Autarkic Philippines?

Autarkic Philippines?

February 23, 2024

By Marvyn Benaning

The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF) has been fighting for trade liberalization, globalization and the dismantling of all trade barriers, as well as reducing tariffs in the wrong belief that laissez faire capitalism will redound to the prosperity of all nations, with the “unseen hand” working to make markets efficient, with the mercantilism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo ensuring that comparative advantage would not increase the wealth of nations but also herald the dawn of peace.

One of its fellows, Alex R. Magno, who is infamous for his neologisms rather than his clear ideas, showed just how strong the FEF brain trust is. In his column for Philippine Star on Feb. 22, 2024, Magno assailed the constitutional provision that barred foreigners from controlling Philippine newspapers and radio-TV networks, claiming that it killed the plan of a European firm to organize a media corporation to handle the production of educational TV programs for all of Asia.

Obviously, Magno was pushing the venture, perhaps as a consultant or as a PR man. He hyped the project as generating thousands of jobs and serving the educational needs of all of Asia but, of course, the 1987 Constitution aborted the plan. Magno rued that the basic law was inward-looking unlike what should be the outward-looking Magno Constitution that serves the best interest of humanity.

Then he lashed out at the cultural deterioration of the country and cited why inward-looking Filipinos love Korean culture so much, when he should analyzing why the Koreans are good at promoting their telenovelas, their dishes, and why the Thai and Vietnamese governments encourage and financially support their citizens who establish restaurants in the Philippines. “By contrast, artistic production withered in this country, weighed down by a constitutional order that commands us to be inward-looking. We cannot export anything beyond bananas because our political economy is autarkic,” Magno howled.

FEF should be gobsmacked by this statement and the jaws of its leading members must have fallen on the floor when Magno described “our political economy is autarkic.” Since the period of Spanish colonialism and the opening of the Suez Canal, the domestic economy had never autarkic, if Magno goes by the textbook definition of the borrowed Greek term that refers to self-sufficiency and self-reliance and calls for closing borders and minimizing foreign trade. The Philippine economy had been glued to its colonial and neo-colonial trading partners so much that it would be next to impossible for the Philippines to close its borders in 1946 and declare itself autarkic.

Philippine political economy has never been autarkic, certainly not during the Commonwealth and certainly not when President Manuel L. Quezon declared that he preferred “a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.” The rentiers that some neoliberals in these shores despise are also the beneficiaries of the trading system that benefited them and their American partners from 1898 until World War II broke out, and the ties that bound them became tighter when the US returned.

So Magno’s autarkic political economy served the needs of both the old rich and the nouveau riche? Philippine political economy replicates the ruling class, sustains its whims and caprices and strengthens its control of the economy and politics, with the sugar barons and the landed gentry dominating politics until the time political families and bureaucrats entrenched their hold on their feudal fiefdoms. They still divide the loot, the principalia is still here, the champions of autarky have worked hand-in-glove with foreign capital. So, the Philippines is still an autarky?