Why words ?
Have you ever wondered what a word really is? Why do they exist? What do you think came first? The words that you write every day or the human being that wrote them? Did the words and alphabets of each language exist 500 million years ago? The answer to that is of course a big old NO. We human beings invented the languages we use. One might then ask, well how do we know that a computer ought to be called a computer, or that the sun ought to be called the sun? Why not call it Bob, I would fancy that. Let’s all call the sun Bob from now on. Why do we not do it? You very well could, nobody is stopping you but most people would not understand you because their brain would not map Bob \(\longrightarrow\) Sun. They would map Bob \(\longrightarrow\) name of a person. You ever look at a color? Your brain will tell you the color you are looking at although there is no rationale for why red maps to what we perceive as red.1
So why does this happen? It happens because your brain is trained like a lab rat to learn these mappings through the art of language learning, vocabulary learning, and sentence writing. We have developed languages with words, then with the alphabet to be able to convey meaning to ‘stuff’ that exists subjectively and objectively. We tend to follow those languages to a tee. That is after all why they are effective tools of communication in the first place. First inside your house to learn the basics but then you are sent to school, all around the world, so that other maps may be accessed and learned through all the subjects that we have in school. The very nature of this subjectivity that each brain is privy to is why lots of countries love indoctrination and why the social sciences are so nonlinear. Human behavior is filled with all kinds of nonsense that determines said behavior which is why it is quasi-impossible to predict, although it is nevertheless deterministic. Education is therefore a double-edged sword because education and indoctrination are two sides of the same coin. You can provide your people with reliable information about the entire world by sharing all the best available knowledge that mankind has at its disposal through the process called teaching in schools, colleges and universities or you can use it to your advantage to raise a lot of sheep by altering things here and there. In Mauritius, a simple example is the fact that there is a clash of words today among the older population and the younger population. That is because words like Democracy, Fairness and Merit mean different things to both groups. To the older population democracy, fairness and merit are compatible with communalism. With using their votes to secure their childrens’ jobs. That their vote has a price or needs to imperatively correspond to their race or religious bloc is not odd. It is so normal nobody even questions it. For the younger generation who is less conservative because they were able to get access to education, they are more liberal in their stance and abhorr such associations like I do. Plus the younger generation knows the fine print that their parents were not given because politics disrespects them across the board. The younger generation knows that irresponsible spending is inflationary and benefits no one, younger people know nothing free actually exists in this world. That is why the younger generation wants the best guy or girl for the job to do the job. So a good objective definition of what a word is that it is.
A word is a placeholder for our brain which maps its perceptions of the world to it so that it can be used as a tool of effective communication. Words can be used to convey subjective and objective perceptions.
So why words? Because without words, a world of propaganda cannot exist. A world of sheep cannot exist without words. People’s opinions cannot be molded to be exactly as you wish it to be without words. Nothing is as effective as words to subjectively alter objective reality. Your parents after all believed that the Republic of Mauritius had been a democracy for fifty six years. As did mine. That was the indoctrination they went through. Things must be a certain way. Our constitution is the greatest in the world. Only we provide free education and free healthcare. There must be a King in the country. The King can steal as long as he shares some of his loot with us. The King can do anything as long as he does me X and Y favor. That they believed it however, does not mean you have to. That they believed it was the only way to live their life never meant it was the absolute way life must be lived. You can let go of that way of life. You can put that indoctrination behind you and move forward, so we can go to the next level together. People before us could not. They did have the education required to be able to do it. They were not equipped to forego that way of life. We people from the 1980s onwards got access to good education thanks to our parents’ hard work, and have the opportunity to end this horror that divides us.
The Couyonne Lepep-ism
Objectively the couyonne lepep-ism is not something that is only prevalent in Mauritius. It is a fan favorite among all governments in the world. Just like the UK washes its sins in India by rewriting history in its A-Level curriculum, or the USA washes its sins of the genocide it committed early in its manifest destiny era which was a major inspiration for Germany and its subsequent nazi horrors. Nazi Germany was only following America’s tradition of eugenics and mass massacre, to begin with to make Europe great again. To make another Roman Empire. The thing to keep in mind is that nothing is truly as it is told when it concerns human history. Human beings have biases and that will affect how human history is depicted by governments based on their self-interests. A tyrant will be a hero if self-interest calls for such a thing to be the case. The world is a horrible place, but it is that which makes the momentary peace we can secure every now and then that much more enjoyable. If you want to have an objective opinion of the world, you can only have one by understanding the science that rules the world. Science will not lie just as Human Nature will not lie. Why is capitalism so successful? Because capitalism is the only objective description that a society can truly have. Any other is subjective. All societies run on greed which is dominated by gilded ages, and then are followed by small periods of great equality before going back to a rinse and repeat. Man is flawed. There is no good or bad. There is only good and bad. Karl Marx’s ideology of communism is not something that actually exists objectively, it is fluff used by many greedy people throughout history to get control of factors of production and to create a defacto Monarchical system in their countries. We call them dynasties in Mauritius but they exist in a lot of other places across the world. Objectively that is what communism has been if you study it. It has never been what it has claimed to be. This is what the older politicians in our country do not get. Science has you beat boy.
