Bureaucracy: A Local Culture
When the US Department of the Navy sailed out of Tanapag Harbor in 1961, it was troubled by what it left behind, a people whose future it recently turned over to the US Department of Interior. Would we be encouraged to venture into entrepreneurship (small businesses on sustainable economic ventures) or feed upon a new culture of government bureaucracy that fuels complacency to our wonderful sense of mañana?
Interior never had the wherewithals to embark on a policy of entrepreneurship. It wasn’t its forte, thus the decision to nurture among islanders, the new culture of bureaucracy. No wonder the indigenous people know everything that is government but quietly acknowledges that something has definitely gone wrong somewhere over the years.
With the change in the political wind in Washington every two to four years comes a different set of federal officials who lorded over the Micronesian region from some 10,000 miles away. Obviously, there’s a constant change in federal policy sharply wedged between those who believe in granting the islanders some measure of self-government and the bunch who wants to turn every wave in our waters into an American wave.
While we played the lethargic role of a sponge, absorbing the whims of mediocrity dished out by ill-prepared federal officials who change policies in midstream, we hear towering speeches of the need for self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, our training focuses on how to become public sector bureaucrats. It’s basically a policy that is mired in the absurd, if not, self-contradiction. But then we were eager to follow the dictates that comes from Washington. Interior never set the stage for entrepreneural development.
And so we followed the single most important and prestigious goal: lay our perception of success on the lap of a larger government bureaucracy. After more than three decades, our well honed perception to learn everything that is government got to a point where we raise wages arbitrarily for redundant public sector employees at the expense of the private sector. This adolescent attitude of superficial political correctness did nothing but wedge and alienate the two sectors. And this well learned attitude of literally strangling the private sector with ill-conceived policies became an art of, believe or not, self-destruction.
Friends, we must unlearn our well nurtured culture of bureaucracy. If anything, no matter how bloated the public sector may be, government is never in the business of turning in a profit at the end of the year. Our government revenue comes from taxes paid by hardworking businesses who more often than not, work 18 hours a day to overcome the pile of strangling regulations so imposed upon them by the government. If per chance you disagree with respect to the source of revenue generation, it means your well earned trophy as a bureaucrat would eventually contribute grandly to the demise of our local government, including your own job.
How do we undo the culture of bureaucracy? Let’s begin with a program for youth so designed to encourage entrepreneurship development however small. It’s a chance to learn the value of hard work, be your own boss and attain personal satisfaction for unlearning a treasured past that no longer works under a changing economy or new set of rules kicked into the larger picture by globalization and the information technology.
