Lula explained in one sentence how socialism always ends

Socialism has a strange ability to transform its failures into moral lessons. First, it promises well-being, equality, and prosperity for all. Then, when reality starts to shrink the menu, the discourse of popular austerity, simplicity, and sacrifice appears. What was once a promise of abundance ends up becoming a pedagogy of scarcity.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has just offered a perfect synthesis of that logic. During an event in Porto Alegre, he said that if there is no meat, one eats eggs; and if there are no eggs, there is rice and beans. The phrase attempted to present itself as an appeal to his own personal history and to Brazilian popular culture. But politically, it says much more than it seems.

Because a ruler can react in two ways to scarcity. They can ask how to produce more, how to attract investment, how to eliminate obstacles, how to expand supply, and how to make previously expensive goods accessible to more and more people. Or they can start explaining to citizens what they must resign when there isn't enough for everything.

Latin American left has perfected that second option over decades.

When it cannot guarantee growth, it transforms austerity into moral superiority. When it cannot offer more consumption, it begins to suspect consumption itself. When it fails to expand people's material possibilities, it tries to convince them that wanting more was a bourgeois, individualistic, or consumerist deviation.

That is one of socialism's oldest tricks: to turn into virtue what its own model fails to produce.

It doesn't matter if it is meat, energy, housing, cars, dollars, or travel. The mechanism always looks similar. First, it promises that the state will guarantee access for all. Then restrictions, controls, shortages, taxes, regulations, and discourses about the need to “prioritize” appear. Finally, the citizen ends up hearing that they must adapt to a smaller life for some greater collective good.

Capitalism works exactly the opposite.

It doesn't ask the poor why they want to eat meat. It asks how to make meat more abundant, cheaper, and more accessible. It does not suspect those who want to improve their housing, travel, buy a car, or consume better products. It starts from the radical idea that wanting to live better is not a sin.

That is why capitalist progress is recognized precisely in what yesterday seemed a luxury and today can become mass consumption. Refrigerators, cell phones, flights, computers, varied foods, medicines, and hundreds of goods that were once reserved for a minority have been expanding because companies competed, invested, innovated, and found ways to produce more with less.

Socialism often looks at that process with distrust. It is uncomfortable that people have different preferences, that they want to accumulate, consume, choose, and progress along paths that no bureaucrat designed. Therefore, when scarcity appears, its cultural reaction almost never consists of admitting that the model failed. It consists of lowering expectations.

That is where Lula's phrase stops being a gastronomic anecdote.

“If there is no meat, eat eggs. If there are no eggs, eat rice and beans” is not simply a recommendation about what to put on the plate. It is a way of thinking about politics. The citizen must learn to adjust their desires to what the system can offer them.

And that logic explains a large part of socialist history.

Instead of building a society where more and more people can choose between meat, eggs, fish, or anything else, power ends up managing what consumption should be considered reasonable. And there is always some intellectual willing to turn that renunciation into a moral virtue.

The problem would never be that people have less.

The problem would be that they want too much.

This moral inversion is one of the reasons why the left can survive even its own failures. If reality improves, it claims the merit. If it worsens, it redefines what it means to live well.

Thus, it never loses the discussion. It only changes the standard.

That is why Lula's phrase is so revealing. Not because eating rice and beans is anything wrong. Millions of people do it out of taste, tradition, or choice. The problem arises when politics starts teaching the individual that they must settle for that because aspiring for more is seen as suspicious or unnecessary.

A free society should pursue exactly the opposite.

That those who can only eat rice today can buy eggs tomorrow. That those who buy eggs today can choose meat tomorrow. And that no one in power explains to them how far they are allowed to aspire.

Capitalism wants the poor to be able to eat meat. Socialism ends up teaching them that wanting meat was the problem.