Blind visionaries

Live From Saipan By Zaldy Dandan

 Saipan — My favorite definition of democracy comes from Walter Russell Mead, who taught U.S. foreign policy at Yale University and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Democracy, he said, “is about self-government, not good government.

It is, if anything, a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and the delusions of a self-regarding elite.”

Democracy, however, is also a system of government fueled by promises of free goods and services. Not surprisingly, throughout known human history, the root of most government crises lies in the failure to finance the benefits pledged by those in power.

Usually, the “solution” is to elect “new” educated leaders, preferably pure-hearted, coupled with the implementation of “political reforms” and “meaningful changes” to the way the government works. Eventually, however, we end up back at the brink, peering into the depths of another financial abyss.

The real problem, then and now, is this: To win elections, politicians promise to play Santa Claus, and voters expect Christmas every day. Households and businesses respond to economic downturns primarily by cutting costs. In contrast, when the government faces a financial predicament, the first instinct of elected officials is to find new ways to take other people’s money.

Here in the Northern Mariana Islands, the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 restrictions five years ago is getting worse. There are no longer enough federal ARPA funds to pay for the CNMI government’s legion of obligations. Tourism arrivals and hotel occupancy rates remain significantly below their pre-pandemic levels. Businesses are either downsizing, shedding jobs or shutting down. Residents are leaving the islands.

Meanwhile, the CNMI government, which is the single largest employer of voters, wants additional funding for the next fiscal year. There will be no work-hour cuts, no consolidation of redundant offices and no austerity measures. The government intends to fully fund its payroll, its retirees’ pensions, public education, public health, public safety, the justice system and public works, among many other things — while paying its debts.

With what money, you ask.

The CNMI administration is banking on massive federal assistance (hundreds of millions of dollars) from a Republican White House and Republican Congress. The governor is also taking out another loan while asking the CNMI Legislature to “identify opportunities for innovative, sustainable revenue-generating measures” — that is, tax and fee hikes.

The CNMI government, in short, will keep spending more than it can afford.

Is this how we intend to get “our financial house in order” as the governor claimed in his epic-length State of the Commonwealth address last May?

As for its inability to help revive tourism, the islands’ only industry, the CNMI administration has declared that it will instead “develop a diversified and sustainable economy that benefits everyone.”

This belief—or conceit—that an administration, in office for just four years, can overhaul an entire economy to its liking and that it can command investors and the public to conform to its “vision” is almost breathtaking in its audacity and obliviousness.

This is a government that cannot enforce the anti-littering law, but it can “transform” the economy!

Meanwhile, the CNMI administration wants taxpayers — both federal and local — to subsidize the implementation of its economic blueprint. CNMI officials are calling for sacrifice — primarily from the private sector — in order to spare its well-paid appointees and other political hires from any inconvenience.

The economy, however, to quote political commentator Kevin Williamson, “is not a game of chess to be played by masters, it is not a laboratory process that can be managed by scientific methods, and still less is it an exercise in magic in which outcomes can be improved by such fanciful inputs as empathy."

People in government, Williamson added, “don’t actually know what to do with any degree of specificity, because there are competing priorities, because real-world events change more quickly than policy-makers can account for, and because the world is complex and unknowable.”

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Or, as American economist Richard Fulmer puts it, “Someone who believes he can steer the economy is like a flea who believes he can steer a dog. While the flea can make the dog miserable, the dog is unlikely to end up where the flea intends.” Donald J. Boudreaux, an economics professor, calls it “the superstition that the economy is the creation of a higher power [the government] that will intervene in benevolent and all-knowing ways if it receives from the faithful enough prayers, devotion, and blind obedience.”

Too often, what’s missing in government is humility — and a basic understanding of how the economy works.

Judging by its statements, in any case, the CNMI administration has clearly misread the past, is overwhelmed by the present, but wants credit now for a future it has yet to deliver.

Zaldy Dandan is the editor of the CNMI’s oldest — and only remaining — newspaper, Marianas Variety. His fourth book, “If He Isn’t Insane Then He Should Be: Stories & Poems from Saipan,” is available on amazon.com/. 

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