Category: Liberty

Categories
Liberty Politics & government

[2467] Why the rush?

I had listened to Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Malaysia Day address with skepticism. Part of the skepticism came after noticing all the qualifications made by the prime minister in the same speech. The so-called Political Transformation Program does not look so bold if one reads the fine print.

As we have learned in recent days, the actual reform does not meet the high expectations set by the prime minister himself. The manner at which the Peaceful Assembly Bill 2011 was rushed through did little to alleviate the skepticism.

In these days of skepticism, only actions command confidence. The nearly six years of the Abdullah administration justifies that attitude. The bravado of Parti Keadilan Rakyat only adds to the justification of skepticism. Indeed, political skepticism against all sides is a sign of maturity of ordinary voters.

While the scent of skepticism was strong, not all shared it. Not all ordinary voters are seasoned political observers after all. Many young Malaysians celebrated the announced reforms as if reform had already happened. And then there are other not-so-young Malaysians who willingly assume things in good faith. Because of this, the Najib administration gained some immediate political capital.

That was about three months ago.

However significant the political capital was, time is eroding it. The power of words can last only so long. The longer it goes unsupported by action, the less credible it becomes. Words are cheap. In order to arrest the skepticism and to ensure that the liberalization exercise will translate into votes for Barisan Nasional, the promised changes will have to be instituted before the next federal election. Action is required, hence the rushing of the Bill.

Within a week, the Bill was read twice. Members of Parliament were expected to read the Bill thoroughly, consult experts as well as their constituents and then debate it intelligently within the span of a few days. That was nothing less than an ambush on the liberal camp.

The ungodly rush suggests something else as well: the federal election is coming sooner rather than later. It suggests the tentative election date has been set and all Bills need to be passed before that deadline. If that is indeed the case, then the election presents a perverse incentive for the government to act based on a misunderstanding of criticism against the previous illiberal laws.

It must be highlighted that the criticism is against the spirit of the previous laws, and not against the laws per se. With the Peaceful Assembly Bill retaining the old illiberal spirit, it is no different from the old laws. To cite another example relating back to the Malaysia Day speech, the replacement of the Internal Security Act will still grant the government the power to detain a person without trial. Yet, the main criticism against the ISA was exactly the detention without trial feature. So, what exactly will the substantive change be?

One gets the impression that the government thinks all that is wrong is the names and the initials of a certain set of laws. Change the names and the initials to something more cheery and they expect the criticism will go away. That is a gross misunderstanding.

Based on that, the government would think that rushing the Peaceful Assembly Bill and other related ones will win it votes. No, it will not.

A substantive-minded government would take a more measured pace by making the Bill and others to come go through a thorough deliberative process. That possibly means pushing the next election as far as possible into the future and holding it only after a much improved Bill is ready for passing.

The reverse — setting the election date first and then targeting to pass the Bills before that date — will result in farcical Bills.

A rushed farcical Bill benefits no one. The voters will see through the farce and BN will not win any extra votes from it. BN in fact would lose votes because new voters and those who assumed good faith would think the ruling coalition has taken them for fools. Meanwhile, Malaysians will not see any improvement in their civil liberties.

In the end, what was the point of rushing it?

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 2 2011.

Categories
Liberty Society

[2439] When it comes, they will run

The return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China was imminent. After years of a hands-free approach taken by the colonial government, the citizens of Hong Kong were used to a liberal atmosphere. The prospect of a continuous liberal environment after the 1997 handover was unclear however. The uncertainty convinced many to fear the worst. Rather than suffer the uncertainty, they took action and sought refuge elsewhere. They applied for permanent residency and citizenship in other countries to escape the possibility of living in an oppressive society. The PRC, regardless of what it is now with all of its contradictions, was perceived as a repressive and decidedly communist country. The 1989 Tiananmen Square incident was still fresh in everybody’s minds.

Money is not always the only consideration in any decision regarding migration. There are other factors that are not necessarily less important than money. Security is one. Love is two. Freedom has often been cited as a factor. A way of life is another.

The implementation of hudud or the adoption of more comprehensive Islamic laws will affect the way of life in Malaysia.

Proponents of hudud argue that the implementation of such laws will be applicable to Muslims only. They guarantee it.

Neither their argument nor their guarantee are good.

