Category: Politics & government

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Politics & government

[2470] Progress brought by better actors

The war drums are being sounded again. The drummers are telling us the election is around the corner yet again. Looking back, I am not so sure much tangible things have been achieved since the last time the drums were sounded.

It has been awhile since the last one. I remember I was angry at many things that it would take a book to list down those sources of anger. I thought I took some initiatives then to channel my anger appropriately. And I voted for the first time in my life in a national election. Now, it is almost four years later and I am disappointed at which things have gone so far.

I am unsure what I had hoped out of that election. I know I did not expect anything out of this world. I did not expect things would change all the sudden into my liking. I knew real, structural, permanent change would take a lot of time and work. Maybe, it would even take a whole generation. It would be naïve of me to think that the immediate years after the 2008 election would reinvent Malaysia into something better.

I do not really know what better means really, but it is out there and I know Malaysia is not there yet. It is just one of those Goldilocks things. It is a trial-and-error exercise. When it is right, one just know that it is right. When at first you do not succeed, you try and try again.

As I inspect my hopes for the country, or rather the community that I live in and interact with, I am starting to suspect that this hope is unattainable. It keeps shifting forward and it does not stay still. It is ever out of my reach. I suppose it is progress and there is progress since 2008.

There are bolder dreams now, swankier presentations and more executions. Yet, one does not need to do much to be better if the Abdullah administration is the benchmark.

Really, it is hard to see if progress we have seen in the last few years is of any real meaning in the grand scheme of things. Racial and religious issues are still flaring up purposefully by some groups. Pick up some of the local newspapers and the headlines are ever ready to prove agitprops are at work. I have learned to dismiss the fear mongering but many have not, and this is angering. Many have yet to learn what is real and what is imagined.

Corruption is still there. As new controversies emerged, old ones go unresolved.

And those in power still lie. The lies are more getting sophisticated with public relations companies as coaches and makeup artists, but lies are lies. In one hand, those in power show that they have something positive to offer, but in the other hand behind their back, mud and slime.

Maybe, after all those historic change and transformation, what we have now for the most part of it are better actors.

That is progress, I suppose.

Categories
Economics Politics & government

[2469] The United States of Europe, on the way

There are several stages of economic integration.

Free trade agreement is probably the lowest of all integrations. It seeks just free flow of capital and labor across borders.

The next step is either custom or monetary union together with a common market. Member states surrender monetary policy to a central authority while maintaining independent fiscal policy. Trade duties are harmonized across the union.

The next stage is fiscal union where individual governments cede their power over fiscal policy to a central authority.

The European Union is on the verge of becoming a fiscal union, making history less than just two decades after adopting a monetary union in all of its sense. Today at an important summit, a majority of European leaders voted for stricter fiscal deficit rules. They believed the best way to solve the debt crisis is to integrate further. Integration will eliminate the crisis of confidence Europe currently suffers from, much like how a troubled California will not trouble the United States by much.

This integrationist logic is persistent among Europeans. When Europe suffered from a serious currency crisis long ago, the then European leaders thought the best way to eliminate volatility between currencies that adversely affected trade in Europe was to have a monetary union.

This is really a big jump. Usually, debates on exchange rate mechanism gyrates between floating or fixed regime. Europe chose to not only have a fixed regime, they chose a fixed regime by marriage. You cannot get a more fixed regime than a monetary union.

Now, the thinking is that the best way to address the debt crisis to have a fiscal union.

Yes, it is an exaggeration to call the recent development in Europe as outright fiscal union. But the new agreement is a big push towards that direction, towards the United States of Europe.

Categories
Politics & government

[2468] They drive, they measure, they are tempted and they can

It does not inspire confidence when the same entity that is driving a program is the one that measures the success of the program as well. There is a conflict of interest there.

Imagine a soccer team up against another team and imagine the referee is a team member of the former team. It is safe to bet that the referee will rule in favor of his or her team. Similarly, if you are running a program to lower crime rate and you are also the one measuring the success of the program, there will be temptation to report your progress in an overly generous way, especially when your progress is not too good. More than temptation, you can actually give undeserved good marks to yourself if the temptation gets the best of you. In order words, you are the prosecutor, the judge and the jury all at the same time.

I see PEMANDU’s National Key Performance Indicators through the same lens. The NKPIs basically measure some areas where PEMANDU or the government wants to see improvement in. While I do appreciate that these tools do increase transparency and makes debates on some matters more objective than it was in the past, the measurements themselves are not entirely trustworthy. PEMANDU has the incentive to look good. What guarantees the indicators reported are not tempered with?

