Non-Bermudians played key roles in our economic development

Part II of II

Look back at the history of Bermuda to see the contribution that non-Bermudians made to our economic development.   Furness Withy, a British Shipping Company and Don Gibson in tourism, and Fred Reiss, Don Kramer and David Graham in international business are but a small sample of the many non-Bermudians who contributed significantly to the Bermuda’s growth.

In cooperation with farsighted Bermudians, an economy which was the envy of the world was created. 

The historical contribution of immigrants elsewhere also led to economic growth and prosperity.  French Hugeunots contributed to the industrial revolution in England, British engineers build railroads in Argentina, German scientists play a huge role in the development of the chemical industry in United States. The historical list goes on and on.

In 1998, the wreckers took over with their short-sighted and astonishingly foolish policies, of which term limits was probably the most lethal.   

Term limits was not, of course, the only mad policy — the trials and tribulations of tourism under the dysfunctional Department of Tourism and the equally dysfunctional Department of Education — also fired torpedoes that sunk the once flourishing Bermuda economy.

Adam Smith (the slayer of the mercantilist dragon) as long ago as 1776, famously called the legislator (our MPs) the man of the system who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them.”

But human beings are not chess pieces — they do have principles of motion besides what the legislature would choose to impress upon them. Work permit holders voluntarily joined those whose permits had been revoked. The result was a huge hole in the economy.

Now it is not any easy task to reverse course.  Bermuda having established a reputation for treating its guest workers like dirt will find it difficult to regain their confidence. This can be overcome, but as Larry Burchall so eloquently pointed out in the Bermuda Sun of August 15, 2012, Bermuda has a declining population and it needs immigrants if for no other reason than to finance such things as civil service pensions and ageing Bermudians. 

However, the populations of Europe, China and Japan are also declining and they need skilled immigrants as well. Unlike the recent past, international skills are at a premium and immigrants will go to those places that pay well, provide opportunities and, above all, make them welcome. 

Reagan’s joke

President Ronald Reagan, who succeeded an economically dysfunctional President Carter in 1980, used to tell a joke about the way Jimmy Carter almost killed the American economy during the 1970s. It goes like this.

A lost travelling salesman was given shelter for the night by a farmer in the middle of nowhere. When the family sits down to dinner with their grateful guest there is a pig in one of the chairs, with 3 medals around its neck and it also had a wooden leg.  The guest cannot restrain his curiosity and asks the farmer why the pig is having dinner with everyone.

I thought you would never ask says the farmer.  See those medals, well the gold one is for when the pig saved my baby son when he fell into the pond.   The silver one was when he rescued my little girl from a burning barn.  The bronze one was for cornering a bull that was about to attack my wife. The salesman nods his head amazed at the intelligence and bravery of the pig.  

After a few more mouthfuls he says “but why does the pig have a wooden leg”. The farmer pushes back his chair, takes a big swallow of his beer, looks at the salesman as if he is stupid and says “well, with a pig like that you don’t eat it all at once”. 

The moral of the joke — if you fail to understand the punch line — is simply this.  The salesman is the gullible voter, the farmer the ingratiating politician, and the pig is the economy.

The former Bermuda Government gave our economic pig not one, but two wooden legs — and no medals. 

One of the major economic thinkers of the 20th F.A. Hayek once stated that “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

The tragedy for young Bermudians is that the PLP Government did not understand the laws of economics.

The result of that is what we have now — namely unemployment, huge government debt and hunger. What a dismal record. n