The current Uruguayan president, Yamandú Orsi, held a press conference mentioning the state of the debt and, once again, the losses, of one of the heads of our state monster, ANCAP.
Raúl Sendic, later convicted and removed as vice president for corruption, managed ANCAP with an accounting loss of 800 million dollars, which ended up being paid with more poverty.
A living image of the group of politicians who insist so much on trying to place themselves in a moral category that they never actually demonstrate being in, honesty.
Although I mentioned Ancap as one of the great evils of our republic in the post "Milei on the Scale... and the Great Scammer State," here I present other aspects a little more in-depth, of this century-old problem. I pointed out under the subtitle "The State Monopoly in Uruguay" that:
Those entities and others created later... that, under the pretext of offering strategic services, force citizens with expensive, inefficient services and without the possibility of complaint, "saving us" from worse evils, the private sector.
Without delving into what we have to endure, by prohibiting us from competition, paying for an expensive and bad product, the militancy of such a large number of voters hired and maintained under the pretext of "strategic company" or source of employment.
I will refer to the origin of the institution, to the prices compared with the world, and to the market failures produced by this type of coercive state interventions in the economy.
The origin of the evil, the Curse of Malinche
Ancap air and water pollution
Ancap air and water pollution, fined once again by the IMM
Created in 1931, with the vocation of an industrial conglomerate (Fuel, Alcohol, and Portland), wrongly called a company, since it doesn't arise from the pursuit of the social benefit that an enterprise implies, nor does it assume the personal patrimonial risk of the creators.
All risk and losses are at the expense of those who always pay for the state's failures, all of us.
Not our rulers, since as we have seen and heard these days, they don't pay the taxes they impose on us either.
Except for an incipient and truncated opportunity given to us by President Lacalle Herrera with law 16.211 in 1991, overturned later through a referendum, driven by the current rulers, with their unionism and related organizations.
The other politicians since its foundation have cursed us to pay for low-quality and extremely high-priced fuels.
It is also worth highlighting the great recurring environmental damage and the potential danger posed to the surrounding population by an old structure, which ended up located in a more populated area than at the beginning.
The most expensive gasoline in the world
In Uruguay, we often claim that we pay for the most expensive gasoline in the world. What could previously be debated, today anyone can easily verify thanks to instant access to information.
The following chart compares the current price per liter of super or regular gasoline in some selected countries, compared to the world average.
Gasoline prices compared Uruguay, other countries, and world average
Source: Own elaboration with data from local websites and globalpetrolprices.com
In some countries, fuel is slightly more expensive, in absolute terms than at home, Switzerland and Ireland, from the chart, pay less, considering the value relative to per capita income, they are on average 4.5 times richer than us.
Ancap and the supposed market failures
The microeconomic theory inherited from the neoclassicals, led by economists like the British Alfred Marshall, at the end of the 19th century, who began to use mathematical models in economic analysis.
They put forward some reasons used to justify state intervention in the economy, such as externalities, public goods, and objectives regarding the main macro variables.
Pollution considered a negative externality, which the government, to "protect us," seeks to internalize it, that is, to include that "social cost" in the product price so that those who use the good pay society.
