Category: Politics & government

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Politics & government

[2607] Romney won because he was underestimated

Before the presidential debate began, I had expected Romney to be creamed. The Obama team was steamrolling for weeks or months now and it appeared that Romney was doing a terrible job at campaigning for the election. Yes, Obama is only maintaining a slim margin, but that margin has not been changing much. Already various commentators are scratching their head, thinking how on earth did Romney screw up his chances?

Plus, given Obama’s oratory skill, if the debate was a trap, then Romney was going straight into it.

Boy, was I wrong. I underestimated Romney and I am sure Obama did too. At the very least, the Obama team did not do enough preparation for the debate.

Quite the contrary, Romney was the debater. Almost throughout, Romney was the dominant debater that at times, it might have surprised Obama. Obama appeared stumped at times. So dominant was Romney, that the moderator of the debate was Mitt Romney and it was not Jim Lehrer.

I thought the reason Romney was so dominant was that he appeared to have changed his position, or at least his rhetoric. He sounded so reasonable that as I was watching the debate on television, I said to myself, “wait a minute. Did he say that?”

After a while, it was clear that this debate was about the middle ground. There was no Tea Party, there was no Occupy rhetoric. I thought this was yet again the affirmation of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty. During the primaries, one appeals to one’s base. Romney, after being accused as being too liberal, moved to the right to fight off the more conservative Republican candidates. During a national election with no conservative to fight against, he appeals to the median voter. One needs to win the primaries first, before one can win the presidential election, after all.

Romney played that card in this debate.

Obama did not see that coming and he struggled to overcome the new, extremely confident Romney. Even on the issue of healthcare which I think Obama has an edge, Romney met Obama head on without a flinch.

From the debate, which was very wonkish, I thought Obama lost it. He lost on taxes and schools. Even on financial regulation. Imagine that.

No, I do not think Romney won the debate on financial regulation just because I am a libertarian. I claim so because Romney said he wanted clearer regulation, not less regulation after Obama effectively said Romney wanted to return to old-style no regulation. Romney brought up the qualified mortgage case as an example of bad regulation and Obama had no answer for that. In fact, Obama, struggled to reply on the wider issue of too-big-too-fail. Indeed, Romney turned the Main Street-Wall Street debate, which is naturally a Democrat’s strong point, on its head that Obama lost his bearing.

And so, I thought Romney won the domestic policy debate.

There are two more debates. The next two debates will be about foreign policy and while I do think Obama will win that (Romney’s foreign policy, I think, is horrible), I am preparing myself to be surprised.

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Politics & government Society

[2597] The myth of adulthood

And a kid and a young teenager, I held the belief that adults had all the answers in the world. They would know what the best to do was, and it was the good of all of us. I thought they were wise, even if sometimes that came at the expense of the young me. Wisdom came automatically with age.

As a kid, I wanted to grow up to be wise, all knowing. Short of being a god of course but in this age, I suppose we are the gods themselves.

Along the way as I grew up, I learned that was not a rule. It was a myth. If there was a wise, well-behaved adult, there was a good chance that that was a mere exception.

In many cases, I have discovered that being an adult is overrated. In many cases, being an adult is worse than being a juvenile. Adults throw all the tantrums, being irrational and hypersensitive like a child, but with the power to do something that a spoiled brat cannot.

A spoiled brat at least does not have the rights of a full adult. The damage the brat can do is limited and there are easy consequences to any wrong the brat commit. Somebody will be there to provide a lesson in manners. For an adult who is also a spoiled brat, who will do that? The police?

Look around you. In the news, grown men and women acting childishly and even like a hormone-filled teenagers all hyped up on the smallest of things. They would shout nonsense, unlikely to think fully before they act. Some even have the audacity to appear on national television. Hell, national television will invite them and gladly provide them with airtime. Some of them are our elected representatives.

Closer to the ground, some adults would gossip and behave like he or she was still in high school. Such is our immature society.

Ah, adulthood. Such an overrated experience. I have enough of respecting adults. I will just respect maturity from now on thank you.

