Sycophantic solutions

It is often said that, when proposing solutions to pressing problems, one does not have to “reinvent the wheel” as there are already existing tried and tested remedies that can be applied expeditiously to address current challenges one is confronted with.

That may explain why the Philippines is presently experiencing a wave of proposals from politicians, policymakers, and other influential voices all advocating for the revival of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.-era solutions to the difficulties that the country is facing.

Indeed, when viewed through rose-colored glasses, it is tempting to believe all those peddlers of disinformation on YouTube and Facebook who claim that the country’s past problems were solved convincingly through schemes already implemented successfully four decades ago, and that surmounting current obstacles is merely a matter of reimplementing brilliant policies of the past.

In recent weeks, and in the months leading to the May presidential election, Filipinos have heard their leaders talk more and more about restoring old solutions which are made to sound like panaceas for the country’s woes.

Consider the latest proposal to revive the Marcos Sr.-era Oil Price Stabilization Fund (OPSF) as the answer to rising fuel prices that have weighed down consumers terribly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to the supply woes created by the reopening of economies around the world after two years in lockdown.

Under the OPSF, the government sets aside money to subsidize private oil companies so that they can sell fuel to the public cheaply during price spikes, while the fund is replenished by the profits created when prices drop.

The problem with this scheme is that, for the fund to remain viable, it is premised on the assumption that petroleum prices rise as much as they fall. The old OPSF indeed helps stabilize prices for a while, but the cost of crude oil just kept rising and rising, leading the government to continue subsidizing its operations, eventually dipping from the coffers of the central bank to keep prices steady for consumers.

This one-way price movement pushed the old Central Bank of the Philippines (CBP) so deep in the red that it, for all intents and purposes, had to be declared bankrupt, and a new law creating Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas with fresh capital had to be enacted in 1993. To this day, Filipinos are still paying for the debts accumulated by the defunct CBP through the Central Bank Board of Liquidators.

To put it simply, the OPSF is a failure—a populist measure that results only in temporary relief (perhaps enough to gather sufficient votes for the next elections), but will burden later generations of Filipinos with financial pain.

Then, there are several other proposals from politicians to bring back the Department of Agriculture’s failed Masagana 99 program which gives loans to farmers with the goal of improving their output.

There were also calls to revive the Marcos Sr.-era program of having “Kadiwa” neighborhood and rolling stores which would sell basic commodities more cheaply to Filipinos in depressed communities. This program also worked for a while in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but soon consumers would find only empty shelves instead of cheap rice, canned goods, and laundry detergent.

There are even calls to revive the Marcos Sr.-era Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, and even the Gintong Alay program of the 1970s for developing and training the country’s athletes to excel internationally. And, of course, who can ignore the recurring proposal to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to its previous name, the Manila International Airport or the Ferdinand E. Marcos International Airport?

Indeed, one cannot help but wonder if some of these proposals are being put forward by politicians just to curry favor with the current President Marcos Jr. by extolling the policies of his father.

If these sycophantic proposals are their way of bootlicking or toadying up to the present dispensation, they should really earn their keep by coming up with better, more creative ideas.

Some of these old ideas might work. But many of them failed then, and will surely fail again if lessons of the past are ignored and they are put in place again in today’s more dynamic world.

Indeed, it is often not necessary to reinvent the wheel to solve current problems. But that is based on the assumption that it is a wheel that works—that it transports heavy loads across certain distances without breaking down, that it is strong and sturdy, and that this wheel is round.

The adage doesn’t work if the proposed solution is not a wheel in the first place but a square block that causes more problems than it solves.