Shock is necessary, let's not be afraid of it.

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 01/12/2025

Guest columnist.
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The economic crisis in Bolivia has once again brought shock therapy to the forefront of public debate. Media pundits and paid commentators of 21st-century socialism portray shock therapy policies as if they were monstrous. Phrases like "it benefits the rich," "they've stripped us of our rights," and "they're going to starve us to death" flood social media and the news.

In truth, the demonization strategy was successful, since all the economic plans avoid mentioning shock therapy. Instead, they prefer the risky and inefficient path of gradualism.

A question comes up here: what is shock?

To answer the question, it is necessary to clarify a previous concept: freedom.

In his brilliant book, *The Constitution of Liberty*, Friedrich Hayek explains that liberty is the absence of coercion. That is, we are free when no one prevents us from choosing our way of life. Obviously, our choices must not infringe upon the rights of others; for example, I cannot trespass on someone else's property or forcibly seize my neighbor's belongings. Politics is the preservation of this social order, since the State's primary function is to safeguard the life, property, and liberty of its citizens.

The state's monopoly on coercion creates another danger: that the entity meant to protect citizens' freedom becomes its primary oppressor. This is why thinkers like Karl Loewenstein, one of the greatest theorists of modern constitutionalism, warned that without constitutional and institutional frameworks, states would transform from guardians of liberty into its oppressors. Hence, his insistence on designing mechanisms in constitutions that primarily protect individuals from their governments.

However, over the last twenty years, the Movement for Socialism, emulating the Cuban dictatorial style, designed a model that concentrated everything in the hands of the leader. Political, economic, educational, religious, and many other freedoms were curtailed through taxes, regulations, and excessive bureaucracy. The mechanism used to assault our freedom was the constituent assembly and the dictatorial regulations born from it. In this regard, Gustavo Coronel, in his article "The New Bolivian Constitution," states:

Bolivia's new constitution is a document of poignant beauty, a kind of anthropological curiosity in the 21st century. It represents an understandable attempt to restore to the indigenous population the rights and presence in the life of the country that had been taken from them or denied them during years of turbulent history. In general, however, its drafters have swung the pendulum so vigorously that they have taken the document to the other extreme, making it almost racist, exclusionary, and discriminatory against significant sectors of the population other than the indigenous population. This document, with its undeniable good intentions, seems to enshrine the tribal, federal nature of a nation that has yet to find a solid collective identity.

I think it's now clear that Bolivia was a Castro-Chavista experiment to expand its dictatorial model. So, if the dictatorship hijacked our freedoms, the real shock, beyond the economic technicalities, is returning those freedoms to the citizens. It's about ensuring that when we start businesses, we don't have the bureaucracy's boot on our necks, much less the system's voracious tax appetite. Gradualism is destined to fail for two reasons: 1) it assumes that the hijacking must be ended little by little, and 2) it requires a lot of money, which the country doesn't have.

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