On Martial Law, the lockdown dictatorship, and CDC PH
September 23, 2025 | 12:02 am
My Cup Of Liberty
By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr.
I write this in beautiful city of Valencia — the third largest city of Spain by population size — where I attended the Tholos Forum 2025 which ended last Saturday. This is the Tholos Foundation’s premier annual gathering of international coalition leaders, free market-leaning think tank and institute leaders, plus a few policy makers and national legislators.
I am among the International Fellows of the Tholos Foundation (US), the only Fellow from Asia, and I have been a friend of the Foundation since 2004 or 21 years ago. The Foundation has invited me to their many international conferences, starting with the Pacific Rim Policy Exchange 2007-1010 in Hawaii, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney. There have been more recent events in Australia, France, Argentina, and Spain.
Thus, I missed the huge anti-corruption rally held last Sunday, Sept. 21, the anniversary of the start of the Marcos Sr. Dictatorship. The declaration of Martial Law was made on Sept. 21, 1972 under former President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. (Actually, it was made on Sept. 23 then backdated to a more auspicious date. — Ed.).
Another important date is Sept. 17, 2020, which was when the Concerned Doctors and Citizens of the Philippines (CDC PH) was formed. It was the largest and most consistent anti-lockdown movement in the country during the dark days of 2020-2021 under former President Rodrigo Duterte. CDC PH turns five years old this month. As I am the only economist in the core group, I will again review what happened to our economy during the lockdown years compared with other major economies in the world at the time.
In 2020, the Philippines suffered a horrible GDP contraction of 9.5% — the worst in Asia and the worst in Philippine economic history since just after World War 2. We had among the worst COVID-19 lockdown policies, irrational and senseless, some of which were not seen in many other countries. These included the shutdown of public transport, from jeepneys, taxi, and buses to planes; the shutdown of shops and malls, with public markets limited to only four hours a day; the closure of borders between and among municipalities, barangays, and even among sitios in the same barangays; the mandatory use of face shields that covered the whole face on top of mandatory facemasks; the mandatory use of a plastic separator between motorcycle drivers and their passengers; no entry into schools, offices, malls, buses, planes, etc. without a vaccination card, and so on.
None of these measures were practiced during the dictatorship of the 1970s. Back then there were curfew hours, the imprisonment of political opponents, and government takeover of non-friendly media, but the people had the freedom to move across municipalities and provinces, and they could open their shops and businesses.
For this exercise, I have compared three indicators: a.) using economic growth in 2018-2019 as the baseline, growth or contraction in 2020-2021, then growth in 2024; b.) public debt/GDP ratio same periods; and, c.) GDP size at purchasing power parity (PPP) values in 2019 and 2024.
In Asia, the Philippines was second only to Thailand which also suffered a deep contraction in 2020-2021 — but Thailand was already growing slowly before this period, while the Philippines had a brisk GDP growth of 6.2% pre-lockdown. When it comes to Debt/GDP ratio, ours jumped by a huge 17 percentage points after the lockdown, meaning the borrowings were big in order to “help” jobless people and the bankrupt businesses that were shut down by the government in the first place (see Table 1).
Many European countries, including Spain and the UK, and Mexico suffered deep contractions in 2020-2021. But like Thailand and Japan, they already had slow growth pre-lockdown. The rise in their Debt/GDP ratio was also not as steep as the rise in the Philippines (see Table 2).
ECONOMIC FREEDOM
The sharing of ideas and experiences among participants and speakers at the Tholos Forum pointed to the need to continue fighting for economic freedom, and for protection of individual liberty and our pockets from the abuses of big government and big corruption.
And I tip my hat to the original convenors and organizers of CDC PH — doctors and entrepreneurs who understand the value of individual freedom and individual choice to trust in natural immunity over experimental vax immunity. Especially to Dr. Benigno “Iggy” Agbayani, Jr., the first President of CDC PH. His soul should be at peace in heaven now.
May the dark days of the lockdown dictatorship stay in the minds of our people as it was worse than the Martial Law dictatorship. We should never allow it to happen again.
No comments:
Post a Comment