The argument of exclusive application is unlikely to be true. Previous conflicts from child custody to death and burial have proven that even the milder version of Islamic laws as practised in Malaysia impacts non-Muslims. These proponents might have forgotten these episodes. They must be reminded of it because these conflicts do create a fear of creeping Islamization in the hearts of non-Muslims as well as others who care for religious freedom.

These past conflicts can tell us what to expect in the future.

The likelier outcome of the wider implementation of Islamic laws is this: whatever affecting the majority will likely affect the minority. A more comprehensive version will not leave non-Muslims alone, even if the legal rights are discriminated among citizens so strongly.

It is naïve to believe such an incredible guarantee.

The minority will float along with the majority, whether they like it or not, for better or for worse. The wider implementation of Islamic laws will be a change in lifestyle for everybody. It will first affect the lifestyle of Muslims, regardless of their piety. The group will become more conservative, voluntarily or otherwise.

Then through the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims, the lifestyle of the latter will be affected. The rest will have to respect the new conservativeness.

In the end, whatever is the way of life that prevails will change. Whatever openness and liberalness within the society that exists will gradually vanish to satisfy rising conservativeness. Whatever lifestyle that was will have to give way to the Islamic one, however those in power define the Islamic laws. The outlook of Malaysian society itself will change. None will escape such a wholesome change unless they leave.

There is a point where the religious and non-religious minorities along with Muslims who hold more relaxed religious positions will choose migration over further tolerance of growing Islamization within their society. The potential lifestyle change can be too drastic to stomach. There is a point where enough is enough.

If it comes, there will be those who will walk off to a more open society permanently. They have the means to do so, just like many former citizens of Hong Kong.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on October 6 2011.

Categories
Liberty

[2436] Bellamy mistook public-private dichotomy as the universe

In Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which is kind of the ideological polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, there is one particular argument that denies the legitimacy of private property in favor of public property.

Bellamy believed that a person uses all of his or her knowledge and experience to produce a good or a service. All of those knowledge and experience were derived from past thinkers and inventors, through interaction with society. All those goods are public properties said Bellamy, produced by humanity and none can privatize it.

Since any further inventions or innovations will necessarily use those goods defined as public properties, new inventions and innovations will continue to be public properties. The usage of public property as an input is sufficient to classify a product as public property.

The inventors and innovators have no moral right to appropriate the products of public property as private properties. It belongs to everybody, so Bellamy held. Just as a person used all these public goods for free, the person must repay it back to the owner of these public properties, which is the society or more practically, the government. As you can see, it is a pretty collectivist idea.

This idea is set within a thought complex where money does not exist and a central planner is all-knowing in terms of productive and distributive efficiency. The central planner assigns all labor based on needs and capability into an “industrial army” and the problem of scarcity has been solved. More generally, the central planner manages all input of production. The whole book was decidedly painted by the statist version of communism all around.

This line of thinking is attractive for those who are against the idea of private property, never mind the impracticability of the matter. In the book, the idea was practical only because of the existence of an omnipresent government that does everything and can enforce the status of a good as a public property. But I am not really interested in its practicality, or impractically rather. I am more interested in its morality, and its origination, which Bellamy based Looking Backward on, despite its elaborate description of Bellamy’s prefered economic system.

The problem with this kind of thinking is its initial state assumption. Bellamy assumed past knowledge is the product of humanity and a person that uses that product owes humanity something in return. In short and more clearly, if you use it, you must return it back. It assumes collective ownership of all things and it preserves collective ownership regardless of circumstances. It is an effort at drawing a perfect circle that goes round and round.

But going back to the first men when none owned anything, or rather without making any assumption on ownership, consider the first state when men were beasts far back in history. The question is who owned what in the very first state of affairs?

Did the first men own the lands, the air and the water, or did these resources were not owned?

If they owned these resources, did they own it privately or collectively?

Bellamy necessarily assumed that these resources were owned collectively by the first men. The mere use of these resources make these resources public property.

I differ. I refuse the relationship between usage as a sufficient condition to turn a good into ownership, hence turning the good into either private or public property.

I differ because unlike Bellamy, I hold that these resources were not owned by anybody. It was a common owned by none. Consider this: if I used the water from a free-flowing river owned by none, would I automatically own the river?

No.

Furthermore, if I used the water and others used it as well, would it automatically mean all the users collectively own the river?

No.

My point is that usage does not translate into ownership, privately or publicly. Bellamy assumed otherwise.

