During the meetings with Ruth Richardson, Mart Laar, Marc Miles and Tom Palmer every public official they met (prime-minister and other Ministers of Georgia) was showing his/her great support to liberalization ideas. They promised many things from tariff elimination, to privatization of pensions and further improvements to the business environment. But still there are some concerns coming from the society.
At first they are connected to very weak contact of the government to the people – in this kind of situation any even excellent program can fail and discredit itself. Especially there are very strong feelings of disappointment from three particular projections of the government: health care, pensions and education. All three are long run policy programs and need strong consent of the general public and political parties. Unfortunately we see the opposite – the government very effectively hides its plans from the society and makes everything to fail. Main concerns Georgian libertarians have here is that this government can easily discredit all the ideas of liberalization and of course the left-wing opposition is ready to fight.
After the president understood these political-circle problems he renewed his PR campaign. Few days ago he visited one of the villages in Kakheti (East Georgian province) brought to the peasants fertilizers and a tractor. After granting the fertilizers to villagers he announced about his generosity of presenting the tractor to the village.
The opposition immediately found some problems in his this action asking his secretary: to whom this tractor belongs now? There are no Kolhoz or Sovhoz in the village and even no executive body. Some reformers in the government hoped somebody in the village would take care (privatize himself) the tractor soon but if not in a week there would be no tractor or even parts.
A month before – during natural gas shortage from Russia – the president, the mayor of Tbilisi and the head of financial police announced about their promise to punish anybody who would sell kerosene for higher than market – speculative prices to the population. Unfortunately we couldn’t see any politician protesting against this stupidity – but no wonder, they, even so called right opposition, didn’t respond to 200% increase of central budget spending during last two years.
“Evil” voices are coming the government started again speaking about re-privatization (or nationalization) of some (they say 30) factories suspected as wrongly privatized. The same story again…
So, as one Bolshevik was saying: one step forward, two steps back!
At first they are connected to very weak contact of the government to the people – in this kind of situation any even excellent program can fail and discredit itself. Especially there are very strong feelings of disappointment from three particular projections of the government: health care, pensions and education. All three are long run policy programs and need strong consent of the general public and political parties. Unfortunately we see the opposite – the government very effectively hides its plans from the society and makes everything to fail. Main concerns Georgian libertarians have here is that this government can easily discredit all the ideas of liberalization and of course the left-wing opposition is ready to fight.
After the president understood these political-circle problems he renewed his PR campaign. Few days ago he visited one of the villages in Kakheti (East Georgian province) brought to the peasants fertilizers and a tractor. After granting the fertilizers to villagers he announced about his generosity of presenting the tractor to the village.
The opposition immediately found some problems in his this action asking his secretary: to whom this tractor belongs now? There are no Kolhoz or Sovhoz in the village and even no executive body. Some reformers in the government hoped somebody in the village would take care (privatize himself) the tractor soon but if not in a week there would be no tractor or even parts.
A month before – during natural gas shortage from Russia – the president, the mayor of Tbilisi and the head of financial police announced about their promise to punish anybody who would sell kerosene for higher than market – speculative prices to the population. Unfortunately we couldn’t see any politician protesting against this stupidity – but no wonder, they, even so called right opposition, didn’t respond to 200% increase of central budget spending during last two years.
“Evil” voices are coming the government started again speaking about re-privatization (or nationalization) of some (they say 30) factories suspected as wrongly privatized. The same story again…
So, as one Bolshevik was saying: one step forward, two steps back!
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