THAILAND
MAY
19th 2010
I do not intend
to start a running file on Thailand and its troubles. I bring the
subject up now because it is highly educational. I recently sat next to
a conventionally brained UK Tory and the discussion turned to
'poverty'. Once I had got him to agree to discuss relative rather than
absolute poverty as the main problem in democracies (that took
about 10 minutes), I asked him if he knew what caused relative poverty.
He freely admitted he hadn't a clue.
OK, here is the
answer. Relative poverty is the inevitable result of successful growth
and national wealth in any country where there is more than one
linguistic culture, more than one educational culture, more than
one level of agricultural culture etc such that the wealth generated in
the evolving economy cannot involve and employ a significant majority
of both the urban and rural population. If modernization and
competition create an efficient industrial, commercial and agricultural
society, it must be one that either gainfully employs or unashamedly
supports those it cannot prepare for the employment, which it must if
necessary provide by either private or public investment.
If a country's
currency is valued by its ability to maintain a balance of payments, it
matters not one whit how many people are employed by the state or by
private enterprise as long as it balances the books in an open-trade
world economy. Private enterprise has many proven advantages in a
viable mixed economy, but the buck stops at the political top, and the
United States has been the biggest state-driven economy to date, with
the great advantage of of giving rein to private enterprise within. The
best of both words they once thought, secure from the abuse and
corruption of totalitarian economics.
Moving along,
what was the late Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, doing
before he was accused of corruption and overthrown by a military coup?
We are told he had made a fortune in telecommunications. His wealth
enabled him through various means to get political power. He used this
to get more financial control and gain in the Thai economy which was
booming on a successful tourist trade. He then poured money into the
long negelected rural areas in the north that were in relative poverty.
His financial
clout and technical expertise enabled him to substantially ignore the
traditional rules of democracy and human rights. The guardians of the
constitution took it personally, as their status and wealth was at risk
as well as their political power. However, Thaksin Shinawatra was doing
in an unauthordox and technically illegal way what a democratically
elected government could have done if it owned some highly profitable
national utilities, and decided to subsidise the areas of the coubtry
and economy that for reasons covered in para 2 above could not share in
the boom-time.
So there we are:
go for growth in any society that is not sufficiently homogenous to
share in it, and relative poverty will grow, and there is no cure
unless the subsidy that is allotted from the carefully tapped boom is
spent in such a way as to support the people, the land and their
evolving education to manage that land in the evolving economy. Once
the people you aim to help have turned to violence, due to expectations
exceeding delivery, you have a real problem.
The mechanism
described above applies anywhere, Thailand, Afghanistan and even the
United Kingdom where we have a relative poverty problem of our own.
It's amazing what you can fix in a dictatorship, benigh or otherwise.
As for the arguments between Gordon Brown and David Cameron and Clegg,
where now is right or left? Left, we suppose, is government action on
what the marke can't fix. Right, now is apparently "Government can't
act, you do it, come on guys, we're all in this together. We all agree
on the aim at least don't we? Or are you going to argue?
nnnn