I was a congressman for a centre-left party in the previous legislature. In terms of freedom to organize and to strike, those freedoms are perfectly safeguarded. The thing is that the organized labour movement has been more about filling their own pockets than it has about protecting workers' rights. The only problem is that internally they are democratic institutions, but that feudalism within our unions is popularly backed by the workers in general, so that is an issue.
Now, the party that I ran under is promoting a dramatic increase in minimum wage in Mexico. We're talking about a 200% increase, obviously staggered over time and whatnot. I think we need to revisit those issues.
I'd like to come back to defending trade as a freedom, because ideologically I think we've also been remiss. Trade is a freedom. Trade is by nature fair insofar as it is voluntary, and if we allow people to say, “Look, you know, I believe that brown people are getting a subsidy”—this is in the United States—“I don't like all these brown people receiving welfare because I see them as these welfare queens” and all of that, all of these horrible images get created over the years.
Yet they turn around, and the first thing that they want is protectionism, and protectionism is nothing but welfare that's paid for by consumers. These subsidies that people are asking for are of the same tenor as welfare, and we can't let them get away with this idea that protectionism doesn't have costs. It has significant costs. People will lose their jobs, and people's general welfare will go down insofar as they won't be able to buy the goods that they want.