The will to change
Posted 10:10pm (Mla time) Mar 26, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 27, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON HIS way to Calvary, Jesus foretold many events that astonished his followers. He said he would be arrested, that one of his own disciples would betray him, and that Peter himself would deny that he knew him, not once but thrice. He said he would be crucified, and he would die on the cross. He would be buried, but he would rise from the dead. Jesus held these things to be true, and he acted upon them so that God might forgive the sins of men, and thus change the circumstances of their existence. This is the poetry of forgiveness around which the Christian faith revolves. It is a philosophy of action and hope, and Jesus was its strongest poet.
Many of us hold certain beliefs, but all too often we fail to act upon them. As such, they serve us no purpose. They have no meaning, no effect on the way we live our lives. They are books that remain unread, music that is unheard, faith that is unrealized. We remain trapped in old untested beliefs, from which we cannot free ourselves because of fear. We do not develop the courage to experiment, to test our beliefs, to connect them to the practical details of our lives. Consequently, there is a huge gap between the beliefs we profess and the beliefs we actually hold by default, our habits of action. And, indeed, there is an even bigger gap between our habits of action as a people and our social goals.
A friend of mine was complaining recently about corruption in a city government office. He said he needed to secure a hundred and one permits just to remodel an old house. Every precious signature depended on compliance with a set of requirements that kept growing as he produced the necessary documentation. After some months of following up papers, his contractor told him that the message being conveyed was loud and clear: a small amount, the usual S-O-P or "standard operating procedure," would hasten the release of the needed permits.
I advised my friend to go and report the matter to the National Bureau of Investigation so an entrapment operation could be set. He was ready to do so, but he never got around to it. His contractor decided to pay, offering to take the added expense out of his earnings. These people work as a syndicate, he said; you get one of them arrested, and the rest of the gang will make life difficult for you.
The contractor's fear is not unfounded. Everyone who has dealt with such offices assumes a general order of things to which you can only adjust. When you are busy earning a living, you cannot afford to take risks fighting the system. Yet elsewhere in the metropolis, my daughter, who is building a house in Cainta, was pleasantly surprised to be able to get all the building permits she needed in one day without having to pay anybody or secure special favors from anyone. There are such pockets of institutional integrity in our society, and they are steadily multiplying, quietly supplanting the old discredited ways of doing things with straightforward public service.
It is less difficult to reform systems from within than to expect heroic individuals to expose the evils of systems from outside. Corruption thrives on the proliferation of unnecessary and unreasonable requirements. It is the stepchild of inefficiency. A responsible leader in an office usually knows who is on the take. If he is not himself part of the racket, and feels strongly about it, he will find ways of eliminating the opportunity and getting rid of the rotten personnel. To do this, he needs a critical mass of reformers to help him, for the corrupt will do everything to tie his hands, to sabotage his efforts, and to undermine his authority and integrity by capitalizing on his own minor lapses.
It is never easy to initiate change. The will to change has to be anchored on a will to believe that things can be different. Such a belief often cannot be grounded simply on the evidence at hand. Yet if one believes and, on this basis, he acts upon the world, his action may change the situation in ways he himself has not anticipated. In the results, he may find the affirmation of his belief or feeling unjustified in his faith, he may become cynical. Such are what John Dewey called "the risks of faith." The point is that we will never know if our beliefs matter until we act on them, or unless we live them.
In his thought-provoking essay, "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey said: "The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation." Dewey is not a theologian but a philosopher. But his understanding of the nature of man in Christianity allows one to appreciate better the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
Jesus was being prosecuted for supposedly claiming he was the son of God. Yet in fact he always referred to himself as the son of man. He called God his Father only because he believed that all human beings were God's children. His disciples were stunned by the revelations he made, and how they all turned out to be true. But the bigger truth he was teaching them by his own life was the truth that is already in them, waiting to be lived.
People sometimes wonder how a predominantly Christian culture like ours could be the fount of corruption. There is a simple explanation for that: faith, for most of us, is separate from everyday life. We do not draw from it ideals or the will to change.
Happy Easter!
Showing posts with label Bureaucracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bureaucracy. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Rationalization by Randy David, PDI
Rationalization
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
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