Department of Easy Money

My prescription to improve the Commonwealth’s economy has always been the same basic medicine: Build an efficient environment in which to do business, and the rest will grow from there. This advice falls on deaf ears, however; the Commonwealth has long been addicted to government programs, and everyone likes the promise of Easy Money, where bureaucratic wizards promise to create free wealth just by waving magic wands. Hey, look where it got the Soviet Union. Ah, the virtues of centralized economic planning, where bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs, are the empowered class.

As for now, the CNMI is still a very business-friendly place, but a centrally-planned economy can’t stay benign forever. Any such economy will wind up with a few rich groups that control all the opportunity and power, while everyone else is left with the scraps. Many of the CNMI’s alien workers are victims of such environments in their home countries. That puts a lot of friendly human faces as victims of otherwise fuzzy-wuzzy concepts like socialism and corruption.

So look around you, and you can maybe get the creeps when you realize that most people on this planet are born into lives of grinding poverty and worry, and have no way to ever escape it. Oddly enough, places that are lucky enough to have escaped that fate usually decide to pull it onto their own heads. Why? Because the masses want easy money. The allure of a free lunch is too good to pass up, it appeals to the larcenous instincts in the world’s mobs. Given the chance, most people will loot their own countries into becoming socialist nightmares.

They think with their stomachs, and can’t see beyond that free lunch. And a lot of folks in the Commonwealth can’t see beyond it, either. Hey, choose that path if you wish, but, eventually, most of your children will have to become subservient to a phalanx of bureaucrats just to have a home and a job.

So let’s at least be honest about things and let’s create a Department of Easy Money. I’ll nominate myself as Secretary of Easy Money, hire a few pals to serve as Deputy Directors of Easy Money, and we’ll enjoy nice lunches at the Aqua Resort (on the taxpayers’ dime) while we dream up programs to create (what else?) Easy Money. Every scheme will be a “tremendous opportunity” for “economic development.” The Commonwealth has chased this tail around in circles for over a decade now, so I think I’ve got the hang of the shuck and jive.

Heck, I could photocopy two or three generic reports I’ve got by my elbow, and have convenient boilerplate programs to offer as needed. My Department of Easy Money Public Information Officer will place Easy Money press releases in the newspapers…and, well, what could be better? Throw in a dose of community flattery, and anyone who sees through my schemes won’t be able to oppose them, since that would make them look like grouches.

And, better yet, with all my Easy Money schemes, it will always be someone else that has to do the work or pay for the schemes. It won’t be you, dear reader. Your neighbor to the right will do the work (Easy Money creates jobs out of thin air), and your neighbor to the left will pay the taxes (oh, those…) to fund the expenses for my schemes.

But you, dear reader, well, you’ll just ride the “rising economic tide” that always floats atop Easy Money. You have my word on it.

Easy Money…a free lunch for all…a magically rising economic tide…see, we’re a lot smarter than those suckers in Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, who do that grim nose-to-the-grindstone gig, starting small businesses, and building them up and nurturing them. Why build an economy on a bedrock of business when you can build it on a blizzard of bureaucracy? Which is easier? Which promises a free lunch? See my point? I thought you would.

So, when your son needs a job, or your daughter help with getting a mortgage, you know who to call. I’m sure we can work something out. And I’m sure that I can count on your support in return, right? Of course. That’s the way it works. It is the road to serfdom, and it is a well-worn path indeed.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)