Hire Ed

In the past week, a couple of individuals have seriously urged me to run for Governor in the year 2009, when I would be thirty-six years old, just a year older than the constitutional minimum age requirement of thirty-five.
Frankly, the idea of running for Governor in the year 2009 strikes me as a wholly preposterous idea. I could never win: People want big government paternalism, not true freedom.

But let me tell you what I would do if I were governor right now. The first thing I would do is hire Ed Stephens Jr. as my advisor and economic consultant. In fact, I have no idea why this has not already been done by the current administration.

The CNMI government needs a good, pro-business economist–one who appreciates how markets work. We really don’t have one right now. Our old friend William H. Stewart is long gone, retired in West Virginia. We need a first-rate economic consultant to replace him, and Ed Stephens is just the man to fill such a position.

We all know Ed Stephens–the UCLA-trained economist. He is probably Saipan’s number one columnist. As you can tell from his adjacent piece here in the Saipan Tribune, Mr. Stephens is a splendid writer. He has a wonderful flair for words. His prose is clear and concise. It has a nice flow to it. Ed Stephens is very easy to read. He expresses his thoughts exceptionally well. Truth be told, I often wish I could write like my friend Mr. Stephens here.

Good, clear writing naturally comes from lucid, logical thinking, which probably explains Mr. Stephens’ sound economic analysis. If you have been paying any attention to Mr. Stephens economic commentary over the past three years, you would surely have noticed how prescient our man has proven to be: He correctly called the decline of the Euro. He called the Philippine Peso. In a report he prepared for the former Marianas Visitor’s Bureau, he accurately foresaw Japan’s continuing economic stagnation and its dire implications for the CNMI economy.

Back when our tourism czars where getting all excited about the Russian tourist market, former MVB economics consultant Ed Stephens knew that it could not possibly work. He understood the basic economics of post-Soviet Russia. He told them so. Yet he was ignored. (I believe they sent Bruce Lloyd to do a piece on Russia, which later appeared in the Guam Business News.) Precious government resources were squandered.

The CNMI can no longer afford to take a lackadaisical good old local boy approach to the CNMI economy. If modernization is ever to take place, we must employ the talents of proven professionals such as Mr. Stephens. If not, then I guess I am just going to have to run for Governor in 2009 and hire Ed Stepehens as my H.R. Halderman–crew cut and all.

Hey, if Richard M. Nixon could win . . .