Dear Editor,
Listen, I have to hand it to our local captains of industry and chamber of commerce luminaries. Every time they stand at a podium demanding that Guyana embrace a pure, unadulterated, American-style free market, free of pesky government interference, regulations, or pesky taxes, I get tears in my eyes. It is truly touching to watch millionaires lecture us on the beauty of rugged individualism while sitting atop an ocean of offshore oil.
Why bother with things like universal healthcare, affordable housing, or robust public education when we can just let Adam Smith’s invisible hand sort out who gets to eat and who gets to live in a shack? After all, just look at the United States, that shining beacon of pure, unfiltered capitalism where the government definitely doesn’t spend $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion a year babysitting its citizens.
Oh, wait. Never mind. It turns out that even in the global cathedral of laissez-faire, the American state quietly funnels over $1.6 trillion into healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid, nearly a trillion dollars into public education, and hundreds of billions more into food assistance and housing. It turns out that when the chips are down, even the capitalists love a good multi-trillion-dollar safety net, especially when it’s time to socialize corporate losses while privatizing the gains.
Yet, here in Guyana, especially our local business elite in Georgetown want us to believe that rugged capitalism means we should let the free market work its magic on the average Guyanese worker. They want us to swallow the fairy tale that soaring GDP growth and oil revenues will naturally trickle down to bless every household, as if wealth has ever spontaneously jumped out of a corporate ledger and built a primary school. They complain about the fiscal footprint of state spending on social programs, entirely forgetting that the healthy, educated workers keeping their businesses afloat didn’t drop out of a supply-side economics textbook. So let’s keep taking financial advice from folks who want all the rewards of an oil boom and none of the responsibility of building a nation. Let’s leave our healthcare and housing to the mercy of market forces so that a select few can add another zero to their bank accounts while the rest of us wonder how much a barrel of oil costs when you can’t afford to see a doctor.
In conclusion, if we are going to copy America, let’s at least be honest about the game: true capitalism is great for the people writing the checks, but for the rest of us, it’s a brilliant way to build a very rich market on top of a very broken country.
Sincerely,
Keith Bernard
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