Dear Editor,
The Government of Guyana boasts with much fanfare, of Guyana’s return to democracy and a free market capitalist economy (they suffer from total amnesia about President Desmond Hoyte’s successful ERP) but are absolutely unwilling to free up sections of the market which they cannot control.
Instead of letting competition, supply and demand run the marketplace, our leaders propose to trample on the rights of taxpaying businessmen by publishing their names in a ‘shame list’ if they (the government) perceive the pricing structure charged by the businesses to be too high.
Gentlemen, if a business overprices its goods, customers will go elsewhere and the business will fail. If a business provides poor quality goods and services to its consumers, they will go elsewhere and the business will fail.
The biggest success story of the effect of competition in recent times is in our mobile phone industry. Look at the effects of competition on the network rates, quality and variety of service, and the cost of handsets in an extremely short space of time. But this competition came about because it made economic sense to compete to provide this service. Unduly heavy price controls destroy this economic sense.
This brings me to the point of the minibus industry, which I think gets the rawest deal of all in relation to government price controls. Its amuses me when the government cries that the fares are too high and ties them only to gas prices, as if the bus is made of pure gasoline, but when asked to provide the service themselves, proclaim it too expensive to provide and too hard to manage. [Ed note: The government is proposing to reintroduce publicly owned ‘big buses.’] If it’s so expensive that you can’t do it yourself, then why must you depress the fares of the persons who brave the circumstances to do it? Depressing minibus fares may be a good way to win public popularity, but it does not benefit the consumer. The depressed fares have created an industry with an entrenched culture of used tyres, used spares, minimal maintenance, and speeding to maximise the number of trips per day. The result is the most unsafe means of transport with problems that regulation will be tough to cure because of the economics involved.
Cheap public transport is always provided by public-sector owned subsidised entities, but in Guyana the government is getting a free ride with no risk or investment involved and even a political whipping boy.
The proposed ‘Name and Shame’ campaign is a breach of businessmen’s right to conduct legitimate unobstructed business, and yet another deterrent to the development of the private sector. I hope the government reconsiders this ill fated move as the making of a profit while conducting legitimate business with legitimate business practices, while paying the correct amount of taxes is certainly not shameful.
Yours faithfully,
Learie Barclay