Strangling laws kill opportunities

The NMI can’t have its cake and eat it too. In other words, it can’t expect accelerated revenue generation without paying attention to pleadings by the business community that it repeals strangling laws and regulations that simply inhibit business expansion and investments.

Like any thriving business center in countries nearby, i.e., Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, among others, we must get down to the business of learning from these countries how they’ve dealt with economic programs that enabled them to building lasting economic investments.

Basically, it is futile to work on free trade zone laws when nearly every strangling laws and regulations are still intact. It’s an exercise in futility. It is far removed from encouraging investors to return to the NMI. We’ve seen and heard people who have, on their own, tried to lure investors to the NMI only to be told that it’s too expensive a proposition given the sets of laws that discourage rather than encourage investments. It should serve as a rude awakening that our old ways no longer work in our favor.

Local propensity to impose strangling regulations seems honed down to an art. It is a depiction of the failed policies of the lead federal agency who’s never equipped to deal with developmental problems in insular areas. We seem to have adapted to such failed policies only to realize that it they are now being used against us.

Indeed, this mentality is a difficult hurdle to overcome. But policy-makers must learn to deal with difficult issues in order to untangle strangling laws against investments or face the music of a regressive revenue generation because we’ve failed to institute positive policies that in fact encourage business expansion and investments rather than the contrary. In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s either one or the other.

As fragile our local economy may be in view of its reliance on tourism which has gone south, it mandates that collective leadership must work with a sense of camaraderie to achieve a common goal to which we’ve yet to converge in order to define these issues and decide how they should be approached. All the while, we all mean the same thing except we differ in approach.

For starters, how about learning to talk with one another rather than to each other? Either we work together to rid our books of strangling laws and regulations in order to open up more windows of opportunities for business expansion and investments or forever hold our breath for we would have allowed opportunities to forever sink with our warped pride. Let’s take the former approach in that we need it more so today than ever before. Si Yuus Maase`!