When I posted Migration and Freedom 16: Mobility and the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem in one of my discussion yahoogroups, a friend Floro commented and here are our brief exchanges. Another friend, Jules, also briefly joined. Then another exchange on universal healthcare. This is long, 9 pages including the photos.
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Floro: Thanks Noy! Paano naman yung mga masisipag kong kamag anak na magsasaka sa probinya? Hindi sila tamad pero low skilled sila kasi di nakapag- aral? Nahahati ng nahahati mga lupa nila bawat henersayon! Pababayaan na lang ba natin silang mamatay? Gusto rin nila mag migrate kahit sa dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs pero maski pamasahe para kumuha ng birth certificate e wala sila. Ano gagawinnatin sa mga taong tulad nila? Paano sila sa mundo ng walang welfare system? Paano sila kung wala ring kwenta ang gobierno ma may Department of Social Welfare?
Nonoy: Thanks Floro.
My quickie reply to your questions ha.
1. Hindi sila tamad pero low skilled sila kasi di nakapag- aral?
--> May mga alam akong HS or elementary graduate lang, rice farmers din. but they don't spend 100% of their days and time in rice farming. They are also into cattle or pig farming, part-time carpenters, tricycle drivers, during dry season they plant tomato, onions, sitaw (stringbeans), other vegetables. These skills do not require a college degree or even a 2-years voc-tech training.
2. Nahahati ng nahahati mga lupa nila bawat henersayon! Pababayaan na lang ba natin silang mamatay?
--> It's expected that their land holding per capita will decline because they have kids. A two hectares land owned by a farmer with five kids is 0.33 hectare per person. When the 5 kids marry and have kids too, the two hectares can be divided by say, 20 people or 0.1 hectare per person.
--> Before we can say, "pabayaan ba natin silang mamatay", I think the prior question will be "pabayaan ba nilang mamatay sarili at pamilya nila?" There are many things to do aside from rice farming. In fact, I have NOT seen any rice farmer who only knows rice farming as his sole skill. They are generally mult-skilled people, like the ones I mentioned above.
3. Gusto rin nila mag migrate kahit sa dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs pero maski pamasahe para kumuha ng birth certificate e wala sila. Ano gagawin natin sa mga taong tulad nila?
--> No one is stopping anyone from voluntarily helping other people. There are hundreds of charity and voluntary organizations, foundations, NGOs, etc. that are willing to help if the proper information between those who really need help is transmitted to them.
--> the NSO and the LCR offices of municipal/city governments should therefore bring down the fee to get a birth certificate. Btway, do you know that in many cities, there are cradle-to-grave fees to pay? Birth certificate fee, residence certificate fee (annual), marriage certificate fee, death certificate fee, burial fee.
4. Paano sila sa mundo ng walang welfare system? Paano sila kung wala ring kwenta ang gobierno ma may Department of Social Welfare?
--> Welfare system is mainly given by the households and family/clan. Even lazy and irresponsible people (drink and party as often as they can even if they have no or unstable job) are supported, fully or partially, by some of their family members.
--> Government welfare system essentially encouraged irresponsibility. A public education system is supposed to help citizens to become productive and skilled. Thus, it should be one time only, as the adults and parents are supposed to be productive already and should be able to take care of themselves and their households. But this does not happen.
Jules: It seems that a welfare state, cradle to grave welfare, works only when only a few people are "on welfare." If they are trainable(willing to learn new skills), imbued with high sense of personally accountability and responsibility, I dont see any reason why they wont find a job.
Overated yang college diploma na yan, basta marunong magbasa, magsulat, mag add/subtract/divide/multiply. College graduate nga, hindi naman maasasan at makapgkakatiwalan, panis din!
Floro: Thanks Noy,
1. You are assuming that they have initial capital but actually most do not have any. And for those who have been doing what part time supplemental livelihoods you mentioned, many still do not earn enough and are barEly surviving!
2. Granting that their parents are irresponsible, still we can not fault the Children for having been born in poverty! To expect that NGOs and Private individuals will be there to help is pinning on Altruism which is rare and inadequate. That is why social institutions came to being not becauase of ideology but for being humanitarian and caring! It was only when labels like socialism and capitalism came to being that the idea of being human and caring lose its essence!
To gain multi-skill is possible if they have opportunities for apprenticeship! But most do not have the same opportunity even as there are some agencies supposedly offering trainings!
3. The poor in reality do not need all those certificates, but businesses and the capitalist require those certificates and identity references when you transact with them? So when you remove such institutions that provide such identity references, who will certify the identities of people doing business with one another! Payag ka bang bumili ng lotse sa taong walang ID?
4. Welfare system from household and family again assumes that thay do have initial capital! Marami nga sa probinsya walang sariling lupa, nakikitira lang sa lupa ng absentee landlord. Di kayang magtayo ng sariling bahay kaya di umaalis sa poder ng magulang!