More importantly, lack of private ownership does not automatically suggest public ownership. Within the realm of property ownership, there is a dichotomy between private and public property. But within the universe, there is a dichotomy of ownership and absence of ownership.

Bellamy, I think, worked within the dichotomy of private-public ownership and mistook that as the universe.

But this relates to physical resources. How about something intangible, like calculus?

It is true that knowledge, like calculus, is the product of contribution of hundreds or thousands of men and women throughout the ages. Without any exaggeration, it is a product of humanity. But although it is, it is not owned by humanity. The discoverers of various laws, theorems, rules, lemma and anything that has logical value in the case of calculus made it free for society to use. But free does not automatically translate into ownership, just like physical resources. None own it but they are free to use or learn it.

Recall the universe and the place of ownership dichotomy within the universe.

Categories
Economics Liberty Politics & government

[2434] Is bailout of government preferred to bankruptcy?

Not all bailouts are the same. When a bailout socializes losses but privatizes gains, it can easily be judged through moral lens on top of existing economic reasoning. The interaction between government and the private entities is deplorable exactly because of lemon socialism. I find it harder to make a damning judgment when it is a bailout of government.

Some of the same crucial points applicable in the case of government bailing out private enterprise to me appear to assume lesser weight when it is the government which is being bailed out.

I do not see such bailout as a duty. Duty is too strong a word to describe what I feel but I do experience some grudging willingness to not oppose the bailout. What is troubling for me is that I am struggling to justify that willingness.

Why is a national government any different from a private entity that is too big to fail? Should the bailout in both cases be treated differently?

My initial take is that we individually and collectively do make mistakes sometimes and these mistakes are innocent in the sense that we are unlucky or that we did not know better. This line of reasoning is appealing when the direct stakeholders are the people. The national government, the reasonably democratic one at least, may have made bad decisions on behalf of the people but idea of letting the government fails appears absolutely cruel too me.

Maybe, a second chance is in order and whomever who bail the government out is an angel. What is important is that the government and the people learn their lesson. In some sense, this makes me supportive of the bailout of Indonesian and South Korean governments by the International Monetary Fund. These bailouts impressed upon the governments and its society the lessons of failure. These countries eventually experienced improved overall outcome, not just in terms of government finance and its economy, but it restructured the countries’ politics for the better, especially Indonesia.

Yet, wide suffering of the people cannot be the factor differentiating bailout of government from lemon socialism. In the case of too big to fail that plays a huge part in lemon socialism we have seen in recent years, the absence of bailout can adversely affect the lives of so many individuals indirectly. If lemon socialism is to remain despicable, then regardless of directedness of the stake holding, the suffering factor does not provide a clean cut. The eventual result is suffering in times of crisis however one looks at it.

The magnitude of suffering could partly be the answer, but I find it hard to make objective decision with such a subjective qualifier.

Suffering could be a necessary condition regardless of magnitude, but it alone cannot qualify as a sufficient condition. Somehow, suffering is merely a side issue irrelevant to the consideration of acceptability of bailout.

And there are a lot of sufferings in the world. Some of it is a case of accident and those are most unfortunate. Others are just, in the sense that you reap what you sow. That has to be differentiated. But I do not see how this is helpful in differentiating actions of the two bailouts. In lemon socialism, bad luck and consciously risky action gone bad can affect different people but at the same time. In many times, separating the two in a bailout is extremely hard if not impossible. Observe the bailout of corporations in the US where executive received bonus out of bailout funds aimed at aiding “Main Street”. In that case, one saves the innocents by saving the guilty.

So, I am forced to address the issue from another angle.

What if a government defaults? More than default, a government goes bankrupt. A lot of sovereign national governments have defaulted its financial obligations before but what if a government goes bankrupt?

If creditors assume control of the government, then this may make a bailout appear favorable. If the democratic way of life is cherished, the government would become undemocratic, being firstly answerable to the creditors rather than the citizens. This is probably the most extreme case where the government is effectively colonized because it will have to be put under receivership or the creditors. This is probably the most anti-democratic possibility under national bankruptcy. It is possibly anathema to libety as well, assuming national sovereignty is directly derived from individual sovereignty.

Due to its anti-democratic ending, maybe a bailout is favorable. Still, the recipient of the bailout itself will be beholden to its rescuer. Perhaps, a bailout is only a nicer of collar. The Asian bailouts by the IMF were not pretty, although the alternative was uglier.

