The Always Amazing Government

Governments everywhere daily demonstrate their stupidity. So why should I be surprised and why is this worth writing about? Maybe it is. Maybe it's not.

What I find so amazing is how they never learn from their mistakes  -- repeating them over and over and over again.  Each time they are white-faced with surprise.

The story today in all honesty could be from almost anywhere. So don't let the foreign names throw you. The Indonesian government deems it necessary to subsidize the price of petrol among other things. Fine. As they wish.

Today the news channels in Indonesia are all abuzz. Apparently the state owned petroleum company (and only authorized, legal distributor) of petrol has recently introduced a NON-subsidized line of petrol as well.

The way the system works - anybody - whether they live on $2 or $200/day can pull up to the pumps and fill up at the lower price. About 50 cents US/liter.


But picture this. You now have the choice when you roll up to the pumps to choose between the subsidized and the non-subsidized.

Stop just a minute and ask yourself (because obviously the government didn't ever think this through): Who is her right mind is going to choose to pay the higher price if there is absolutely NO DIFFERENCE between the two? And there is no other incentive or element of coercion.

So to combat the fact that everybody still opts for the cheaper - subsidized petrol - what does the state owned Pertamina do? They put each station on a fixed quota of the cheap stuff. But remember - it's still first-come, first-served.

There are no individual ration cards or any mechanism established to control who is given access to the subsidized goods. So...

You guessed it. Stations are running out of the cheap petrol.


Any sane, thinking, intelligent - even self-serving government that just wanted to save itself a lot of heartache would have thought things through a little better and either announced it well in advance and just gone cold-turkey.

'Sorry folks - No more subsidies. We just can't afford it anymore....' or

They would have provided some other mechanism to deal with the dual pricing confusion... or provided another way to subsidize the people they felt needed help.

Or.... There are a hundred other intelligent ways to deal with this.

This reminds me of the debacle several months ago when the government of idiots decided it wanted everybody to convert from using kerosene to LPG for cooking. In itself a wonderful idea.

But it was the way they went about it. In a word, they had no education mechanism set up to teach people how to use the LPG tanks. The price of the LPG was higher than the equivalent amount of kerosene.

And guess what?

Yep. It gets worse. The government in all its infinite wisdom decided it would give away small 3kg tanks of LPG to the poor.
Many, many of these literally exploded. Killing many people and leveling the only home many poor people had.

'Government' and 'intelligence' are two words which seldom seem to belong together...