same topic with the participation of Rosa Guirado, lawyer, economist and founder of Legal Sharing, and Manuel Llamas, editor-in-chief of economics at Libertad Digital. For Rosa Guirado, regulation is the set of rules with which a state equips itself and channels the actions that can be carried out by the market itself, which is governed by a series of principles, starting with market freedom. These principles should establish a number of fundamental freedoms to be guaranteed by regulation, such as freedom of entry and exit from the market, freedom of access without barriers, freedom of contracting and pricing. In other words, a series of freedoms that allow outsiders to invest in the market, all within the framework of the Services Directive, i.e. no limits on access that are neither necessary nor proportionate to the general interest that justifies the need for regulation. Manuel Llamas, for his part, indicated that the reality is very different from the theory. In Spain, regulation is made up of rules that politicians always invent for their own benefit, with the only limit being the constitutional framework. If the basis of an economy's freedom is the fulfilment of contracts, private property and economic freedom, good regulation is that which derives from the fulfilment of contracts. When conflicts arise between individuals who have freely entered into contracts, rules, natural law, appear. This has nothing to do with what politicians do, whose incentive is to stay in power by satisfying public opinion or their constituents. Regarding the role of lobbies in regulation, Rosa Guirado commented that today there are no politicians with a vision of the state, willing to sacrifice their short term. Lobbyists do the same thing: they do not seek the general interest, but their own. The bad thing is that the regulator has been captured by this lack of long-term vision, which makes it easy for the lobbies to convince them, to the detriment of free competition and market freedom. For Manuel Llamas, the role of lobbies depends to a large extent on the convictions of the ruler in power. If a politician has strong liberal principles, the pressure that lobbies can exert is marginal. If the politician wants to liberalise a sector, he liberalises it, full stop. In the specific case of Spain and new technologies, the role of lobbies is absolutely restrictive. With the collaborative economy, new competition has emerged and the stagnant sectors, which operate under quasi-monopoly regimes, are very prone to demand restrictions and politicians, with whom they have maintained good relations for years, are prone to grant them. How can the pressure of the lobbies to shield themselves from competition be counteracted? If the politician's only interest is to stay in power, the most effective way is for them not to win the battle of ideas, to teach people what is in their interest and what is not. For Manuel Llamas, a scandalous regulation is that of tourist flats. Tourist flats have always existed. Madrid has just approved a regulation that prohibits, de facto, the 95% of tourist flats in Madrid because it requires them to have an independent door from the entrance that opens directly onto the street. The hotel lobby is the one proposing that the regulation be passed on to the autonomous communities and then they started complaining that tourist flats were unfair competition for them. It is the same debate that existed years ago between big airlines and low-cost airlines. According to Rosa Guirado, here it seems that you are nobody if you don't talk about unfair competition. But there is an essential difference between competition and unfair competition. The existence of competition implies a general interest and, therefore, it is in the public interest and the state is empowered to defend it. Unfair competition is when, where competition already exists, competition is elbowed out of the way. The Supreme Court says that competition is always annoying, but that does not make it unfair. Based on this distinction, what has led to the plethora of regional regulations is the approval of nonsensical regulations that say how many hangers a tourist flat must have to be legal, how the toilet paper roll holder must be, etc. These barriers to entry are not only via regulation, but also via sanctions. What is disruptive is not the new technological models, but how customer-centric the traditional models were. It is not that Cabify or Uber are the bomb, but how badly taxi drivers were doing it. It is not that Airbnb is a marvel, but how much of a gap hotels were leaving for Airbnb to fit in. Rosa Guirado pointed out that the regulation that causes the most damage is the one that confuses. Lobbyists confuse because they want to confuse. The laws that confuse are the ones that are left over. The reform would be to be very positive, to understand that there is a vision of the future on the part of the parties. They have to have faith in free competition, they have to stop being held hostage by the lobbies. But, to date, I don't see anyone in Spain taking up this issue. Manuel Llamas is pessimistic in the short term because the lobbies exert brutal pressure and there are politicians who are willing to buy their material. But he is optimistic in the long term, because the technological revolution is unstoppable and common sense will eventually prevail. <strong>Round Table "The Rise of Authoritarianism in Europe".