Freedom II

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry

In this day and age...

I made a commitment to myself a long time ago that I would never insult a person directly or consciously. I often do, though, out of personal weakness.

A word that hurts is stupid. I don't call people stupid often because it hurts, and I don't like to be called stupid either. However, when I call people stupid outside of moments of momentary weakness, I do not mean the traditional definition which includes personifying idiotic, retarded, dumb, etc. behaviour. What I mean when I call someone stupid is that they are, to me, misinformed, or have misinterpreted information.

So, when I say that people who fight for protectionism and who are against free trade are STUPID, please don't feel bad. Although I should add the words unbelievably, dumb-founding and wow-that-is-amazingly before the s-word.

Here's a quick lesson.

1. Proton is protected. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a mat rempit problem, as people would be able to afford cars, we would have half as many road deaths as people would have safer cars, and we probably would have had a 5% higher GDP had we not pumped money into this rubbish carmaker. You could draw parallels with Chrysler and GM.
   
   
2. MAS is protected. If it wasn't we would have been flying to Singapore for RM100 anytime we wanted to, or anywhere else for that matter. We wouldn't have pregnant air-stewardesses being fired. We wouldn't have a government crony being given a RM 1 billion bail-out. We would not hear anything against a competitor building an airport, as facilities would have been built and managed privately long before the government could even issue a passport.
   
   
3. A student's entire schooling needs for a whole year can be bought at any hypermarket for less than RM 100 all in the same place. Before these existed, we had to go to Mydin to buy sub-standard school uniforms which would tear within three months, go to a stationery shop to buy exercise books at RM1 each, together with RM1 pencils and RM5 pens. We'd have to go to Bata to buy white shoes together with the shoe-white.
   That's just the schooling needs. A conservative guess on the savings received by the average consumer who buys from a hypermarket, compared with one who buys from the neighbourhood provision shop, would be 30%. Workers at hypermarkets have the opportunity of vertical mobility, compared with the provision shop owner who hires one person for thirty years to do all the labour.
   
   
4. What if the West had protected its products and opposed trade? We wouldn't have the Internet, the car, the computer, the refridgerator, this is a redundant list.
   
   
5. We want to protect out rice farmers against imports of American rice. But Thai rice, Indian rice, Vietnamese rice is OK. And what are we protecting our rice farmers from? Even more misery. Our rice farmers suffer because the monopoly that is Bernas flushes its money straight to Syed Al-Bukhary, the philanthropic mosque-building billionaire, and is more concerned with feeding its rent-seeking crony than feeding rice farmers. If we had a competitive market for local rice, our rice farmers would be a lot better off.
   
   
6. Compare life in communist China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba (where mobile phones will celebrate their one-year anniversary in March), National Socialist Germany with Hong Kong, Belgium, Singapore (although this is a place where life isn't really worth living), the new China, the new Russia, the new Germany.
   
   
7. The current economic crisis has not been caused by greed or capitalism. It has been caused by too much interference by the US government into financial markets. Alan Greenspan as head of the Treasury for 28 years was responsible for keeping interest rates artificially low even during boom times, which he subsequently labeled "irrational exuberance". He coupled this with allowing unregulated financial engineering creating complex derivatives which even experts don't understand and can't appraise. When the banks were going bust, the government stepped in to help the ones with connections i.e. Goldman Sachs, where Henry Paulson was head of investment banking. They disallowed interested parties from buying up bad debt and the US$ 700 billion TARP fund received 10 times worse terms than Warren Buffett did with his US$5 billion investment. There is no clearer picture against protectionism than the actions which have led to the worst financial meltdown ever.
   

Which is why you have to be STUPID to oppose free trade and support protectionism.

The cartel and the working class

It begins on the premise that everyone is good. Only then can you judge people for what they are worth.

I take the train usually to and from UPM, Serdang. Last year, a consortium of Putrajaya taxi drivers took over the taxi service from the KTM Serdang station under the guise of a co-op. A more brazen cartel I have never seen. Overnight, taking a taxi went from paying RM10 for a 5 minute drive, and in the process finding 2-3 people willing to share the cost, or looking for the one in five gem of a taxi driver who will use the meter, to a RM10 coupon taxi ride – no sharing.

I took a taxi home last night from Kepong at 11.00 pm. An African girl, a young female office-worker and myself squeezed into the Proton Iswara. We approached an interchange, and the conversation between the African and the driver went like this;

“I think you can use this way, left.”
“How many ways do you know?”
“I said I think, I didn’t say I know”
“How many ways do you know?! I’m driving taxis, I know. Just sit and don’t argue! There are so many ways.”

Uncomfortable to say the least.

Her fare came to RM 3.30, and later we went pass the interchange she thought she knew. It was jammed, and the man told me it would have cost all three of us more if he had used that way. He didn’t charge me the RM 5 shown on the meter when we came to my house, and just asked for the usual fare, which was RM 4.

In my almost three years of taking taxis in Serdang, only once did I find a taxi that used the meter, and the driver was a saint. He picked up one more person on the way (there were already two of us), and used the meter all the way; I payed RM3 for a ride which would cost me RM 10 now.

To the socialists crying out for the right of taxi drivers to fleece customers, I say keep your voices. There are more than enough taxi drivers who are honest enough to put in a decent day’s work for a decent day’s pay.

I wonder how they, the honest ones, feel when they know they have to fleece ordinary people in the name of a koperasi.