To compound the issue, PEMANDU is not exactly an independent or even an impartial party. It answers to a minister. I suppose it helps that Idris Jala is an unelected minister with probably an entirely professional background. That is an argument of him being isolated for the myopic politics. But then again, myopia is not a trait exclusive to politics. It is well documented in businesses, and everywhere else.

And the fact is that he ultimately answers to the Prime Minister, whose career is entirely dependent on politics. The success of PEMANDU will be one of the key factors in increasing the odds of reelection of  Barisan Nasional. So, it is in the Prime Minister and Barisan Nasional’s best interest to have PEMANDU succeed, or really, appear to be successful. PEMANDU wants to look good. The Prime Minister wants to look good. The government wants to look good. Well, everybody wins by looking good.

We have not even begin to consider the KPIs under the case of various ministries, which are even more suspicious. KPIs, at least the ones I have witnessed elsewhere, are always negotiated. The negotiation ensures that the KPI is not a kind of out of this world so that it is not impossible to achieve but at the same time, not too easy to make it meaningless. Now, consider a bunch of politicians that want to get reelected. It is in their collective interest to set easy KPI that can be achieved even without a mad dog chasing them behind.

So every time when somebody comes up to me and shows me some indicators to prove that PEMANDU has been successful in some area, I quietly note the conflict of interest at the back of my mind.

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
Politics & government

[2463] We don’t need a big government voting bloc

In our modern Malaysia, one can hope that government policy comes about through the general will of the people peacefully through democratic means. One can further hope that this mean not merely crass majoritarianism but that which is respectful of individual rights. After all, the government and the state derive its legitimacy from the people, the citizens — an idea that is clichéd but time-tested and the prevailing idea of government in our time. It took us humanity hundreds if not thousands of years to finally subscribe to it either willingly or grudgingly.

The ideal democratic government and state translate the general will into policy and ideally, they must always accede to the general will.

What is ideal is not necessarily true on the ground however. How many self-proclaimed democratic states have turned against its citizens?

History has witnessed many of those examples, which should be enough to convince the democrats among us of the need to establish some mechanism to limit the opportunity for government to shirk from their responsibility to the people and more importantly, to prevent it from developing means to promote its own separate interest at the expense of citizens.

Since we really live in a largely majoritarian reality, herein lies the importance of a small government.

To understand the need to control the size of government, it is crucial to note that government employees themselves are voters and all voters are self-interested. They will vote for those who will promote their welfare and interest more often than not. They are exemptions, of course, but the assumption of self-interest remains the most robust assumption of human behavior. It expects the least and thus less susceptible to disappointment, unlike other more benevolent but naïve assumptions that exist on the economic left that have failed more frequently than the financial markets have crashed.

A large government employing a large fraction of citizenry will invest this group of voters with excessive political power. The larger the government, the more votes will go toward enhancing the welfare of its employees.

This creates a conflict of interest where the employees of the government can promote their interest collectively instead that of the wider voting population. With a power voting bloc, the institution that is supposed to execute the general will of the people takes a life of its own. How many times have large rewards been to government servants just before the election in Malaysia?

Essentially, that large voting bloc enables government servants to raise their own wages and grant themselves other benefits, a conflict of interest so brilliantly portrayed in an episode of the BBC’sYes Minister.

That conflict of interest is even more worrying when the taxpayers are mostly those who are employed in the private sector. What pain do the benefactors of the voting bloc suffers when someone else is financing the punch party?

With a majoritarian reality and an influential voting bloc, officeholders and the aspirants will not dare promote a responsible public finance. So not only it exacerbates the status quo, it reduces the likelihood of putting the party to a stop before it is too late to switch the tracks.

At the very extreme, such bloc makes the liberal rationale for the state irrelevant. The state now becomes overly sensitive to government servants, and less so to the citizens at large.

The 19th century American author Edward Bellamy somewhat circumvented the problem by making everybody the employees of the state. He detailed his views in his work of fiction, Looking Backward.

Ingenious, except he dreamed of a very different society. He dreamed of a utopian communist society where all wants and desires are fulfilled, and men and women work not for monetary reward but merely for recognition that scout boys proudly wear. Men and women of Looking Backward believe the government does everything for the benefits of the masses, ever so efficiently.

Where Bellamy spotted a utopia, Orwell saw a dystopia.

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 Sun on November 25 2011.