</strong> This was followed by a round table discussion on "The rise of authoritarianism in Europe", with the participation of Juan Pina, President of Fundalib; Ángel Rivero, Professor of Political Science and Administration at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Director of the Juan March Institute of Social Sciences at the Carlos III University of Madrid. For Juan Pina, authoritarianism is an amendment to the totality of the European values on which we have based ourselves for the last three hundred years. It is a series of changes that came about when we were able to rationalise authority. Authoritarianism represents a return to the times when authority had no checks and balances, something subject to the judgement of society. Europe is returning to authoritarianism because there is an erosion of widespread and transparent social democracy. It implies a return to the times before capitalism, to the separation of powers, to the separation of church and state, to the lack of scientific and cultural freedom. If the West is characterised by anything, it is for having been able to abandon obscurantist apriorisms to embrace freedom. Ángel Rivero, for his part, commented that authoritarianism is opposed to democracy. It is a type of coercive government that does not take into consideration the opinions and interests of the governed, nor does it enjoy their authorisation. The rise of authoritarianism in Europe is a bit truculent, because there is no totalitarian state. He prefers to speak of populism, because it has a connection to authoritarianism, but it is also distinct from it. There is indeed a question about democracy in Europe, which is seen, for example, in political leaders like Orban who think that more democracy means less liberalism and more plebiscites, referendums. There are many European movements that participate in this idea and want to do away with liberalism in the name of democracy. This authoritarian drift, however, should be qualified because there are countries with important populist movements that are still the most democratic countries in the world. Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca added some additional nuances. Over time, the boundaries between authoritarianism and populism have become blurred. Before the Second World War they were tyrannical, despotic regimes. But the post-World War II push for democracy is so strong that most authoritarian regimes after 1945 are regimes in which elections are held and there is some multipartyism. Of course, the parties do not compete on equal terms, but the playing field is tilted in favour of the dictator. This creates confusion because today it is not clear where these authoritarianisms end and illiberal democracies begin. As a result, it is no longer possible to make such clear and sharp distinctions as before. Authoritarianism has not come to Western Europe because no democracy has fallen. In fact, the richest democracy that has degenerated into an authoritarian regime is Argentina in 1976. All other cases of democratic backsliding have occurred in countries with a lower per capita income than Argentina in 1976. If we look at the level of developed democracies, there are no cases of regression to authoritarianism. The problem in the West is not so much the danger of authoritarianism as the gradual erosion of the mechanisms that allow democratic systems to remain alive and well. They are in danger, but they do not just die because of the costs and uncertainty that the complete destruction of the pillars of democracy would entail. It is prevented by the propertied middle classes, but they are not powerful enough to prevent democracy from eroding. What needs to be analysed is why this is happening, whether it has to do with the economic crisis, with the crisis of the social democratic parties, with the mechanisms of economic globalisation. Juan Pina does see danger because, if you look at the political spectrum in Western Europe, at the extremes there are new actors who have much more weight in the elections and in seats than they have had in recent decades. And there is one culprit: social democracy, which, after seven decades, is wearing out and generating its own anti-system. For Ángel Rivero, the erosion of democracy in Europe has to be taken with nuances. Europe is still an island of democracy. There has been a certain decline in democracy in the world, but not in Europe. Where there is a decline is in those countries that lack a democratic tradition, or that have been barely independent. This is the case of Poland, in particular, or Hungary, which had no democratic tradition at all. In these countries, democratic degradation can be observed, but they are still democratic countries. With regard to the rise of populist movements, Ángel Rivero commented that these movements are very noticeable in Europe. We are witnessing a completely new political discourse. The political discourse of the post-war period was one of consensus and was characterised by stability and a very broad agreement between the governing parties on what liberal democracy and the social market economy were. Now we are faced with new actors, coming from the 1970s, who challenge the political value of the great post-war political formations. Different types of crisis explain their emergence. In some places it is an economic crisis, in southern Europe it is a social crisis in the form of growing inequalities, in others a political and representational crisis, in still others a cultural and migration crisis. In some, the causes are even non-existent, as in Hungary. And in the absence of such a problem, the population can also be mobilised, creating a sense of threat and degrading democracy. Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca believes that these forms of populism are very different from those of the past, in the sense that in this era there is no known alternative to the existing order. What we have are reactive movements of dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy, which do not challenge its essential values, but pervert and degenerate them through a practice that does not coincide with the ideals of the system. The question is why these movements are appearing so strongly now and not forty years ago. What they have in common is that trust in political representation is broken. In the case of Italy it was because of corruption. Then came other cases as a consequence of the economic crisis. Then, citizens start to think that their children are going to live worse than them and the representative link is broken. In this scenario, populist leaders emerge who try to capitalise on this discontent. Juan Pina, in turn, insisted that the post-war social democratic consensus made the social democrats indistinguishable from the Christian democrats and the rest of the parties because they all buy into an institutional set-up characterised by increased regulation and interventionism. This system does nothing more than promise, promise and promise levels of welfare that, when times of crisis come, cannot be achieved. Hence the emergence of this dissatisfied society that gives rise to the rise of authoritarianism, which is very worrying. It is very worrying because Russia is behind it. It is also because the extremes have been gaining ground throughout Europe. Ángel Rivero pointed out that the rise of populism can be correlated with the crisis of social democracy, but there is no causality. The oldest populist parties were originally libertarian parties, anti-tax parties, including the National Front when it was founded. All these parties, today, are defenders of the welfare state, as opposed to the capitalist parties that are the traditional parties. In this malaise, therefore, there is a chameleon-like character; they are always looking for protest. Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca commented, in this respect, that what unifies all European populisms is that they all make the diagnosis that the cause of their ills lies in the loss of national sovereignty. Therefore, they are all against Europe because Europe's technocratic elites are oblivious to these problems. The populists say that, if they are given national sovereignty again, they will make the policies that the people are asking for. The problem is that they are prevented from doing so by both globalisation and the European Union. Political elites, on the other hand, say that national sovereignty is an atavism. But society demands sovereignty, which produces a disconnection between the elites and civil society that has not been fully understood or managed. Populist movements further to the right are mostly blue-collar workers, people of a certain age and with low levels of education, and many of them living in medium-sized towns or outside the big capitals. In southern European countries, where left-wing populist parties have more momentum, what we see is that those who vote for populist parties are younger, urban, highly educated people, with education levels well above the average, who see that their possibilities for job development are closed. They are different social groups but they have a similar reaction, which is to demand sovereignty, insofar as they have been beaten in recent years. Insofar as they oppose the basic post-war consensus, they cannot be said to be the antibody of social democracy. This is because the foundations of the post-war consensus have ceased to function due to economic transformation, technology and globalisation, which have generated distortions that political systems have not been able to handle. For Juan Pina, the loss of the bond of representation derives from the transformation of the deep social network, which is now no longer decentralised, but distributed. This is affecting culture and business. Society is becoming disintermediated in many ways. This disintermediation is also reaching the world of politics, so the system of governance is going to have to change, to be less interventionist, and more direct for everything that stays within the public sphere. Claims of sovereignty are one of the leftovers of statism, which is no longer useful. On the other hand, for Ángel Rivero, the important lesson of liberalism is the political lesson that representative democracy is the instrument for protecting individual freedom. This idea of direct democracy as a gain in freedom is the false idea fed by these movements. In the same vein, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca pointed out that it is abusive to identify mediation by political parties with state interventionism. The politician's task, in a highly complex world where there are thousands of decisions to make and multiple dimensions to judge, is to offer coherent packages to citizens. What he or she does is to make sense of a set of measures and present them to the citizenry. If this role of aggregating decisions is broken, politics becomes chaotic, and what is presented to the public are emotional messages that convey a false hope. With regard to the European Union, Juan Pina denounced the fact that European integration had gone much further than it should have. European integration should have stopped at two things. Firstly, a basic charter of rights and freedoms, with a set of institutions to protect it. Secondly, a free trade framework. It has gone much further than that and as a result we have an EU that is far removed from the people, a bureaucracy that the people do not understand. This is fuelling society's demand for sovereignty. For this reason, the idea of the common market had to be recovered as an alternative to this Europe. Ángel Rivero pointed out that the question of national sovereignty is worrying from a liberal point of view. We have returned to collective subjects as political actors, which should be criticised. Sovereignty