Bureaucratic (mal)practice
What welfare state model — replete with assumptions, measures, and calculations — allowed government to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, provide free healthcare to the sick, give cash subsidies to the jobless? This bureaucratic (mal)practice transfers the burden to the taxpayers-at-large if the pattern of government spending is to extend help to the needy. Seemingly a grand equalizer, privileges go to the poor like manna from heaven while obligations pass to the rich like punishment from above, effectively blurring the relationship between entitlements and contributions.
Economists have done very little to incentivize interdependence rather than this vicious dependence by the least affluent class on the more affluent class of society. And what angelic genius of an idea have grandstanding politicians invented in the government’s strongest pretension as a welfare state — when navigating like a rudderless ship in fiscally constrained waters — they should not have dared to venture?
Came the fire that ravaged the entire Central Post Office building from the basement to the roof of the iconic five-story structure, stripped of its “flesh” solely because water sprinklers had not been installed in the whole edifice that could have averted the tragic inferno. At no point had the government come to its senses on how to preserve a P1-million investment a hundred years ago — or to how much it would cost to build the same structure today.
An editorial in a leading newspaper has profusely romanticized the role of the old post office with an unmuffled scream for restoration and reform toward modernity — one more superior than private courier services (i.e. FedEx, DHL, United Parcel Service). But the long prose hardly rolled out — in a manner clear as crystal and hard as diamond — what “structural weaknesses of the agency” ought to be reengineered. Its nostalgia for the charred edifice as a Filipino heritage is vacuous or paying mere lip-service absent any well-defined reform parameters beyond its existing mandate.
Instead, why doesn’t the government sponsor an international competition for the design of a new Central Post Office building by forming a judging committee as early as now? Thereafter, the winning entry will be commissioned to begin construction of what would later be a new heritage landmark. In short, let a new structure rise and supplant that which now lies in ruin – for want of water sprinklers. It will not strain logic that the charred remains of a onceproclaimed national treasure has fallen into an absolute case of “sunk cost,” which simply means that there is nothing more to retrieve.
At this critical juncture, however, let it be a local concern rather than a national one given that as head of a local government unit, the city mayor of Manila is in the best position to determine its needs in accordance with existing comprehensive land use plans. Besides, LGU Manila is one of the highest revenue-generating local governments and therefore has the wherewithal to foot the construction of a new post office.
What “outstanding universal value,” if any, is the old building known for to deserve classification as a cultural heritage or as a national treasure, as the case may be? What heritage — natural, cultural, historical — is there to really preserve other than the nightmare of the Battle of Manila in World War II? A single article in a referenced journal should be enough proof that it attained a level of recognition of unsurpassed value.
When the National Museum of the Philippines declared it an important cultural property for “exceptional cultural, artistic, and historical significance to the Philippines,” it came so rather belatedly in
2018. From then on, it received public funds for its protection, conservation and restoration.
If officialdom will download awesome sums of money to restore what was lost, methinks that in both economic and accounting costs, it will be foolhardy to do so. For now, blame not Congress or any board of inquiry for probing why it burned to the ground — beyond the worn-out narrative of faulty wiring.
Let heads roll!
“If officialdom will download awesome sums of money to restore what was lost, methinks that in both economic and accounting costs, it will be foolhardy to do so.
“An editorial has profusely romanticized the role of the old post office with an unmuffled scream for restoration and reform toward modernity.