Economics 101: government has no money. Zilch. Nada. No, this is not about balance of payments, debt or surplus. I am simply stating what should be obvious: people in government literally do not own the money that passes through their official paws. It’s all our money. Democratic governments administer our money, which they collect through taxes and which they try to multiply through judicious investment. They do so according to the promises we accept (provisionally) to believe when we elect them.
We hold them accountable to how they use our money; we literally count on them to count our money very carefully and be completely transparent with how they are using it and where they have put it. Indeed, a good definition of undemocratic governance, whether it is a straight-up dictatorship (as was Russia) or a dictatorship with democratic dressing (as is Russia) is that the people in government actually own and/or profit from the workings of the State.
The whole unwieldy exercise of formulating and accounting for the yearly budget is justified by this: it’s our money, not theirs. The checks and balances of institutional oversight are far from perfect, but at least they provide an important standard. Any funding that does not fall within the purview of such oversight is liable to tempt your average less-than-saintly politician, if not to pocket it, at least to profit politically from it. For example, the way the Good Causes Fund has sometimes been used in the past was not always free from controversy.
But we are now in new and far more unseemly territory. Imagine a situation where you have entrusted your hard-earned cash to a broker, and one day you see her on television giving a hefty donation to charity from the profits off your money without your consent.
How would you feel?
Well, it seems that if the broker is your ruling party demi-god, you are expected to fall on your knees with tears in your eyes, thanking him for his magnanimity.
One does not even need to go into what motivated Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to make his dramatic phone-call that gifted €5 million to Puttinu Cares on Good Friday. Nor is the act distasteful simply because it is funded from the murky proceeds of the sale of golden passports (there is meant to be an ‘independent’ committee to decide on how to use these proceeds, but what the hell…).
Muscat just threw away 10 times as much to Vitals as he graciously donated to Puttinu
The act itself demeans our democracy. Governments in social democracies don’t do charity. They do social justice. And one of the main pillars of social justice is the access of high-quality health care to all, especially the most vulnerable.
We have a health system that is one of the best in the world – and I say this as an ex-patient and a relative and friend of patients. It has survived the depredations of Vitals and its Maltese proxies, and is gearing itself to try and absorb or face off the brunt of Steward Healthcare’s neo-liberal model of privatised provision.
True, the small size of the Maltese population leads to a lack of critical mass of rare diseases and conditions. In these cases, health care in much bigger countries could be a better bet than in Malta simply because specialised centres there will have that much more experience and concentrated expertise. So something like Puttinu Cares will always be needed and welcome.
But the main policy thrust of any self-respecting social democratic government should be to reduce the need for Puttinu Cares, not to climb on its PR bandwagon. Damn it, Muscat just threw away 10 times as much to Vitals as he graciously donated to Puttinu. Ten times.
Government should certainly endorse, incentivise and support charity-giving by civil society, and there are other, far more dignified and appropriate ways how to do this. But it should stand or fall on how it is administering our money to improve our health care.
Daphne + 6
In a week’s time it will be the six-month anniversary of Daphne’s assassination. She is but one of a long and terrible list of journalists around the world who have given their life to their work, literally. A total of 82 journalists and media staff were killed doing their jobs in 2017, while 262 were imprisoned and 58 are missing. Eleven have been killed so far in 2018, including Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak, who like Daphne was investigating the ties between politics and corruption.
This list does not include the ‘collateral damage’ of journalists’ relatives who have either been killed, such as the fiancé of Jan Kuciak and wife of Azeri exiled journalist Rahim Namazov, or permanently scarred, such as Daphne’s brave family.
Let us demand justice for Daphne’s murder with this wider perspective, in solidarity with this increasingly beleaguered profession worldwide. No journalist, anywhere, should die in search of the truth.