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Economics Politics & government

[2587] You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold

I do not take hard currency idea seriously. Hard currency is a wacky idea. I generally think supporters of hard currency, gold standard advocates being the worst, as non-serious discussants of monetary policy. Hard currency is inflexible and it will exert unnecessary pain in time of crisis. If we had a hard currency all over the world during the last financial crisis, we would have easily experienced the worst depression in modern times. Worse than the 1930s Great Depression.

It would be worse because the world’s economy was so much bigger in the 2000s than it was in the 1930s and given real prices of commodities associated with hard currency, gold and silver specifically, the supply of hard currency could not accommodate the demand for money. The world’s economy would be much smaller than it was at every single point of modern history even without any crisis.

I am a libertarian but unlike too many libertarians, I prefer fiat money to gold standard. I have rationalized my position before.

On top of that, I am a monetarist because I understand the basic operations of modern monetary policy and its implications. I accept the lesson taught by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz: in times of crisis, expand the money supply. Under hard currency, the expansion is almost impossible while deflation, which as damaging to general welfare as hyperinflation is, is always a real threat.

Although I am generally reluctant to admit it, I do ultimately support previous quantitative easing exercises in the United States and other similar money supply expansion in other parts of the world. The fear of expansion is always about high rate of inflation but it is quite clear for the past few years that there is a considerable unmet demand for money that money supply expansion does not create any kind of noticeable damaging inflation. Until inflation becomes a credible threat, I will not oppose money supply expansion by too much.

In other words, I think Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has done a great job. Bernanke given his scholarship is the right man for the job.

So, I take it as a demerit when Mitt Romney said he would not reappoint Bernanke to the job if he is elected as the next President of the United States. And I take it as a huge downer for the Republicans to bow to unreasonable crowd that is the Tea Party and then push for gold standard.

This may force me to reassess my bias with respect to US politics.

I have a Republican bias just because of Republicans’ economic policy has typically been closer to my preference (notwithstanding the Clinton’s years that blurred the line; I do consider Clinton as the best President in recent times). At least, the rhetoric is. And I do think the selection of Ryan Paul as exciting. This election has catapulted libertarian understanding to the national front farther than Ron Paul has ever done.

But the contemporary Republican view on monetary policy might be too much for me.

There are many great economists within the Republican camp at the moment. It is the responsibility of these economists to advise the Republicans of the folly of gold standard.

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Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government Society Travels

[2584] Better commercialization than communism

Cambodia has a dark modern history and I always knew that. That knowledge did not bother me much previously because I did not really relate to it. Cambodia despite being so close to Malaysia appeared farther away from me than, for example, the United States where I spent my undergraduate years.

Cambodia was some land far away from my consciousness. Farish Noor once lamented that Malaysians knew more of New York, London and Paris than Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila. I am guilty of that.

My travels to Cambodia, specifically to its capital Phnom Penh, were my effort to turn his statement untrue. I started out in Siem Reap up north trying to relearn my Southeast Asian history. It was an adventure, going through and climbing all of the famous Angkor temples and more, and then getting lost in the obscure ones, which were no less impressive than Angkor Wat or Bayon. Only the fear of landmines prevented us from being too adventurous, on top of constraints involving time and money.

Warnings of landmines are a stark reminder of Cambodia’s dark past. Too many landmines were planted across the country by participants of the Cambodian civil war. While the war has long ended, efforts at clearing up the mines are still under way and there are new landmine victims every day. The past will not just go away quietly.

Even in the capital Phnom Penh, time passed slowly. I felt as if I was still living in colonial times during my stay there. French influences are remarkably strong still. There are many French tourists and expatriates even. It was as if they refused to leave in the first place.

That is understandable. The capital, located at the meeting of Tonle Sap and the fabled Mekong rivers, is beautiful. Rows of old buildings stand along the banks, providing a lively waterfront. If it wasn’t for the devastating civil war, Phnom Penh would have been one of the great cities of Southeast Asia.

The city was emptied during the communist Khmer Rouge regime. It is hard to imagine the beautiful Phnom Penh devoid of life but it was a ghost town in the 1970s, as were other towns in Cambodia in the same period.

The communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. They had a terrible idea of equality and wanted to create a classless society. But more than that, they did it in a hurry. Their solution was to turn everybody into a peasant overnight.

To do so, they forcefully relocated urbanites to the countryside. There were no doctors, engineers and other professionals under the Khmer Rouge. All were peasants. Peasantry, in reality, was a euphemism for forced labor. Many realized that. Those who questioned the Khmer Rouge were tortured and killed. The intelligentsia were murdered to protect the communist revolution, before Pol Pot turned on the Khmer Rouge itself in the name of power and ideological purity later in the late 1970s.

The failure of China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which aimed at creating a communist society quickly, was unheeded. The Khmer Rouge thought they were a better implementer of communism than their Chinese counterparts.

Well, judging by the result, maybe they were. According to the World Bank, there were more than seven million individuals in Cambodia then. By the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, between two million and three million were dead according to the United Nations. That was a significant proportion of total Cambodian population.

Yet, statistics are just cold numbers. It is always hard to humanize numbers that run to the millions. Being in Cambodia gave me the chance to understand exactly those numbers.

I visited the Tuol Sleng museum while I was in Phnom Penh. The museum was formerly a school, which the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison and a torture house. The turning of a school into a prison more than symbolized what the Khmer Rouge and, really, what communism in practice is all about.

Despite the purpose of the museum to remind us all of the past, entering that museum felt like an act of trivializing history. It cost two US dollars to enter the museum. There was something sacred about the museum that I could not explain. Yet, here, like many places in Cambodia, history had been commercialized. Past pain has been repackaged as a product of tourism. It was about making money. It felt wrong.

As I was about to condemn the commercialization as a scam, what I saw inside prevented me from protesting after all.

The first building was where the last tortured prisoners were placed in, and died. There was an empty rusty metal bed frame in each cell, with photographs of the last victims hung on the wall by the curators. The photographs were not pretty. The photographs were shot by the invading Vietnamese army as the Khmer Rouge regime fell. The Vietnamese came too late to save anybody. They found only rotting bodies bound to metal beds in the torture house.

The next two buildings had even punishingly smaller cells. It was much smaller than my bed at home. Judging by the condition of the cells, one could imagine the impossibility of life during the time of the Khmer Rouge. It was a kind of environment that if I were put inside, I would die almost immediately out of sheer despair. Out of the thousands who passed through the gates of Tuol Sleng, only a few survived it. Most were destined for the infamous Killing Field located a number of miles outside of the city, if they were not killed here.

What made the visit to the museum unbearable for me were pictures of hundreds or thousands of victims pasted on countless boards. Many prisoners were clearly scared of things that were to come. One particular face was on the verge of crying. That particular image haunted me throughout the day.

I decided I could not stand it anymore after seeing all of the photographs. I could not explore the rest of the museum to make good of the two dollars. It was then that I made an emotional connection to Cambodia.

As I sat on a bench outside in the open space, disturbed at the capability of the Khmer Rouge to do what they did, I became angry. Just before I exited the building, I spotted some writing on the wall. A visitor had penned that no God would have let this happened. I understood that person.

I came to think of the two-dollar entry cost. During the communist rule, this would have been illegal. Commerce in general would have been illegal. There was only one profession in the name of equality. The peasantry produced for the benefit of the communist state. That policy of unreasonable equality produced famine and exacerbated the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

Only now are Cambodians coming out of the shadow. They are eager to do commerce and improve their lot, something that was not possible under the communist Khmer Rouge.

The two-dollar entry cost is only part of the effort to come out of the hole that communism created. If the commercialization of the dark past brings about a brighter future for Cambodians, then let it be. Nobody, foreigners the very least, has the right to condemn the commercialization.

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 August 20 2012.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2580] Opposing the proposed SABM-HAKAM Social Inclusion Act

Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia (SABM) and the National Human Rights Society (HAKAM) have proposed to introduce something called the Social Inclusion Act.[1] The general idea behind the proposal is noble but if this act somehow finds itself in a queue for debate in the Parliament (which I think is unlikely given how private member bills are typically ignored in favor of government-sponsored bills), the act does give too much power to a commission that it seeks to establish.

