No previous regime in Brazil’s independent history has pursued the nation’s regression so viciously as the current Lula-STF consortium. This isn’t about the unprecedented assault on democracy, the rule of law, or citizen security. This time, the focus isn’t on the progressive construction of a civilian dictatorship by Lula, the far-left, and the Supreme Court. It’s not about the corruption that now rages unchecked by any moderating mechanism, nor the public sector’s ingrained incompetence, or its sheer crookedness. It isn’t merely a state apparatus openly favoring criminals over the common citizen. The true horror is the deliberate destruction, enshrined as state policy, of any prospect for Brazil to achieve economic freedom, for its people to acquire knowledge that fosters genuine social advancement, and for the creation of opportunities vital for generating wealth, merited personal progress, and material prosperity through honest labor.

For two and a half years now, the Lula-STF regime has systematically undermined every single one of these foundational aspirations. Think of any policy capable of entrenching misery, concentrating wealth, and ensuring Brazil continues to have the world’s worst education indices or a public strategy for preserving ignorance—Lula, the Left, and the STF have already implemented it and intend to come up with even more. Turning job creation into an unaffordable luxury for private companies? The government does this on a daily basis. Making Brazilians work five months a year solely to pay taxes? That’s precisely where we are today and facing a clear trend of escalation; the latest effort to make things even worse is the desperate increase in the IOF (Tax on Financial Operations). (See Carlo Cauti’s article in this edition.)

Imagine a scenario where all states in Brazil’s Northeast have more people receiving Bolsa Família (cash transfer program to aid low-income families) than people actively employed. This is precisely the reality today, and the government trumpets it as evidence of “social progress.” In the extreme case of Maranhão, twice as many people receive the monthly dole from “Lula-3” as the number of actual workers.

The Public Power’s rancorous hostility towards businesses, private initiative, and personal enterprise—especially among the poor—is perhaps the most unnegotiable foundation of the Lula-STF doctrine. All of them, with very few exceptions, would rather die than give up unlimited private property by any means necessary, provided that property is their own. But they loathe, whether covertly or openly, the very existence of entrepreneurs and a business world where the government (meaning, themselves) holds no sway. Within this regime’s philosophy, a private company is equivalent to a criminal enterprise, and a “good” criminal enterprise is a walking dead one. It’s tolerated—however, its sole function, like that of the ordinary citizen, is to pay taxes to keep the State increasingly wealthy. It is an act of perpetual confiscation. To the Lula-STF consortium companies serve exclusively as tax collection agents—profit, much like the enterprise itself, is treated as “a necessary evil,” justified only if it funnels money to the National Treasury. Should it fail in this singular duty, the company is liquidated, and its remnants absorbed by the State.

There is no “hate speech” as extreme in Brazil today as that which the government directs against private enterprise. “They tell me they have job openings in companies, and they can’t fill them because no one wants to work due to Bolsa Família,” Lula stated in a recent, particularly enraged outburst. “If they paid better wages, everyone would take the jobs.” Lula has already said that Brazilian business owners pay “little tax.” Before that, he branded companies as “greedy” for seeking profit rather than “social justice”—and claimed that business owners “don’t work,” but are parasites who only benefit from the efforts made “by the workers.” Lula and the regime fail to grasp that when hiring someone for R$2,000 a month, for example, a company will actually spend R$3,500 to R$6,000 to cover the nightmare of “social charges” (payroll taxes and benefits). They assume they can simply hand money to the employee by squeezing it out from the employer—until, inevitably, the employer is just bled dry.

The entire economic policy of the current regime is based on a scoundrel’s principle: that the State must hoard funds—the more the better— and must dictate how they will be distributed. Its entire social policy is built upon another deceptive premise: that the increase in people’s income, and thus the eradication of poverty, should exclusively stem from handouts dispensed through government “social programs.” Both ideas are false. The State has no, never had, and never will have a single dime of its own. All the money in the country belongs to its citizens and was produced by their toil; every cent the government spends, whether on Bolsa Família or a nuclear submarine, on Gilberto Gil’s concerts or Janja’s trips, comes directly from your pocket. Similarly, no one escapes poverty with public money—unless, of course, they steal it or receive Dubai emir-level salaries, like fat cats of the state machine. The poor only cease to be poor when the demand for their labor exceeds the supply of manpower—or when their professional skills are what the market needs. Period.

It is rigorously impossible to escape poverty with a government that utters these two falsehoods repeatedly. Could there be a more vivid illustration than Brazil’s own trajectory? For 22 years, save for the brief periods of Temer and Bolsonaro, the country has been governed by Lula and the Workers’ Party (PT). If their “social policies” were truly effective, why on earth does Brazil continue to have a Class D (or E, F, G) living in the world’s worst levels of misery? Why has the income disparity between a judge earning R$50,000 a month (or God knows how much) and the poor become so grotesquely wider during this period? More than two decades of “Lulism,” now in partnership with the Supreme Court, have not been enough to lift Brazil out of poverty—that, at least, is obvious. On the contrary: the Left’s ideas, if they can even be called ideas, their conduct, and their ethical-moral framework are concrete guarantees that no society can progress by doing what Brazil has been doing since 2003.

