PM's popularity hard to understand
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Your newspaper has reported that Yingluck Shinawatra incredibly enjoys over 70 per cent popularity.
This could only be the case in the unreal world that is Thailand.
After a year in office, it is hard to understand why this is other than the fact that there is almost no criticism of her or her performance. What have been her successful policies, achievements in office, or even memorable speeches? I can hardly remember anything she has said excepts things like “the walls won’t break” or “it’s hot”.
It seems the reason for this is that the media (certainly the government controlled TV and radio) decline to criticise her. Even the opposition has been lame, and last November during the censure debate was “warned” by Pheu Thai politicians that she was “off limits”. What a joke.
The PM’s silly answers to the inflation threat and over 900 company closures triggered by the Bt300 minimum wage – a policy disaster – are reminders of her “deer in the headlights” handling of the flood crisis last year.
The fact that the government’s top so-called economists are now recommending wage and price controls when all historical experience shows that they do not work and make the situation worse and cause shortages, is added to by Yingluck’s and Kittirat’s tortured attempts to show that prices are going down, not up.
If you go to Family Mart or 7-Elevens, as I did today, there are shortages of many basic goods including soft drinks because they are waiting for prices to go up.
You can’t fight the marketplace, and just because the real person running the show in Dubai says this or that does not make it so.
Also these politicians should not interfere with the independent work of Bank of Thailand governor Dr Prasern Trairatvorakul to try to use the nation’s reserves to fund its populist policies and investment in infrastructure, as the last time there was such interference, in 1997, with the failed baht defence policies, the government found it had no reserves at all and had to go hat in hand to the IMF for a bailout.
Regardless of what Dr Olarn says, Economics 101 teaches that the government should not interfere with the free market, and everything the government is doing with the minimum wage and price controls now reflects the same flawed premise.
Frederick von Hayek
Vancouver