In Welfare societies, the government provide help with responsible governance where you can get free education or an opportunity to retool or gain new skills as your skill become obsolete? It is not only because one of being lazy, but there ought to be a system of interdependence between society and people. Institutions or organized groups will still be needed to provide order or system. You may not want to call them government agencies but still they will funtion as such even in the so-called self policing business sectors.
Nonoy: Hi Floro,
More comments to your points.
1. You are assuming that they have initial capital but actually most do not have any. And for those who have been doing what part time supplemental livelihoods you mentioned, many still do not earn enough and are barEly surviving!
--> Come on, to buy hammer, saw, other basic carpentry tools, even farmers cannot afford them? In many poor households, consumption of alcohol, beer and cigarettes, plus gambling in jueteng, tong-its, beer house, etc., are much much larger than their budget for food.
2. Granting that their parents are irresponsible, still we can not fault the Children for having been born in poverty! To expect that NGOs and Private individuals will be there to help is pinning on Altruism which is rare and inadequate. That is why social institutions came to being not becauase of ideology but for being humanitarian and caring! It was only when labels like socialism and capitalism came to being that the idea of being human and caring lose its essence!
--> Gawad Kalinga is building more robust and more cost-efficient housing than the NHA and all other government housing agencies combined. When govt comes in, they don't cut cost, they jack up cost so that they will have more leeway for other wasteful spending if not outright robbery. GK, Rotary, Red Cross, Masons, Lions, CfC, and many other NGOs and charity organizations are always conscious of not bloating the cost. They also invite beneficiaries' share in labor and other costs in kind.
To gain multi-skill is possible if they have opportunities for apprenticeship! But most do not have the same opportunity even as there are some agencies supposedly offering trainings!
--> I visit our farm in Bugallon, Pangasinan, every 4-5 weeks. It's mainly a rice farming village. Rice farmers there can also be carpenters, or tricycle drivers, mango/vegetable/banana farmers, cattle or piggery farmers, etc. Some are into trading like having a sari-sari store, buy-and-sell of palay, etc. This picture can be observed in most farming villages nationwide.
--> Apprenticeship is mostly hands on and actual experience being assistant workers/helpers initially. A few attend TESDA training if they wish to work abroad.
3. The poor in reality do not need all those certificates, but businesses and the capitalist require those certificates and identity references when you transact with them? So when you remove such institutions that provide such identity references, who will certify the identities of people doing business with one another! Payag ka bang bumili ng lotse sa taong walang ID?
--> I built my 2-storey, all wood treehouse in the farm, and all the carpenters there were from the village, mainly rice farmers with carpentry skills honed through years of hard work, never of relying from the govt, see here, Farming Notes 2: My Treehouse
4. Welfare system from household and family again assumes that thay do have initial capital! Marami nga sa probinsya walang sariling lupa, nakikitira lang sa lupa ng absentee landlord. Di kayang magtayo ng sariling bahay kaya di umaalis sa poder ng magulang!
--> Too much focus on "absent initial capital" and zero consideration for personal and household savings, personal responsibility. I mentioned above frequent drinking, smoking, gambling, etc. among many (but not all) poor people. Here are 3 examples.
a) Our former worker (pa-extra-extra lang) in the farm more than a decade ago, Banong. He would be complaining that after a drink, he experiences dizziness and some headache, but he keeps drinking. He has also grown a bit fat, eating more pork and fried food than vegetables as he was earning more from driving a tricycle than rice farming. His wife been advising him to stop drinking. One night, the barkadas came, they started drinking at 7pm, stopped at 9pm, complaining that he's getting dizzy again, went to sleep. Before 11pm, he woke up to drink water, complaining of headache. Suddenly he fell down, they rushed him to the hospital, he never reached it, he died. The family is now poorer than before.
b) Another former caretaker, not exactly a worker. He only watches our native pigs, chicken in the farm in the evening, he sleeps in the farm. In the morning, he does many things, usually making charcoal, as extra or day laborer in other farmers' rice farm (planting, harvesting, threshing, etc.). He's really a hard worker, he works 7 days a week practically. But when he drinks, he drinks like there's no more tomorrow. One time, he went to a wedding party, started drinking at midnight Saturday, perhaps did not sleep and continued drinking until whole day Sunday. By 7pm that day, he went home complaining of stomach ache. The next day, Monday, he was rushed to a hospital because the pain won't go away. By Tuesday he's dead.
c) Other farmers there, their main disease I think is liver cancer (over-drinking), with possible lung cancer but since they're poor -- you cannot have enough savings if you drink and smoke and gamble with already low income -- early detection tests they don't undertake.
--> One can blame lack of capital, blame capitalism, blame the market, blame the Gods, blame the government, but never blame personal irresponsibility.
In Welfare societies, the government provide help with responsible governance where you can get free education or an opportunity to retool or gain new skills as your skill become obsolete? It is not only because one of being lazy, but there ought to be a system of interdependence between society and people.
--> My longer discussion is here, Why inequality is good.
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When people tolerate or even justify the laziness of their family members until their adult lives, they are encouraging these people to become forever whiners and subsidy-seekers, or at least do not know how to accumulate enough surplus and savings for their future and that of their other family members. They may work 6-7 days a week but they also party 6-7 nights a week and they end up with very little or negative savings. When emergencies come, they blame everyone else -- capitalism, the market, the neo-liberals, the church, the government, other people -- but never themselves.
