Luis Rubio
“The stability of a democracy depends very much on the people making a careful distinction between what a government can and cannot do,” stated the academician, diplomat, and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Seeking what it cannot achieve implies “creating the conditions for frustration and ruin.” All societies procure finding an equilibrium between what is possible and what is desirable, what leads to progress, and what entails excessive risks. Conditions of equilibrium are crucial, but there is congruence only if the objectives pursued match the provision of elemental services.
In Mexico, there is great confusion concerning what corresponds to the government and what concerns the society. Mexicans tend to mix social philosophy with the practice of government, which has produced enormous swerves back and forth over time, but at the same time, it has impeded the consolidation of functional government at the service of the development and the progress of the people.
One thing is the management of public affairs, and another very distinct is the criteria for allocating resources. What is basic for any society, in any country and under any circumstance, is for the existence of conditions for life to function, which implies, for example, the infrastructure of potable water, sewers, streets, security, education, health and everything that make it possible for daily life to work in normal fashion.
On the other hand, there’s the philosophy of who presides over the government, and that, as a point of departure, entails allocating resources in the broadest sense. Will it privilege the development of an individualist society or a more corporativist? Will it invest in streets for the circulation of vehicles or in public transportation? Will centralized education be favored, or will a multiplicity of service providers be promoted? The market will be emphasized as a mechanism of decision-making in matters of investment and production, or industrial policy? And what will the balance be between these two models?
There is no single philosophy of government, and the voters, on electing a governor, endorse distinct ways of facing development challenges with discrete visions and models as long-term objectives. In contrast, in the most elemental, there is only one way of creating conditions under which daily life can be possible. That is not to say that providing a particular service (e.g., water) should necessarily be public or private, but that there should be sufficient water at a competitive cost to satisfy the entire population. The same with all the other indispensable factors for quotidian life.
On a more elevated level, one of the critical elements of the governmental function in the process of engendering conditions for progress and prosperity is the creation of what economists call “public goods,” that is, services that benefit the whole of society and that are necessary for its development, such as security, education, knowledge, infrastructure, the rule of law and health. No country can prosper in the absence of these factors.
In this context, one cannot do other than ask what the rationale is in suspending the provision of statistical information on justice or education, two obvious public goods, on the part of the governmental entity dedicated to that purpose, Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The only explanation possible is that for the government, the less information afforded, the greater control of the population. If one were to extend this logic to the budget cuts that the health sector, scientific development, and the infrastructure, in general, have undergone, one could only conclude that the change spearheaded by AMLO’s Fourth Transformation (4T) does not include the development of the country, but instead the submission of the population. If one then adds the systematic attacks on the judiciary, especially on the Supreme Court of Justice, on the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data (INAI), and on institutions such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the project becomes transparent in the end.
The spirit that drives the bill on administrative reform promoted by the federal Executive branch is revealing. It involves recreating, in one fell swoop, the discretionary component enjoyed by the Mexican government in the seventies: the era of arbitrariness in which a public servant could decide on the life or death of an investment, the viability of an educational project or the possibility of consolidating a scientific investigation liable to transforming vast regions of the country. The rationality of the bill is evident, but its costs and consequences are unmistakable, not due to the philosophy that stands behind it, but instead because it fails to separate those two pivotal components of the governmental function: the philosophical and the administrative.
The world’s most successful governments, the majority of these in Asia, divide those two elements, contracting professional functionaries for the administrative part for there to be continuity in the provision of services, while political decisions orient the long-term investment projects. On blending together or confusing, both functions, Mexico sacrifices its development on the altar of personal and short-term obsessions.
One can approve or reject this, or that policy, but no one should be against the existence of better public services that make prosperity possible. Lest the true objective is another.
@lrubiof
Further Reading: