My Regret

Nowadays, a lot of my Malaysian friends paid a lot of attention in the field of so-called ‘politics’. Being one who is perpetually attracted to this subject (or perhaps my disappointment that stems from it), I cannot claim to have paid more attention to it. The BERSIH rally and the resultant police action had of course produced a lot of publicity.

But what does BERSIH claim? BERSIH aspires to have free and fair elections in Malaysia. That’s a very noble goal, and certainly not an extreme one. In fact, it is something that most democratic countries had taken for granted. However, such aspirations, manifested in the rally that had taken place on November 10, had caused the police to take such drastic actions as to use force against the citizens, their fellow countrymen. This is very alarming; we should perhaps revise some of the writings by John Locke regarding the role of the government, and that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, concerning social contract.

There is a social contract in Malaysia, formed and agreed upon before the Federation of Malaya gained independence in 1957. It dealt with such matters as the rights of Bumiputera and the citizenship of the immigrants. It was subsequently woven into the present Constitution of Malaysia. However, fifty years down the road, the questions that arise regarding to the such special status, in my observation, had become one of a quite different nature. Instead of discussing the relevance of the social contract, formed fifty years ago, in today’s context, the argument had gone to such areas as the policies of affirmative action and the chauvinistic ideas of the superiority of one race over the others.

The result is a lot of arguments, with lots of irritations, but with little constructive meaning. The attacks on the flaws are diffused and inconsistent. There has been a lack of a central principle which guides the attacks on a consistent line. This is especially so given our (or perhaps my) education on democracy, social contract and political process. Government is being seen as the patriach, the planner; and the citizens, the servant, the children. I doubt this is a proper framework of a democracy as practiced effectively in other areas of the world (read the United States and Switzerland). Of course, upon saying the preceding statement, I would be immediately rebuked on the grounds that we have a different culture and that kind of democracy cannot suit our needs. My question: How many kinds of democracy are there? How many kinds of freedom are there for the humanity to choose? Is my desire for freedom different from, say, the people of Africa or the people of the United States?

Well, the following is quoted from the U.S. Department of State website; I believe it’s true. The way to solve a disagreement, instead of shutting up the opponents, is by encouraging more freedom of speech. There has been a lot of claims by some authorities that traditional values and virtues are perverse in the lives of the society. However, some matters are deemed intolerable, sensitive, and groups of people are not able to take it. What, then, is the benefit of such traditional values? Is not that a contradiction that, a society with a lot of humanly traditional values and virtues cannot engage in arguments in a logical, tolerant, and an open-minded manner?

The need of education to resolve this issue is as great as ever. However, in the situation where the majority of students enrol in government-sponsored schools, I doubt the proper concept of democracy can be introduced in the curriculum at all. Reaching out to the society in general is very desirable, but in the presence of heavy self-sensorship and governmental oversight, what can be done?

But, gloomy though the picture is, the standard of living of the people has been rising, and they had become better off than ever. But the sphere of life is more than economic affluence. Whether the society wants to be more open and more boisterous is eventually up to the people themselves to decide. A minority who finds his or her opinions not acceptable to the majority can always go elsewhere, where his or her aspirations will be satisfied. In this globalized world where resources and people of similar kinds tend to congregate, this is more true than ever.

Paying for Bad Service

Is the following my emesis of frustration and dissatisfaction? I hope not, and if it is, I hope it is a constructive one

I shall first tell a story. Somebody wrote a research paper on monetary policies of Malaysia and Singapore, and originally measured nearly 60 pages with some 30 graphs. However with the clever editing of his research partner the paper was managed to be cut to a neat 26 pages. Along with the reduction of pages is the reduction of file size: 9.05MB to 8.61MB. The statistics Excel file, which forms an integral part of the research, adds another 95KB. After finishing all the work he happily visited the IVLE page and intended to submit the paper through the workbin. To his horror and dismay, he found that the maximum file size is 5MB. He then proceeded to email his professor and partner concerning this matter.

The next day he received an email from his partner, informing him that the professor failed to reach him by email and had to contact him through his partner. Still horrified, he checked his school’s email account and discovered that his email account had been closed. He felt strange that he had cleared his emails prior. Upon investigation he found that the Deleted Items COUNT towards the mailbox quota limit, a miserable 30MB (actually only some 27,000KB).

Of course he cleared the Deleted Items folder and tried to send the mail again. This time, for redundancy purposes, he also sent the mail through Gmail. He succeeded in sending the mail through Gmail, but here’s the reply he got:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[Email address]

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 552 [mail server address] your message size exceeds maximum inbound size of 10240 kilobytes

There’s no need to guess what happened to his mail sent using the school’s email account, since the two are virtually identical.

Hello, what is the era we’re living now? IS REALLY 11MB THAT MUCH?

He then sent the mail again PATIENTLY, submitting the Word document and the Excel file separately. He was still yet to receive a machine-generated reply.

*** *** *** *** ***

Now I’m wondering… Do you have to actually pay and use the service (Exchange Server) from Microsoft, and on top of that, to provide your own dedicated servers? I’ve been using free email services for ages and had never been aware of such problems… Hmm…

p/s: Moral of the story: Nothing beats a book! Although it cost me nearly $20 to print one, the result is much more satisfactory than the supposedly high-tech way of delivery

Monetary Policy of the ‘State of Brunei’

Last updated: December 13, 2007

Note: ‘State of Brunei’ refers to a city in SimCity…

‘Brunei’s’ monetary policy is unique in the world. In ‘Brunei’, the objective of the conduct of monetary policy is not to ensure price stability, but to ensure efficiency (i.e. reduction of impedance) of transactions. Therefore, the tools used by the Government of ‘Brunei’ is markedly different from the rest of the world.

Money Supply
The people of ‘Brunei’ maintains that a party shall not be held responsible, and influence, matters which is not within the capability of that party. Based on this principle, the government is not held responsible for maintaining monetary and price stability as such functions effectively rest on the private sector; the private sector can maintain a turbulent price fluctuations if it so wishes. The government is responsible for the issuance of hard currency however, and as such the function is tightly controlled to maintain the greatest level of certainty. The Currency Ordinance of 1323 provides that the government is obliged to increase the hard currency by three percent of the same kind already issued. The government is given discretion, through the Central Bank, to vary the percentage by a window of 1.5 percent either way. The currency is not backed by foreign reserves; in fact, the 1323 Act prohibits such backing by the Central Bank. However, ‘Brunei’ in fact holds more than one-third of world’s foreign currencies’ reserve: The reserve is maintained by the private sector for the clearing of international transactions.

There are two units of currency in Brunei, namely Simoleon and Bruneian Dollar. One simoleon is equivalent to 200,000 Bruneian Dollars. The government account is kept in Simoleon, and the real estate market also uses Simoleon as the official unit of account. However, since the value of Simoleon is very high relative to the rest of the world (i.e. 1 simoleon = US$250,000), the Bruneian Dollar is created to facilitate transactions and to make prices better understood by the rest of the world. The Simoleon managed to keep much of its purchasing power over the centuries, and in fact increased it, because the money supply increases very slowly while the economies expanded at a much higher rate, much analogous to companies which expands fast but never split its stocks.

Exchange Mechanism
The exchange transactions of ‘Brunei’s’ money is carried out entirely by the private sector, primarily through the Exchange Clearinghouse of the downtown Financial Market, and even the government had to seek the service of the private sector to carry out foreign exchange transactions. There is no government restrictions of exchange transactions.

Foreign scholars had long doubted the viability of such arrangement, as the country had witnessed a great many economic fluctuations over the past six hundred years, and many also expressed concerns over the overly simple mechanism. However, they were both right and wrong: they were right that the economic performance experienced great fluctuations, and they were wrong that the livelihood of the people was steadily improving. They were also wrong in ignoring that the Bruneian economy is merely one of the by-products of its advancement in civilization, and not the achievement of its civilization. The Bruneian economy is truly advanced that it not only could produce large amount of goods and services when demanded, but also shuts down temporarily when the demand is falling, thanks to the very low breakeven point. An example would be from ‘1975′ to ‘1977′: The economy contracted by 3.1 percent over ‘1975′-’76′ but expanded by 25% over ‘1976′-’77′. The economy suffered no increase in unemployment over the period, but the people was able to enjoy longer period of recreation or continuing education, actually resulted in a higher standard of living. This is very different from the rest of the world, where a sudden drop in economic activity would cause economic disruption and human suffering.

Also, the Bruneian economy is based entirely on voluntary exchange. There is no governmental directives or influence in granting favor over any goods and services, and prices are the dominant signals of favorability of exchange. This extends to foreign exchange, and fluctuation in exchange rates is being viewed upon in Brunei as a matter of fact, rather than imperfections that need to be addressed. More attention is paid, however, to the reduction of transaction cost and efficient dissemination of reliable information to ensure the smooth functioning of the economy in the long run.

Relation of Government with respect to monetary policies
The government has a very limited role in the conduct of monetary policy other than those prescribed above. The government dedicate resources to develop information technology to enhance the efficiency of monetary transactions over the years, and collaborate with the private sector in this matter. The government also provides real-time information on market information; or rather, information on the Financial Markets and enterprise transactions are provided to the government for consolidation. As a result, the government had access to the state of finance of any company at any time of the day, and the businesses do not have to file financial statements to the government. A strong and efficient judiciary, along with effective check of powers, ensure that privacy is respected.

The government is prohibited from borrowing money and maintaining debts; however the government is permitted to be granted a credit line which does not exceed its projected annual expenditure. The government, therefore, had to run a balanced budget, or to finance budget deficit using existing reserve. The government must be dissolved in the case it had accumulated debt, and a new government would be formed to succeed the one dissolved. Such stringent terms meant that the government’s accumulating debt is a virtual impossibility, and it had never done so since its inception nearly 700 years ago. Instead, the government now maintains a huge financial reserve worth 75 million simoleon, or 15 trillion Bruneian Dollars, equivalent to 199 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or 34 percent of Gross World Product (GWP), and 83.5 times of current annual governmental expenditure. Even with such financial wealth, the Government holds only 2.9 percent of the National Wealth of ‘Brunei’, reflecting the immense size and wealth of the private sector.

(To be continued…)

Some Fragmentary Notes

On Internal Shuttle Service
Well, to put it lightly, the availability of the service is equivalent to its absence. Not only I failed to catch any BTC1 services on the time prescribed on the timetable, I’d had to fork out eight dollars for a cab ride, and five minutes late. (This is not my first time, and I obviously failed to learn from mistakes…) Talking about efficiency indeed.

On Writing
There’s no new posts on my blog because I’m busy preparing for some writings concerning politics. Unfortunately, many of those got deleted before the drafts were completed. I had a hard time organizing my thoughts; and it was complicated by the need to express it in a non-cluttered manner, as well as to make it ‘interesting’. I know I’m not obliged in any way to complete those, but I shall try.

On (Personal) Study
I’m rather contented that I was able to finish reading a number of books, mostly biographies, over the past few months. I hope I can go for more, but am bogged down by the absence of such books in the library and my unwillingness to pay for it (finally! ). Perhaps I should consider visiting the National Library at downtown more often.

On My Blog
I had been contemplating of shutting down this blog for quite some time because it seems to have no longer served its purpose, and there has been barely, if any, deliberations going on. (Care to see the number of comments?) Of course, popularity is not my objective, and so does the number of comments. However, as one saying goes, the greatest risk a politician could ever have is not being unpopular, but being ignored. (Not trying to be a politician tho! ) My point is that, at the very least, I would like to know others’ opinions concerning the topics as well as my responses. Well, I’m not going to ask for opinion about the shutdown because I know for certain that no one is going to respond anyway. And I still have ongoing writings!

On Politics
Believe it or not, I just realized that I don’t understand democracy at all, even though I had spoken like a political expert for… …many years. I know many of us had studied at least a little about governance during schooling years. However, upon reading John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Madison et al’s The Federalist Papers, I know that I had to start learning all over again. Just think about this: Why teach politics in the school? What is the supposed reason? What is the real reason? Who write the syllabus and books? We are told that we need to be loyal, need to maintain harmony, need to contribute to the country, so on and so forth. These seem plausible, but after reading the papers I mentioned, and also the videotapes of Milton Friedman’s lectures, I know that those are plausible no doubt, but those are just rhetoric, and they can’t form a logical argument (I’m taking Logic this semester! ). For a citizen of democracy will be loyal to nobody other than the principle of freedom, and a democratic government is nothing more than an enforcer of contracts, including laws mandated by its citizens. Anything more than that and suspicion is warranted. Okay, since I mentioned that I’m currently writing several articles concerning this, I should put it to an end