The Lula-STF regime offers a fundamental lesson to Brazilians, superseding all others in its curriculum: “How to Build a Losing Country.” No one in the world today knows how to do this as well as they do. By opting in favor of crime, they have turned Brazil into a nation where the State no longer guarantees the life of its citizens; today, we are among the countries with the worst homicide and violent crime rates in the world. Bolsa Família is hand out to 52 million people, more than half of the active population; added to the 24 million retirees, that’s 76 million non-working adults in a population of 200 million. There is no rational explanation for this paradox. The State, at all levels, will collect R$4 trillion (that’s right, trillion) yet it remains bankrupt. It grows ever more bloated with money extorted from citizens; its magnates live better and better, its services become ever costlier (the Brazilian Judiciary is the most expensive on Earth), and the poor masses remain poor, because the 4 trillion isn’t for them.

Brazil is hurtling back to colonial times, when the Portuguese Crown forbade local manufacturing, printing books, and exporting anything but gold, brazilwood, and sugarcane. Aside from Embraer jets, a private company, not a soul on the entire planet wants to buy a single modern product from Brazilian industry. This is the worst quality stamp a modern economy could have; to be a major player today, industry must necessarily produce goods that can be sold in any market worldwide, based on their quality, price, and guarantees. But guarantees for what, with Fernando Haddad as minister of Economy? And how can quality and competitive prices be offered if Brazil’s productivity level, crippled by a suicidal bureaucracy, poor infrastructure, hatred of capitalism, plus an outrageous tax burden, is among the worst in the world? In direct opposition to the contemporary age’s imperative for greater internationalization and deeper engagement with the global economic vanguard, Brazil has turned into a parish lost in the middle of nowhere. Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than Brazil’s pathetic 1% share of global trade today—precisely when Lula and Janja fancy themselves a global power.

Worse than all else, perhaps, is the persistent and purposeful maintenance of Brazil as one of the most ignorant nations in the world—a direct and indisputable consequence of the PT’s control over Brazilian public education. We have the worst global performances, scraping the bottom of the barrel, in elementary mathematics, comprehension of simple texts, sciences, logical reasoning, basic expression skills—a real nightmare. How could it be different, with public education contaminated to its last cell by the “Paulo Freire method”—possibly the most effective pedagogical tool in history for mass illiteracy production? Whatever the method doesn’t kill, the educational militias of the PT-PSOL mutilate. The chief weapon in their arsenal of sabotage is the notion that school “is not a place for learning but for forming citizens.” The concrete result is that today’s children learn everything in school except three things: how to read, how to write, and how to do arithmetic.

At this very moment, incidentally, the Lula-STF regime’s “death squad” is in full swing devising its new “national education plan,” or whatever it’s worth. Just to give you an idea: a pedagogue from this academic “fishing pond” stated, in one of the “meetings” to discuss the topic, that in her view, mathematics should have the same importance as teaching diversity, sexual options, etc. Brazil will be lucky if it stops there—at “the same importance.” What they truly want is for kids to leave school knowing everything about transgenders, and without any idea of what the Rule of Three is. If in nothing less than the United States President Trump decided to close the Department of Education for its role in poisoning education, one can only imagine the situation here. That’s the largest assembly line of semi-illiterates in national history—it molds citizens for a job market of delivery riders, gas station attendants, and street vendors.

In this term, finally his last, Lula has positively developed an infallible knack for, when faced with two or more options, invariably choosing, without a single exception so far, the wrong one. In an era when even Papua New Guinea wants to be at the forefront of technology, Lula pushes Brazil back to the Stone Age. “He’s not digital,” Janja summarizes. The past two decades of Lulist governance coincided with a period of monumental technological leaps; Brazil, however, remained rigorously on the sidelines of all this, like an imbecile who points at the sky and only sees his own hand. Now he’s fixated on Elon Musk’s space rockets—he’s “against” them, just as Alexandre de Moraes is against the mere existence of cell phones. Between Israeli democracy and Hamas’s crimes, he sides with Hamas. Between clean elections and Maduro’s electoral theft, he sides with Maduro. At a moment when the entire world, starting with China, is racking its brains to navigate negotiations with Trump, he fancies himself the global leader against the United States.

Don’t bother searching for anything right; you’ll just waste your time. The great news, as always, is that today isn’t tomorrow; Lula will pass, but Brazil remains, and Brazil is far greater than the destructive capacity of the Lula-STF regime. They may cripple, but they cannot kill. When the bleeding stops, Brazil’s organism will regenerate, for this is a country that has the energy, strength, and circumstances to leave these opportunistic dwarfs and their ghost town of Brasília in the dust. Each passing day is one less day with them.

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