Presidential Inaugural, Traditionalism And Spending Other People's Money

People are enthralled with ritualism.

This would be evident today in the inaugural of President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III and Vice President-elect Jejomar Binay.

And the pomp and pageantry attendant to this celebration comes with a cost; we learned that more than 10 million pesos (US $215,000) had been earmarked for this grand event.

My wife tells me to let this be (which I guess reflects the mainstream view), since this has been a tradition.

To heck with tradition! Money consumed from public spending extravagance is always lost productivity.

And the same reason holds why Philippine poverty rates has also been a tradition, the Australian government website notes that, ``In 2006, almost 27.6 million people lived below the Philippines' poverty threshold. This represents 26.9 per cent of Philippine families and 32.9 per cent of the population. According to international data, 44 per cent of the population subsisted on US$2 or less a day.”

Since money is a scarce resource, public spending, which is always political, represents the priorities of political leaders. Therefore, traditionalism means “the heck with poverty, long live grandiosity!” Poverty, thus, is reduced to political convenience. They matter only during elections and when justifying policies to the public to expand government's role in society.

As the illustrious Milton Friedman precisely said, ``If I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!"

4 ways to spend money, table from Freedom Channel Blog

Thus, free lunch it is, at our expense.

How true, yet how unfortunate.

Unfortunate because, as Ludwig von Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government, "people lack the mental ability to absorb the principles of sound economics. Most men are too dull to follow complicated chains of reasoning".

In other words, the public's lack of understanding makes us all so easily manipulated by political leaders.