Economic advancement and social justice.pdf

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extracted text: economic ^dvanceme Pio Pedrosa CThe strongest motivation * that animated President Quezon’s public life was Fili pino national self-assertion. It can hardly be said that there was an instance in his pub lic career that was not ins pired by the wish to advance the country and our people on the road to dignified, res pected and self-respecting nationhood. No one in our generation is unfamiliar with the antecedents of our poli tical emancipation. I believe he did not consider indepen dence his ultimate aim. On a par with winning the free dom and civil liberties of the people was his deep pre occupation for their preser vation through upliftment of their social and economic status. The two objectives were to him interacting. In dependence was the environ ment in which social pro gress could best be promo ted. In an atmosphere of free dom alone he thought could the people’s genius for self realization be nurtured. On the other hand, internal peace and the integrity of the national sovereignty would have been unstable, political independence could have been but a sham, if the country did not rest on firm foundations of the economic well-being of the people. ‘‘There are countries,” he said once, “that are nominally indepen dent but which in effect are under foreign rule. There are still others which have in theory and in fact national independence but whose peo ples know no freedom ex cept the freedom to starve, the freedom to be silent, the freedom to be jailed, or the freedom to be shot.” The task of improving the economic position of the peo ple is always one of great magnitude. The need in our case for its dedicated pur suit, President Quezon fore saw, would be a long, con tinuous endeavor. To insure that the promotion of gene22 Panorama ut and Social justice ral well-being and economic security should be a perma nent duty and obligation of government in the future, he made social justice a declara tion of paramount principle of the Constitution. The wis dom of this mandate is today as of unquestioned validity as it was in his time. In our rural areas, in our barrios and country-sides, the main problem still revolves around the crushing havoc of pover ty: the destruction of morale and the frustrations of mil-' lions that find nothing to do, the inroads on vitality by the pangs of permanent hunger, the hopelessness of meagerly rewarding perfunctory toil, the inevitably high and tra gic incidence of early death. These seemed to be the char acteristic earmarks of our rural community way of life. President Quezon was res tive for economic growth. De generation should not have been the attribute of the peo ple he was leading into free dom, into membership in the circle of the progressive peo ples of the world. He plan ned and carried out an ac celerated program of that growth. The first requisites were fiscal and monetary stability. These he achieved. At the same time he caused measures to be taken that would enable the people to share in their life-times the. opportunities for obtaining more nutritious food, better shelter, healthier surround ings, more dependable secu rity for their future. He as pired for them the necessi ties and amenities of culture, of decent civilized living. These were the material in gredients of human self-res pect and national dignity. To day, we could ask how far forward the mandate of so cial justice he inscribed so indelibly in the Constitution has been carried into effect, to what extent the promo tion of the well-being of the people as a prime obligation of government has been ad vanced. It would manifestly be un realistic, unjustifiably dero gatory, to deny or belittle the material advance achiev ed in the county’s economic pursuits of the last fifteen OCTGBBR 1961 23 years. Substantial progress has been made in agricultu ral production, in industrial expansion and diversification, in domestic and internation al trade, in capital formation, in technical and entrepreneural progress, in the utili zation of technological and scientific processes. All econo mic indicators attest to the peceptively even if slowly and haltingly improving standard of living of our people. We know that our masses in the rural areas are still eking out the barest subsist ence, beggars are scavenging the night garbage dumps of the cities. Criminality against property is rampant, doors and windows of dwellings have to be grilled in iron and steel. Men begging for bread, or scrounging dirty rice sweepings, or forced by hun ger to steal bananas are shot dead. Public services may not be availed of in many places except upon bribery. Tax ad ministration is often an ins trument of blackmail and inti midation. Business enterprise must purchase influence or pay tong for obtaining license to operate. Lives and proper ty may not be saved in con flagrations except upon sub mittal to extortion. Usury is rampant, oppressive interest rates are legalized, credit fa cilities to increase production in the rural areas have been proselytized to political ends. It is perhaps beyond possi bility that criminality will be entirely suppressed. There will always be a certain am ount of human perverseness, of sub-normal psychosis, of moral and spiritual delin quency below heaven. On the other hand, we can not ex tenuate blame for ourselves when we permit the perpe tuation of conditions which make us all callous to the pervasive degeneracy into which our institutions have fallen. We are not without responsibility for a society that denies to fellow citizens the opportunities to earn a livelihood other than to beg and scrounge and steal. Economists talk about per capita income as the measure by which the state of well being can be gauged. Per ca pita income is the total na tional income divided by the number of the popula tion. The national income, as you know, is the aggregate earnings of labor, manage ment, property, and capital in current production. This average is supposed to re ject the economic status of the people. It is not an abso lutely correct index, how 24 Panorama ever. It takes no account of little islands of luxury and wealth happy unto them selves on a vast ocean of rest lessness and misery. Be that as it may, ours in the Philip pines is not a very impres sive national or per capita income. The per capita in comes in Malaya, Hongkong, North Borneo, Japan, and Singapore, — to mention a few in our immediate neigh borhood, are higher than in ours, which is less than P400.00. Parenthetically, if we would wish to regale our selves with what we can call consuelo de bobo, our per ca pita income is higher than that in many countries of Asia, Europe, Africa and South America. The larger among these, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and seve ral of the Soviet republics and satellites, with popula tions aggregating almost onehalf of the human race, have their tremendous masses wal lowing in more dreadful po verty and misery. In spite of misconceptions per capita income figures can create as yardsticks of eco nomic development, they are useful as an index for regis tering the results of planned measures carried out to in crease the national produc tion. The success or failure of any program to combat poverty can be determined in a general manner by the re sulting comparative per ca pita incomes registered year after year. Disregarding dis tribution distortions, an in creasing per capita