(By the way, this is not applicable to Greece and Germany. Germany and others within the Eurozone have to bail Greece and others because they want to defend the Euro. That essentially changes the question from bailout of national government to the favorability of maintaining the euro. Also, the economies are closely-linked that bailing out Greece is the only viable solution, while ignoring moral hazard problem. I am probably thinking the US bailout of Mexico in 1995, or as I mentioned, the IMF Asian bailouts)

But I am in the opinion that such extreme case is unlikely to happen. But what other alternative would prevail in the event of bankruptcy?

It could be something like Germany-like with reparation post-WWI? But the point of bankruptcy is that the national government could not repay the loan. To have the reparation route seems like an abuse by the creditor. But if the route is taken, the “bankruptcy tax” to make up for the default might be a good alternative to a bailout, the problem of seigniorage notwithstanding.

What about the stripping of the government by creditors to claim whatever left as theirs? Would that mean the collapse of government? If the government does collapse and along with the state, would it not be easy to set up a new government and state? Sounds like a good idea and actually strengthens the anti-bailout position. But this would make a mockery of the process. Would the new state be essential a new one or is it really the same state in new clothes? If the new state is actually a new state, then no default in the world would matter because everything can be start anew.

Starting afresh however is outrageous. That is obviously a flawed thinking. It is likely that the market will see the new state as the old state, thus would treat the new state however it treated the old one: demand for high yield is one treatment.

There is a precedent: Argentina in 2002. That ended with merely debt restructuring, and along with grave civil disturbance, capital flight and depressed economy, although most of these were the results of ongoing economic crisis that caused the default in the first place. I said merely because the creditors did not have a hold on the government, the government escaped any retribution from the creditors (despite it suffering economic backlashes) and in fact, the creditors were punished through the debt restructuring. And this actually makes default favorable to me (although it is unclear to me if that default is equivalent to bankruptcy).

This is turning out to be a rambling where I bite more than I can chew.

So what exactly will happen if a national sovereign government, or better, a state goes bankrupt? Does it only mean outrageous yield? Collapse? Effective occupation by creditors?

In the end, whether or not I prefer a bailout to bankruptcy depends on the end results. I am a consequentialist as far as bailout is concerned. But this is unhelpful and goes against my preferred way of deriving an issue from the principle, in the sense of John Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance. What good is it to be able to decide after the fact?

Maybe I am thinking too much from the perspective of the state. I will continue to think more about this. But for now, time to read.

Categories
Liberty Politics & government

[2430] Let us inspect the qualifications first

Prime Minister Najib Razak has just delivered a much awaited speech.[1] It is much awaited because it was hyped up by the media. The speech did contain important announcement of intentions but the first 15 minutes were full of fluff.

The substance came later in the second half of the speech. He said his administration intends to repeal all declarations of emergency still in force. These declarations are frequently cited as anti-liberty and as means to circumvent more rigorous laws. He mentioned that the necessary bills will be sent to the Parliament for consideration.

My first reaction was one of excitement. Yet, questions linger. Will we see the return of local elections? There is no explicit mention of that. There are other questions in my mind that require answers.

With that realization, I take a skeptical position. This skepticism grew as the PM read more of his speech.

The proposed abolition of the Internal Security Act for instance should be a reason for liberals to cheer but two new laws are being proposed to replace the ISA. I fear that this may be merely a renaming exercise, due to the qualifications the PM included in his speech.

Another is the annual renewal of permit for the press. The proposal on the table is to replace that mechanism with a system where a license will only be canceled until it is canceled by the government. Does this mean the government will have the discretionary power to cancel a license just like that? That is not much better than the current setup. I prefer a renewal system where the permit lasts more than 5 years beyond typical election cycle to limit political manipulation by the government, be it one led by Barisan Nasional, Pakatan Rakyat or anybody for that matter. It limits discretionary power. The newly proposed system increases opportunity for discretion. The problem has always been the exercise of discretionary power, not the permit system per se.

These qualifications are important because these qualifications will be the true measure of sincerity of this announcement and of any effort at liberalization.

The Prime Minister and his administration deserve a nod for this liberalization plan but let us inspect the qualifications first before applauding the administration.

And I will believe it, after I see it finally done.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — [Najib Razak. Perutusan Hari Malaysia. Office of the Prime Minister of Malaysia. September 15 2011]