Outrage, memes and amnesia

THE RECENT flood control fiasco offers a textbook case of our political cycle of outrage and forgetting.

- Jam Magdaleno

Ironically, the same cycle happens every few months. Last year, everyone seemed to be preoccupied with POGO and Alice Guo. A few weeks back, the same public gaze was turned towards online gambling. While it is understandable that people are enraged, what is concerning is that these events reveal a cyclical pattern in our public discourse.

For one, the endpoint of these issues almost always leads to more government intervention. Once the flood subsides no pun intended - it is predictable that the result of these hearings will be yet another layer of government oversight.

While oversight and fact-finding bodies are important to extract justice in some form, they are merely ex post facto. If we are to have any hope of addressing these decades-old problems, shouldn't we be more creative? Some proposals, like Ramon Ang's plan to fix Metro Manila's flooding, have already been forgotten.

Former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay rightly suggests that perhaps it is time to seek private-sector intervention, given that the cost of government-led flood control projects is often inflated by leakages.

Waiting for the government to carry out a self-inflicted overhaul is like waiting for Godot. No matter how many goodgovernance officials are in place, the very nature of politics ensures that self-interest trumps the public interest.

To understand why this is the case, we turn to the concept of public choice.