income is a sign of growth. It is an indication of increased na tional production. It reflects a diminution of the ravages of poverty and disease. It points to an improvement of the standard of living of the people. Therefore the only formu la there is for eradicating poverty, for advancing the standard of living, — if we might restate it, — is produc tion. And it must be produc tion that should outstrip the growth as well as the grow ing needs of the population. Planning for production ex pansion and growth could, consequently, take as a spe cific goal a predetermined per capita income at a pre specified future. If our per capita income now is P400.00, the tempo of productive ac tivity could conceivably be quickened to increase that fi gure to, say P800.00 five or ten years from now. That could be the target of the new production effort. Then the next step would be to harness the requisite tools October 1961 25 and factors of production and gear their use in that direc tion. The instrumentality that coordinates these tools, these factors, and lines them up together into a driving force that pushes the pro ductive power forward is bu siness enterprise. Without business enterprises produc tion is an impossibility. Busi ness enterprise, however, inevitably must operate un der systems of governmental, monetary, fiscal and other statutory rules or regulations. These rules and regulations can help the productive pro cesses to move ahead. They can also hold them back. Rules and regulations ob struct business enterprise by curtailing the full and bene ficial utilization of the re sources contituting the tools and factors of production. When they do, they obstruct not business enterprise alone, they obstruct production it self. To the extent that such obstruction exists, the effort to eradicate poverty, to push forward the promotion of so cial justice, to improve the well-being of the people is correspondingly halted and stalled. These rules and re gulations are thus the deter minants of the climate and the environment in which business enterprise will eith er fail or succeed in the rea lization of the national ob jectives of expanding pro duction, improving consump tion, lessening the ravages of poverty, raising the standard of living of the masses of our people. The aims of the constitutional mandate to promote social justice and economic amelioration are subserved depending upon whether these rules are regu lations are constructive or obstructive. We can not go into a de tailed analysis of many of the various roadblocks to production business enter prise must reckon with to day. Offhand, we must give credit to the general effort exerted towards loosening the reins that have held back the productive processes. There has been such effort. But we could have been more consistent, less contra dictory and less self-defeat ing. We expand the money supply, we ease production financing, we expand govern mental deposits in the bank ing system. Yet we syphon off the same money supply and tighten credit with the continued imposition of prem ium fees in the sales of for eign exchange and with the immobilization of large vol umes of the monetary cir culation stashed by govern ment banks in inactive gov 26 Panorama ernment securities. We adopt ostensible measures to ban the importation of luxuries, but we refuse to curtail the unbridled activities of favor ed individuals by the contin uance of the barter system on a non-selective industry basis. We are encouraging domestic production for selfsufficiency of consumption staples, foodstuffs and com modities, yet we are bringing ruin to local industrial in vestments by indiscriminate and unnecessary licensing of imports of competing com modities of foreign produc tion. We subsidize the im portation of rice at the rate of one peso per dollar, which goes to the foreign rice farm er and importer, in order, it is said, that imported rice might be sold at P0.85. If we did little more than pay lip promises of encouragement to domestic rice production, we could have paid that peso to the Filipino rice farmer and he could also have produced rice to sell at P0.85. We are loud in our protestations of welcome to foreign invest ments, but we harass even those who have made signal contributions with their past investments to the develop ment of our economy. We try to attract visitors to visit our shores, but we mulct them when they come, we discourage provision for their safety and comfort by sub mitting attraction policies to the veto power of vested in terests. We want the foreign exchange income augmented to achieve a healthy balance of payments position, but we promulgate rules and regula tions on exports, on foreign loans and investments, on earnings remittances, on ca pital repatriations, and on others that scare the entry of foreign exchange or faci litate the stashing of the pro ceeds of overshipments and of excess valuations of im ports in foreign depositories. We adopt patriotic shibboleths that would emphasize coun try first, forgetting President Quezon’s admonition that we can not isolate ourselves from the rest of mankind, because such slogans become conven ient for serving self first, self second and self all the time. We announce economic development programs but af ter their promulgation we forget them and go back to compromise and accommoda tion. We pass laws to shield policy-making bodies so they could function in the gen eral interest of the nation, but we break down the de fenses against political inter vention and allow politics to guide policy implementation. We make a great show havOCTOBER 1961 27 -ing adopted plans to return to free enterprise but the results have been to favor groups with windfalls from our debased currency. We all know, however, that the situation is not without hope. The spirit of dedica tion to social justice and the mandate bequeathed to us to labor incessantly for the eco nomic upliftment of our po verty-stricken people can not be lost when vigilant organ izations like Rotary, dedicat* ♦ ed to service to fellow-men, with identical inspirations as those that animated Pres ident Quezon, take a day like this to remember his memo ry. In paying tribute to him, we can not but remember also the people in whose be half he spent himself. In spite of all our present frus trations and difficulties, his labors and self-sacrifices have not been wasted on them; they have not, in the words of the Apostle, been sterile in them. * NEW PAINT MEETS DEMANDS OF NUCLEAR SUBMARINE U.S. technicians have developed the first in terior paint to meet the demands of the nuclear submarine. The new coating, an acrylic latex, is practically free of air pollutants that would ser iously restrict submergence time of the vessel, according to Donald E. Field, a chemist of the US Naval Research Laboratory. The paint loses 95 per cent of its fumes within 24 hours after appli cation and releases the rest in harmless amounts. Extended drying periods that can keep sub marines out of action in an emergency are eli minated by the new formulation which dries in 20 minutes. It can be used 'for both bulkhead and deck applications and “does not constitute a health hazard to the crew if used during sea ope ration,” Field revealed. In a 26-day test on the USS Triton, the paint compared favorably with enamel in gloss and dirt resistance, and it was superior in ease of application and freedom from odor and toxicity. Panorama 28
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