MANILA, Philippines—The unprecedented, seemingly irremediable inflationary trends that everybody experiences today may have so robbed Trade Secretary Peter Favila of his sense of Christian discipline and values that he now wants to make this country a gambling capital like Malaysia, Singapore and Las Vegas. (Inquirer, 9/9/08) That is the most tragic thing that can happen to the most predominantly Roman Catholic country in the Far East.
Favila is certainly not naïve to fail to recognize that, since time immemorial, gambling and industry have been such formidable and mutually exclusive contradictions that, like oil and water, can never mix. In 1899, the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen pointed to this contradiction in “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” He said that gambling encourages a belief in luck rather than the more desirable commitment to rational planning and vigorous industry.
Later writers have asserted that gambling teaches its participants to have faith in the concepts of “something for nothing” and “making a killing” by taking high risks, thus undermining the capacity of a people to work hard and to save. Our very own national hero, Jose Rizal, had dedicated a chapter on cockfighting in his novel “Noli Me Tangere,” where he denounced that age-old vice among Filipinos—even though allowed by the Spanish government every Sunday—to be more despicable than the smoking of opium by the Chinese.
More appalled would Rizal surely be to know that not only cockfighting but all sorts of gambling, legitimate or not, that have since been invented by modern man are now being encouraged by the government to be played nationwide under everybody’s nose—not weekly but several times daily.
As things are, to tame down the spiraling of prices in the marketplace is Favila’s most crucial mandate, not to exacerbate an already fast-worsening culture of gambling in our midst and times. If he finds himself unequal to that mandate, he should resign.
—RUDY L. CORONEL, 10 Venus St., Golden Country Homes, Alangilan, Batangas City
