http://correctphilippines.org/competition/
It’s
all about Competition
by
Orion Perez Dumdum
Competition
forces you to shape up, or ship out!
It
is well-known that the concept of healthy and fair competition has
the effect of an “invisible
hand”
that essentially results in benefits and improvements for everyone.
We
CoRRECTors and other advocates of Constitutional Reform do not
subscribe to the idea that human beings have to be saints so that
things will get better. Humans are fallible and make mistakes.
Instead, it is clear that when people have to compete, that’s when
people improve: because competition forces people to shape up or ship
out. Whenever there is healthy competition, unscrupulous behavior
ensures that one’s competitors will eventually win. When there is
competition, lousy service and lousy products lose out as consumers
prefer to buy the better products & services.
CoRRECT™
– Constitutional Reform & Rectification for Economic
Competitiveness & Transformation is really all about Competition,
Competitiveness, Competence, and Choice.
Let
us review the Three Point Agenda:
With
economic liberalization, we allow more investors into the economy,
whether they be foreign or local. It is very possible to have local
players comprised of talented local Filipino technology gurus (who
unfortunately do not have their own cash) who are supported and
funded by foreign venture capitalists’ seed money.
We
will have more foreign investors and foreign companies coming in –
instead of having to send Filipinos abroad to work for foreign
companies in foreign lands – so that Filipinos can earn and learn
(foreign multinationals often have good skills and personnel training
programs) while being with their families, and not needing to work as
migrant workers and OFW’s abroad.
With
more economic players, there is more competition.
Companies will compete against each other and will thus be forced to
provide better goods and better services to the end consumer. Simple
Law of Supply and Demand: Companies will be forced to compete
against each other in hiring the best employees, dangling higher
wages or benefits just to attract applicants to choose to work for
them and not for a competitor.
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Filipino
workers will see that more jobs also means higher wages, with the
highest wages going to the most competitive, skilled, and hardworking
workers. Many workers will thus seek to improve themselves and
compete against others, by learning new skills, and making themselves
more attractive to employers in order to command higher wages.
Compare
a situation that has an abundance of competition versus a situation
that has a lack of it.
Without
competition, you end up with lethargy & laziness. You end up with
Despair. People feel resigned to the fact that no matter what they
do, they’ll continue to earn low wages and they can’t find
alternatives. And when they try to go into business, they also
realize they don’t have much capital to begin with (and with the
60/40 constitutional provisions, generous foreign venture capitalists
and angel investors are nowhere to be found) and even if they do,
they may find that while there are many people, only a few have jobs
that pay them enough to allow them to afford whatever it is they’re
selling.
Clearly,
competition is better. Economic Liberalization
ensures competition, and economic competition improves our economic
lives as wages improve.
The
Philippines’ OFW problem is really nothing but a serious
manifestation of the obvious lack of competition in the economy and
lack of companies and jobs, forcing Filipinos overseas either as
overseas workers, or as full-fledged emigrants.
With
Region-based Decentralization, the regions will be empowered to make
their own economic and business-related decisions so that they
themselves can decide how they want to attract investors to come over
and set up companies in the regions.
Instead
of a centralized unitary single monolithic entity such as Imperial
Manila, we end up with empowered autonomous Regions who can compete
with each other in trying to best attract investors and businesses.
Whether it be by providing lower taxes or creating better policies,
or it could even be by simply improving the efficiency of their own
regional bureaucracies, the simple point here is that by making the
empowered Regions compete with each other, they are forced to improve
themselves in order to attract economic opportunities and businesses
because in turn, the more businesses go to regions, the higher their
revenues, the better the region’s infrastructure, and the more
respectable the region’s leaders become.
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If
certain regions succeed in making themselves richer by successfully
attracting so many investors and multinational companies as well as
national companies originally headquartered in Manila, since they are
autonomized and empowered to keep a bigger share of the tax revenue
that they collect and are also empowered to make their own regional
decisions, they may even decide to raise the salaries of their own
government employees and leaders, thus making it unnecessary to
resort to graft and scraping little kickbacks just to decently raise
families. Regions will compete against each other and thus try to
lessen their inefficiencies, lessen corruption, lower taxes, improve
infrastructure, etc.
Competition
clearly improves things, not just in a corporation versus corporation
type of competition but also in a region versus region type of
competition.
In
the current Presidential System, there is no real competition based
on competence and platform. Instead, the competition is based on
name-recall and popularity: both of which are irrelevant when it
comes to delivering results.
But
in a Parliamentary System, real competition that makes sense happens.
It’s
a competition of Party versus Party (as opposed to personality versus
personality).
In parliamentary systems, there is intra-party competition where the best members move up to the top, the best one becoming party leader. Parties also compete against each other on the basis of platform and performance
Notice
also that in Parliamentary Systems, party leaders (who are in the
running to become Prime Minister if their respective parties win
majority of all seats or if their parties form coalitions where they
have the most seats within the coalition) campaign using the pronoun
“We.” They speak more collectively about their party’s
platforms and their party’s past performance by always referring to
“Our Party” or “My Party” unlike in Presidential Systems
where presidential candidates use the pronoun “I” all the time.
Parties
will be forced to compete against other parties by presenting their
platforms to the public and showing that their platforms are more
responsive to the needs of the people. More importantly, parties will
be forced to compete against each other by choosing the best members
among themselves to be the senior members of the party, the best of
whom will be the party leader.