I am against the act, at least in its current form.

The proposed commission has too much power because its functions have been defined so broadly and the act grants the commission the ability to implement its own recommendation.

Furthermore, the commission can also compel the government, federal or state, to implement its welfare program if the commission believes such program is warranted. In other words, it can dictate government policy, which I think is unreasonable. It transfers debate on such social policy which can be controversial from the public sphere to within the commission’s four walls. The commission can also exclude members of the public from participating in any discussion held by the commission. So, not only it transfer the venue of debate from the public sphere to the private space funded with public money and public authority (yes, it can compel anybody to appear before the commission, which I find odd and coercive, but this is a small issue), there is transparency worry.

In clearer terms, I find the non-transparency as unreasonable as the commission can compel the government to implement its suggestions whatever the commission sees fit, notwithstanding what other laws state that may curb the commission’s powers. There is too much authoritarianism in that. I do hope, if the proposed Social Inclusion Act is taken up in the Parliament and eventually passed, there are such laws that limit the powers of the commission.

Now, what are the functions that I find too wide?

The commission has the power to develop social inclusion policies and also, the power to implement it. The exact boundary of such policies is unclear but it can be so extensive that it may require a whole ministry or two to do it. Social inclusion, based on what are listed as the functions of the commission, includes but not limited to reduction of real poverty, reduction of income inequality, provision of social safety net and prescription of intervention model. I wrote the functions of the commission are not limited as to those stated in the act because social inclusion can mean a lot of thing and it is ill-defined.

It is ill-defined because it is based on the definition of marginalization, which in turn is defined as the exclusion of a person or a community’s economic, social and political rights that prevents the person or the group from realizing their full potential and from participating fully in society.

Those rights are controversial, if you understand the existence of negative and positive rights. Given the individuals behind Anak Bangsa Malaysia, I think I will quickly disagree with a number of ideas that they may consider as rights. I subscribe to negative individual rights and more often than not, I am oppose to positive rights, which compel others to intervene another person’s life to help achieve the latter’s potential. In doing so, it is a violation of the former’s individual rights, which demand the former to not be coerced into doing something.

Define these rights as positive rights, then the size and role of government will quickly expand at the expense of individual liberty.

I think the act can be improved by making it more transparent and more inclusive in its decision making (which is ironic because this is a so-called Social Inclusion Act but its discussion and decision can be exclusive) by allowing the commission to recommend first, and then have the Parliament debates and then on approve or reject the recommendation. If the Parliament approves it, only then the commission should be allowed to implement directly or compel the necessary existing ministry to implement the recommendations. Or better, let the commission be the implementer of whatever relevant laws the Parliament proposes and passes. Take away the recommendation power of the commission.

I think having the lever at the parliamentary level is important at guaranteeing a more inclusive act. It also puts a bump on effort to expand the role of government. The membership of the proposed council can be biased and unrepresentative of the wider society. Having the Parliament has the decision maker partly solves the problem of bias and representation.

Here are some example of excessiveness of power the proposed commission has. Consider this: the power to introduce a social safety net is entirely in the hands of the commission. Such introduce is a major policy, require major expenditure and in the US, the expansion of public insurance, or the Obamacare, was a major public debate. It will be outrageous to give the commission such power. That decision should be decided by both the Cabinet and the Parliament and the wider Malaysian public, not the Commission exclusively.

Consider this also, the stated function of the commission is to reduce income inequality. This potentially include tweaking with the taxation system. To provide the commission with such power is too much.

So, I reject the act. I see the current proposal as a way to ram through certain way of thinking about social issues without check and balance. It is a request for free pass to expand the role of government, without accountability.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
[1] — An Act to provide for the development and implementation of an integrated plan of action to address serious marginalization within Malaysian society [Social Inclusion Act 2012. SABM, HAKAM. Extracted August 17 2012]