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After the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF0 has
been abolished by the President last Friday, August 13, 2013, there is an
unprogrammed amount of P25.4 billion in the proposed 2014 budget. If explicit
pork barrel is indeed abolished, the budget should be lower by that amount. But
this is not the case.
According to DBM Secretary Butch Abad, legislators can
introduce their priority projects, subject to certain guidelines as mentioned
by the President last Friday, into the budget. Meaning those projects will be
inserted into agency budgets and the size of the proposed budget has remained
the same, not declined. This practice is often called as “Congressional
Insertion.”
The budget submitted by DBM to Congress after the
President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) is a compilation of financial
requests from four groups: (a) provincial and regional offices of an agency
like DA, DILG, DTI, etc., (b) Central
offices of those agencies and Departments, (c) local government units (LGUs), and
(d) NGOs, people’s organizations via “participative budget consultations"
like the recent Bottom up Budgeting (BuB) scheme.
Once the budget is discussed and heard in Congress, legislators can disapprove some proposals and projects, say projects coming from Mayors, Governors and NGOs who are not friendly or non-ally of the legislators. Then they can increase the budget of certain projects which can benefit their friends and allies, like in municipalities and cities that supported them in the last election. It is the prerogative of the legislators to do this because they are empowered by the Constitution to scrutinize and pass a budget law every year.
Once the budget is discussed and heard in Congress, legislators can disapprove some proposals and projects, say projects coming from Mayors, Governors and NGOs who are not friendly or non-ally of the legislators. Then they can increase the budget of certain projects which can benefit their friends and allies, like in municipalities and cities that supported them in the last election. It is the prerogative of the legislators to do this because they are empowered by the Constitution to scrutinize and pass a budget law every year.
This Congressional Insertion is one form of soft or
implicit pork barrel. Thus, pork barrel can never be truly be abolished,
without expecting the national government to shrink in size and budget. Only a
truly independent and activist legislature can control and disallow wasteful or
excessive spending by the Executive branch.
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The citizens’ “Million March” in Luneta on August 26 is
unique because it is largely spontaneous. While Edsa 1 revolution in 1986 was
also spontaneous, big politicians and political groups later set the tone and
direction of the protest movement. Besides, it was directed against a
particular leader, the former President Marcos.
The “Million March” is different. It is not directed
against a particular leader, say President Noynoy Aquino, but against
corruption in general and corrupt officials in government, especially among the
legislators implicated in the Napoles pork scandal. And there are no grand
speakers with grand speeches and promises, no plackards and streamers, no
dominant political color or political group organizing it.
The spontaneity
and lack of central organizers with central planning thinking makes the
“Million March” exciting and unpredictable. The activist public have become wary
of the usual protest leaders and groups. They suspect that these groups are no
different from the politicians that they criticize. So the public is now opting
and experimenting the politics of spontaneity.
Big politicians, big political groups and big government
do not like this kind of arrangement. They are used to dealing with centralized
action so they can focus their politics of compromises, and bribery if
necessary, on the leaders of those movements.
Famous Austrian economist and political philosopher, Friedrich
Hayek, extolled the value of spontaneity in his book, The Constitution of Liberty (published 1962). He wrote,
Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable. Because every individual knows so little that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it….
Freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend… Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. Freedom means that many things will be done which we do not like. Our faith in freedom rests on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.
Hayek was referring to the evil of central planning in
running societies and governments. Leave the individuals to run their own
lives, their own households and communities, so long as the government is there
to implement the rule of law – few, general laws and prohibitions that apply to
all, no one is exempted and no one can grant an exemption. Like the laws
against murder, stealing, abduction, land grabbing, extortion, destruction of properties.
The politics of central planning as practiced by many
governments around the world, armed with huge annual budget as authorized by
their legislators and the legislators getting their own pork in exchange for
passing such budget laws, works against individual freedom and facilitates
corruption. Corruption not only in wasteful or stolen spending, but corruption
of values of the people, that they can relegate certain personal and parental
responsibility in running their own households, and pass them as government
responsibility.
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See also:
Pork Barrel 3: The Silent Idealists, the GFO-NGOs, August 10, 2013
Pork Barrel 5: Abolish Pork Fund, or Shrink Government?, August 21, 2013
Fat Free Econ 46: On Pork Barrel Aboition, August 25, 2013
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