should be denounced. We should also be more belligerent with populist movements, which can be giants with feet of clay. To conclude, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca pointed out that one way of understanding what is happening in Europe is that integration has gone too far and has built a technocratic decision-making superstructure, far removed from the citizenry. This technocracy has sometimes been brutally imposed, as in the economic crisis, leading to pendulum reactions such as populism. Representative democracy is threatened by the European technocratic superstructure and, at the other extreme, by groups demanding an idea of sovereignty that is impossible in these times. What is being lost in between is an idea that has worked for two centuries, which is representative democracy in which there were horizontal political structures that allowed the representative link to function. The challenge is how to strengthen representative democracy to avoid these two opposing dangers. <strong>Round table: Future challenges for the Spanish economy</strong> This was followed by the round table on the subject of "Future challenges for the Spanish economy", in which Juan Ramón Rallo, economist and founding partner of the Juan de Mariana Institute, and Rubén Manso, founder of Mansolivar and head of Vox's economic programme, took part. Rallo explained that the Socialist Party has a very clear model of where it wants to take Spain, which is to bring it fiscally closer to Europe by bringing tax revenues in relation to GDP into line with the European average. At the moment, the tax collection gap is seven percentage points of GDP, which is equivalent to 80 billion euros. This figure is often repeated by the PSOE and Podemos because they advocate a much larger and redistributive state in the worst sense of the word, that is, taking from some to give to others and, in between, creating clientelistic networks and dependence on state power. The basic idea is that this money should come from the rich. But it also means that the middle classes would have to pay much more taxes, between 4,000 and 8,000 euros per family per year. There is no way to collect what the PSOE wants unless it is by plundering the middle classes. In fact, the Spanish middle class pays less tax than the European middle class. Faced with this model, we must move to another diametrically opposed one, in which taxes must be lowered and the state dismantled. It is a question of returning areas of responsibility for their lives to citizens so that they can manage their own money, choosing what to do with it in services that are currently monopolised by the state. Moreover, when people think of catching up with Europe, they think of countries like Denmark, Sweden or Finland, which are countries with higher per capita incomes and welfare systems that, in many areas, work better than ours, which can be attractive. If we were to substantially increase the tax burden in Spain, our mirror would not be those countries, but Italy, Greece or France. Manso, for his part, indicated that the ideas of the socialists are the antithesis of what Spain needs. What we are in is a game in which the middle classes have to believe that they are getting more than they pay for. A welfare state of the size we have achieved cannot be sustained by the rich because the rich have a tremendous capacity for mobility. That is why social democratic countries have been characterised by very low taxes on capital and very high taxes on labour. Our fiscal model is like that. There is no social democrat who does not know that if he taxes capital, it will go away, so he taxes labour. We need to reduce spending and taxes, we need to reduce the state and transfer those responsibilities to individuals. What greater control is there than not taxing me for a lot of services, including education and health care, that I could pay for and that I as a consumer could control? The Constitution does not say that the state should be the provider of education and health care, only that it should ensure that they are provided. Education and health care can be provided by private companies. Public schools are cheaper than public schools. And consortium systems, such as agricultural insurance, can serve as a model for healthcare. Rallo added that the loss of dynamism in these sectors stems from the fact that users are deprived of freedom of choice. Therefore, private providers who should be competing and economising their resources in order to offer their service at the lowest possible cost, do not do so. Not even the subsidised centres do so because they have no margin, due to the existing regulation, and because as it is not the consumer who has the cheque that gives or withdraws it, this competition, which would reduce costs and improve quality, does not take place. Moreover, the fact that it is the state that provides these services makes us tremendously dependent on political power. The state can ruin one's health, education and pension and the individual can do nothing about it. Also, state insurance should be subsidiary to what the private sector gets. The main social responsibility we should all have is to prevent others from having to take care of oneself. Manso warned, in this sense, that the principle of subsidiarity is being applied in reverse. The principle is that where private initiative does not reach, the public should step in, but it has become the reverse, that is, that private initiative should do what the state does not cover. It is essential to create wealth, reforms must be implemented that allow families to create wealth and wealth because that is what gives them independence from political power. However, we see that savings rates are very low, which means that