Sick man

These voices of discontent can only be ignored at our own peril.

They are not the usual angry voices from the margins of society, from the outer limits of the rational mainstream. They are concerned voices from those who should know, from those who make decisions of gravity and from those who look far into the future.

What they are basically saying is this: We are not solving our problems quickly enough to maintain our course towards prosperity.

A few months ago, the normally reticent Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce made a startling public statement. In exchange for a ban on strikes, they commit a large volume of investments in the economy.

That statement, disturbingly, came and went. It is a truly significant one, however. It underscores the extent to which our archaic labor laws and our unreasonable unions have conspired to drive away investments, causing unemployment and poverty to persist.

Our tradition of trade unionism was formed during the period of protectionism where it was possible to jack up wages irrespective of improvements in productivity. In a closed economy, employers may simply pass on the additional cost to consumers. This produced a regime of high inflation, stagnant productivity, uncompetitive pricing for our exports and declining investments in labor-intensive, job-creating enterprises.

The more radical trade unions are, simply, slaves to some forlorn ideology. They indulge in strikes to make the oddest political statements. The net result of their ideological efforts has been the closure of numerous firms, the diversion of potential investments to other countries in the region and the migration of our own labor-intensive industries to countries like China and Indonesia.

In short, by making the trade union movement slave to some archaic political orthodoxy, they caused the unemployment of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Filipinos. In another place and another time, they would have been put to the wall and shot for economic sabotage.

Maybe we would have lesser problems if we were in that other place and time.

Last week, the Japanese ambassador, speaking frankly about the peace and order situation in this country, professed to lacking sleep at night due to fears about his own safety. He was bashed.

And rightly so. Diplomats are not supposed to be in the business of dishonoring their hosts. Even if the dishonor is just.

But in the rush to bash an erring diplomat, we might have lost sight of the merits of what he just said. Our peace and order situation, especially for foreign businessmen, is troubling to say the least.

This happens too often: we bloody the messenger and conveniently forget about the discomforting message. Remember how, a decade ago, our mass media went into a frenzy bashing the American journalist James Fallows for an essay he wrote for an American magazine hardly read here. In that piece, he said Filipinos had a "damaged culture."

The heady exercise of bashing messengers, especially if they happen to be foreign, becomes an excuse for avoiding the necessary task of collective introspection. And so it is that our damaged culture remains in disrepair – and we, utterly unrepentant.

Unlike diplomats, businessmen have a right to be brash. They have a right to be brutally frank. That is, in every sense, their business.

The other day, the American Chamber of Commerce, as other foreign chambers have done, reminded our government that the pace of reforms was moving too slowly. That pace will prevent us from sustaining a robust growth rate, let alone catch up with the rest of the Asian Miracle.

Our infrastructure, the American Chamber says, remains inferior. Our labor laws are behind the times. Our legislation is slow and unresponsive. Our policy application is erratic and uncertain.

All that is true.

We are heir to a deeply flawed political culture. Political patronage inclines our politicians towards the networks of corruption to feed their constituencies’ appetite for spoils and largesse. Political ambition draws our politicians away from the terrain of sober legislative work and towards the arenas of scandal-mongering and posturing.

Our reform agenda is clear. We need to align our policies with the best practices there are. We need to improve our revenue generation efficiency and install new processes that will help curb corruption.

But little has moved in that reform agenda. Those that moved did so much too slowly.

The Macapagal-Arroyo administration, in part out of inclination and in part out of political insecurity, has not exercised enough command of the Congress to cajole the movement forward of vital reforms. To a large extent too, many of the remaining reform measures are "hard reforms" that will likely meet strong resistance from within the bureaucracy itself.

Remember how early on, the employees of the SSS managed to kick out the reform-oriented Vitaliano Nanagas in order to conserve the old way of doing things in that agency. The employees of the BIR deliberately undermined collection, held the fiscal balance hostage, in order to forestall the reforms being introduced by Rene Banez.

Today, the syndicates of corruption at the main revenue agency have found a champion in an opportunistic congressman wearing a funny wig and casually spewing lies. The syndicates of corruption do not want institutional reforms to happen. That will kill their rackets.

As it is elsewhere, reactionaries plant bombs of contrived controversy like so many treacherous landmines in order to slow the advance of reforms. Politicians work with an intrinsically shorter horizon that that which is necessary to put our national house in order.

But the proclivities of reactionaries and opportunistic politicians do not constitute a sufficient excuse for the disappointingly slow pace of policy reforms.

In the end, the pace by which a political order is capable of adjusting to a changing environment is a measure of the quality of statesmanship available to that order. The disappointingly slow pace of reforms the last few years is a sad commentary on the quality of statesmanship available for our society.

On the eve of yet another round of bitter electoral combat, we should be reminded that so much our well-being as a national community depends on our people’s ability to choose statesmen and the capacity of our political system to produce precisely the quality statesmanship we need in this moment of great change.

Failing in that, we will remain Asia’s Sick Man.