In
a Parliamentary System, unlike in a presidential system, the Prime
Minister and his majority bloc are always in competition against the
Leader of the Opposition and his minority bloc. Active Debates ensue.
The Leader of the Opposition tries to show that the Prime Minister
does not know what he is talking about. The Prime Minister, on the
other hand, must always be on his toes to show that indeed, he does
know what he is talking about and has the facts to prove his point…
In
a parliamentary system, there is an intense system of competition
where the Majority’s “Government Cabinet” is always being
challenged by the Minority’s “Shadow Cabinet.”
In a Parliamentary System, the competition between the Opposition versus Government during parliamentary debates ensures that the Government is on its toes
The
Minister of Finance from the Government Majority is always on his
toes and must always prove himself as the Shadow Minister from the
Opposition Minority always challenges him and questions his
decisions. In fact, since every single decision that the Minister of
Finance makes within the Ministry of Finance regarding budget and
other concerns is always done in the presence of the Opposition
Shadow Minister of Finance, everything is above board, everything is
transparent.
In
a Parliamentary System, the Majority Government faces off in a highly
competitive confrontational seating arrangement against the Minority
Opposition
In
fact, even the seating lay-out of a Parliamentary System
(particularly the
Westminster and Spanish systems)
force the Majority and the Minority to face-off against each other in
a face-to-face debate. The Government side sits on one side of the
parliament hall directly facing the Opposition who are on the other
side. Compare that with the Philippine legislative chambers’
seating lay-outs where all members of the House of Representatives
and even the Senate all face the front where the presiding officer
(Senate President or Speaker of the House) is seated.
There
is no real sense of “competition” between the two sides. As such,
this obvious issue of the physical seating lay-out in the legislature
is also why there is a very poorly-developed sense of party cohesion
in the Philippine setting. If the Philippines shifted over to a
Parliamentary System where the seating lay-out features direct
face-to-face confrontation between Majority versus Minority, this
institutionalized competition between both sides will actually force
the development of an improved party system: It will force parties
with similar philosophies and platforms to coalesce or merge and
prevent the proliferation of too many fractured mini-parties, while
it will cause parties with very different ideas to become distinct as
far as their platforms and policy proposals in concerned.
Most
of all, forcing Majority and Minority to face-off in debates as a
result of such a seating layout fosters the kind of greater
competition that results in higher transparency and lower corruption.
In
such a system, you don’t need to hope and pray that your
government’s leaders are extremely honest people. Instead, the
competition
between the Minority Opposition and the Majority Government keeps
them honest, as the Minority-Opposition essentially keeps close watch
over the Government’s dealings and decisions. The
Majority-Government, on the other hand, will try its best to ensure
that it is able to deliver on its promises and thus enable it to gain
the trust and confidence of the voting public for the next general
elections.
In
the presidential system, the decisions made by presidents and their
cabinets often tend to be done behind closed doors, without any
observation or scrutiny unlike in a Parliamentary System where the
intense competition between Majority Government and Minority
Opposition blocs forces the opposition to scrutinize the Government
in the minutest detail.
Knowing
this, it is thus no wonder that countries using parliamentary systems
dominate the top ranks of Transparency International’s CPI listing
(Corruption Perceptions Index) of the Least Corrupt Countries of the
world, while presidentialist countries (and semi-presidentialists and
dictatorships) dominate the bottom tiers.
In a Parliamentary System, there is Competition everywhere. There is Competition among parties and competition within parties.
Among
parties, the parties try to outdo each other by executing policies
better and producing better results than their opponents, and
presenting better planned projects, better planned policies, and
better platforms and manifestos to the general public.
Within
parties, party members compete against each other to show who
embodies the party’s principles and who is worthy to move up the
ranks and eventually take on important roles within the party and
within government in case the party wins a majority and forms the
government.
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A
lousy debater who cannot articulate his thoughts properly, cannot
think on his toes, has poor knowledge of history, poor knowledge of
geopolitics, poor knowledge of policy, poor knowledge of economics,
etc can never rise
up the ranks
in a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, the higher you
go, the more exposed you will be to heated debates and intense
scrutiny by the opposing side.
Not
everyone in a party can do this. And certainly, because of this, not
everyone aspires to become a party leader (and therefore only a
select few ever really aspire to become Prime Minister).
Becoming
a Prime Minister, a deputy prime minister, a minister, or some other
senior member is clearly not for the faint-hearted and especially not
for the weak-minded.
To be a Prime Minister, you must be better at debates than your own
party mates. You must be the “go-to-guy” or “go-to-gal” that
everyone relies on when there is a difficult question. You must know
all the relevant facts and figures in order to support your
statements and often, you will not have notes or teleprompters
helping you out when you extemporaneously respond to questions during
debates and Question Time. There is no such thing as “Teka
muna, tanungin ko muna advisers ko”
in parliamentary debates.
The
parliamentary system is all about healthy competition. It’s
the kind of competition within parties that ensures that the best and
most competent member in a party becomes its leader.
Competition
between Minority bloc versus Majority bloc ensures that Corruption is
kept very low as scrutiny of government is very intense.
Competition
between Parties ensures that parties come up with solid platforms and
solid plans of action.
Clearly,
competition forces the best in everyone in a parliamentary system.
Sadly,
the Philippines is presidential, that’s why we continue to be mired
in mediocrity.
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