we are depatriarchalising families. Rallo added that, in addition to the loss of welfare generated by taxes, there is an irrecoverable loss of efficiency, which means that if you take away part of what you earn, you are going to make less effort, you are going to work less. So, value is no longer generated, and this occurs in labour income and business income. One could have high taxes if the rest of the regulatory environment were favourable, but Spain is not characterised by a favourable regulatory environment at all and has one of the highest corporate taxes in Europe. If we don't correct that, we will not attract and retain investment and professional talent. Manso added that one thing that has been fought most in Spain is wage discrimination, when it is the thing that benefits the poor the most. When people criticise the fact that someone earns three or four thousand euros, they don't ask how much it has cost to get to that position, so that in Spain we have such small wage differences that this has generated the movement towards self-employment. Many people become self-employed because a culture has been created in which it is frowned upon for people to earn 70,000 euros, and the tax authorities punish them. With the communications we have, we are going to end up driving these people out of Spain. What we are creating is a lot of low-productivity work. Therefore, the fiscal measures that the government is preparing will cause us to lose human capital. The migratory flows in Spain are proof of this. A lot of very low-skilled people are entering Spain because there are no incentives for those who are highly skilled. Instead of low taxes, we prefer to throw these qualified people out. Rallo continued along these lines, saying that those who stop generating value internally, not only stop generating it for themselves or for the consumer. To set up many industries we need complementarities, so if talent does not come, it cannot be complemented by other internal talent, which will also have to go abroad. You will not generate these interconnected hubs with internal people. You also need unskilled staff, which allows the skilled staff to be able to deliver their full potential. The problem is that we are exempting very low incomes from paying taxes, while increasingly taxing high incomes. This creates a very perverse set of incentives for the elections, which will decapitalise the country economically. But it must be forgotten that some of these high-income earners are the result of plundering and parasitism from others. This plundering and parasitism should not be combated with high taxes, but by removing the privileges that allow this parasitism. On the subject of social security, Rallo continued, we are increasingly moving towards a welfare model. The model we have today is of the contributory type, i.e., so much is contributed, so much is received as a pension so that there is a correspondence between what is contributed and what is received. What have the governments of democracy done, and what are they going to continue to do? They have narrowed the gap between the minimum and maximum pensions and, on the other hand, they have made progress in reducing the cap on social security contributions without abolishing the cap on the maximum pension. In this way, social contributions become just another general tax: you pay according to your income and receive whatever the state wants to give you. This is tragic in the case of social security because it is a welfare mechanism. Let's go to this welfare model. It exists in other European countries, but it is not negative because minimum pensions are low and so are social security contributions. The difference goes to personal savings as a complement to the minimum pension. Spain does not have this part of the system and what is going to happen is to extend the welfare system to everyone indiscriminately. According to Manso, we are moving towards a welfare system, but an expensive one. We are treated like children, like adolescents, ensuring pensions, education, etc., while they take from you through taxes. What needs to change is the passion for equality, which is very wrong. Inequality has been growing since humans left Africa, but inequality creates wealth and equality creates poverty. What we need to start worrying about is not the rates of inequality, but how those who live the worst live. Excessive inequality can cause some problems of social cohesion, but that depends on how we educate. For Rallo, inequality can have both positive and negative effects. It can channel talent towards activities that generate more value. But it can also be a symptom of certain established and extractive oligarchies because they generate a lot of justified social resentment. Even more important than inequality is social mobility. France is more egalitarian than Spain, but it is also more conflictive because social mobility has fallen a lot. In our society, unfortunately, there are many guild barriers that favour oligopolies, cartels, protected professionals over competition, etc., which generate a lack of social mobility and logical resentment. Manso explained that this type of extractive elite is generated by public intervention and regulation because it creates a type of capitalist or entrepreneur, whose business does not depend on satisfying the consumer but on satisfying the state. It is also because of a reservation of political power in favour of a caste. That is what we have to put an end to.
The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio González, are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of the authors.
The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio J. González, are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.
