Carrot and Stick

If you played this little game called Tropico (by TopPop), you'll start to appreciate facets we face in this current political landscape.

In the era of military dictatorship, the only thing that the dictatorship needed to do is just simply keep a strong and loyal army, and the people can't do anything. The only difference on how they are perceived deal alot with how they deal with their subjects which range from benevolent leader into bloody tyrant.

At the moment, we can see alot of people have moved from the central figure such as dictatorship into a more democratic type of government - as along with our country Thailand, in which we have a parlimentary system that is similar to Britian.

With the rise of democracy, and our charter reform, there is high hopes that democracy can solve alot of our problem. What has happened over the years has been less rosy.

If you played tropico, you can issue edicts such as TaxBreaks, arrange carnivals, or do other flashy thing to gain votes just directly before your election. I like to reckon that the Carrot and Stick approach in democracy - in which politicians vow to give something in return to the people as long as they have their votes - which is a more subtle version of direct bribery or the old school democracy where vote buying was rampant. When they go to office these politicians make their promise true, but then later spend their time enriching themselves and their henchperson in various means.

With IT and media playing a larger part in our modern society, alot of politicians have mastered the art of PR or public relationship in which makes them appear good in the society though they have contributed little or actually damaged our country through various means of corruption.

I remembered distinctively our PM promised 1 million baht for every of the 80k villages across our country to develop products for sale. That election promise was part of the reason why they won the last election in a landslide - and is a policy with dubious benefits. As the new election approaches, with more NGO, academic circles, and government advisory agencies are complaining about policy corruption, I've found it interesting our PM has stated directly that the corruption was caused by low ranking government officials, and the way to erradicate corruption was to raise all the income of government officials. Strangely enough, he got angry when they asked him what the PM has to say in rebuttal of the allegations and research stated by the government advisory panels and brushing them off.

Looking through all of this, I just found it funny. Lower rank officials follow ranks from higher-up - the corruption is in the whole system and giving more income to lower ranked officials will not solve corruption unless the highups set a precidence- which sadly is lacking in all levels.

The increase of income is in my conclusion a thinly-veined carrot stick, and I'm very certain many donkeys will take the bait.