When these types of people are plenty in society, then society cannot progress much. Social and personal resources will be wasted on bailing out these people. And it is also this kind of situation that big and welfarist governments plus the bleeding heart multilaterals and foreign aid bodies come in, they justify various welfare and subsidies, often without asking how people have become poor in the first place.
Meanwhile, a friend in facebook and whom I have debated a few times, Arcy Garcia, posted about the new LGU hospital, the Laoag City General Hospital in Ilocos Norte and noted, "kapag may ganito na sa bawat lungsod at munisipyo, baka nasa tamang landas na tayo...mabuhay ka mayor Farinas!!"
I left a comment in his wall and here's our brief exchange:
- Nonoy Oplas teka Arcy, healthy people do not go to hospitals to be confined, right? If they get sick, they just see a doctor, go through some diagnostic tests, take prescriptions and go home. More hospital confinement means people are sickly, even if hospitalization is free, even if medicines are free.
- Arcy Garcia tama ka bro. pero sa ngayon, kailangan yan ng maraming tao. anuman ang dahilan. ang mas mabuti kaysa ilagay ang pondo ng bayan sa mga absketball courts, waiting sheds na may pangalan ng pulitko, o simpleng sa bulsa nila. mas mabuti pa rin ito. nagkakasakit ang tao. humhina, o nasisira ang ating mga cells..kalaunan.. at obligasyon ng pamahalaan ang magkaloob ng serbisyo medikal sa lahat....
Nonoy Oplas Mas maraming nananakaw sa curative healthcare kesa preventive healthcare. Magbudget sila P500 M patayo hospital, worth P400M lang, nanakawin ang P100M. Kung preventive, tell people they should not over-drink, over-smoke, over-eat, over-sit, mainly educational campaign, ano mananakaw nila?
Di rin ako pabor sa "healthcare for all". 2/3 of deaths now in the Philippines and worldwide are due to lifestyle and non-communicable diseases (lung cancer, liver cancer, hypertension, diabetes, etc.). People abuse their body, they party like there's no tomorrow, they eat like pigs and have body like pigs, when they get sick, even those who are conscious of their body will pay for these people? Zero personal responsibility, all government responsibility? Mali yan bro.
- Arcy Garcia tama ka ulit at agree ako. mas ok ang preventive healthcare. pero hindi mo yan masasabi sa isang taong maysakit na ngayon...sa mga kabataan at sa malakas ngayon, dapat malawakang edukasyon, ng gobyerno pa rin at ibang cso's. ang business kasi, at ang kapitalismo, hindi yan gagawin. ang mahalaga sa kanila, kumita ng pera.
Nonoy Oplas Kaya may fb, google, yahoo, youtube, twitter, ipad, cellphones, flat tv, buses, jeepneys, tricycles, pumpboats, tractors, etc. dahil sa kapitalismo di ba? Gusto kumita ng malaki ng mga manufacturers and distributors ng mga yon, at tipong nasiyahan naman mga tao. Otherwise di nila bibilhin mga yon, ipunin nila at i-donate sa mga activist groups para ibagsak ang kapitalismo at itayo ang sosyalismo, di ba.
1See my earlier debate with Arcy here, Pol. Ideology 22: Diskurso sa Kapitalismo, Sosyalismo at Gobyerno,
November 15, 2011.
The discussion briefly detoured to the healthcare system in Saudi Arabia. My sister in law is a nurse in a big government hospital in Riyadh. Well, all hospitals in Saudi I think are government-owned. Hospitalization is free, medicines are free, physician consultations are free, what more can you ask? The Saudi monarchy need not over-tax the people, oil money can finance them all. One problem of this set up is that irrational use of medicines is rampant. People can be impatient, their doctors give them certain medicines, branded, free, but if they don't get well in a few days, some they just throw away the medicines (it's free anyway) and go back to the doctor to demand even stronger medicines. What happens is that the immune system of the body is altered and anti-microbial resistance (AMR) is getting worse. Next time those people have cough, even ordinary cough, ordiinary or mild anti-biotics won't work on them anymore, the cough will continue and they will need even stronger anti-biotics, and more complications in the body should be expected in the future.
Diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases are among the major ailments, if not killers, among Saudis. Sedentary lifestyle exacerbates this and people can become sickly -- despite the free and universal healthcare system they have.
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See also:
Welfarism 9: Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), November 12, 2010
Welfarism 10: Spanish Problem, the Euro or the State?, December 01, 2010
Welfarism 11: Bureaucratizing Entrepreneurs, April 12, 2011
Welfarism 12: Denmark's Shrinking Entitlements, January 17, 2012
Welfarism 13: Decriminalize Prostitution, January 20, 2012
Welfarism 14: Hard Work vs. Dependence, the Pacquiao Experience, January 30, 2012
Welfarism 15: Abolishing Pork Barrel, February 04, 2012
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