You are not different. You are not that one political party that is not a political machine. Because that is what all political parties are. That is the science. Human beings if nothing else will always excel at being human beings. That is the problem in Mauritius. Acting holier than thou with the younger generation, when all of us know that what is required in Mauritius is not the perfect politician but just for the goddamn laws to work. We know you stole money, all of us know you stole money. We know we are not different and that we could have done it too for all we know if we were in your shoes. That is not what bothers us. What bothers us is that you did not serve that prison time you should have served for all those crimes. What bothers us is the rule of law fumbling time and time and time again and being unable to secure even an ounce of justice, a lot of times on purpose. There are an incalculable amount of people in Mauritius doing obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting every day by not investigating anything that is sent to them and getting close to a million rupees per month for it. Do you think all the young people in this country do not know that? How dumb do you think we are?
Moving on, the biggest problem that Mauritius faces today is the hoarding of its capital. Not all people are allowed to shine in Mauritius. Especially right now given that there is no progress. Government has been slowly expanding its grip on the total capital of the country each year with all kinds of new taxes and by increasing its hold of total GDP. There is a reason why independent presses have bowed down to government, why radios have bowed down to government, and why businesses must bow down to government. Capital markets are not free and one wrong move could end you if you get into a cash crunch. You see, the blunt truth of Mauritius is that you could be extremely incompetent and still shine due to the fact that you are part of the Monarch of Mauritius, by getting money continuously thrown at you. Public tax money. It does not matter that all you will do is effectively launder the money through a company to legally justify you getting so much tax money. In the end, that is inefficient, because these people did not generate new savings in the end. They just expopriated capital from the system like a typical political machine contractor. These people just ate billions of savings of the country and gave nothing in return and is still asking for more and is being given more. We are letting incompetence shine rather than competence. That is how we got here. What we need is not these rigged capital markets but fully functioning free capital markets who is willing to make the best buck. We want that to happen in Mauritius. But it has not happened. The one player that was making the market more competitive (BAI) was killed. Facts remain facts. BAI was destroyed because the capital owners of our country did not agree with their way of running things. BAI was pro-competition which the rest of this country is heavily against. Oligopolies is the sweetspot in Mauritius. The illusion of competition. Which is why, they pulled out their capital by working together and conspiring to take the man down. The man did not die though. There was no Ponzi of any kind. He had more capital than they could have imagined, their plan failed pathetically. So, they panicked and revoked the banking licence of this man, with the central bank failing its fiduciary duty to the components of the financial system (basically you the people) of the Republic of Mauritius which is to act as a lender of last resort so that your money stays safe. This is what should have happened, but even then with the central bank pathetically failing its duties, the capital was found but the money was rejected and the banking licence was revoked. In the end, they retorted by bullying him and making him go through hell when their conspiracy failed by lying and doing what they did best - inventing a story about a Ponzi scheme to forcefully crush him.
These people are not your friend, you need to realise this. If you were to become that man tomorrow, your fate would not be different if you were not part of this incest club of Mauritius with their trademarks collection and what not. The no parallel imports club. Screaming democracy! democracy! does not make a country democratic unfortunately. We need trillions of dollars of capital to make this country democratic over the next 50 years. We can have it if you start choosing competent people. We have to privatize most state-owned companies to bring huge amounts of foreign capital in. Government needs to get smaller to make any future political machine smaller. For example, the CEB has to be privatized, ideally giving the buy to a US company that has good relations with a refiner, who hopefully is willing to invest big bucks. We are talking billions here, of dollars yes. The plan has to be to refine and produce lots of stuff here for further processing, export and domestic (port) consumption. We can do other stuff that comes with entering this value chain and work our way up to electronics step by step. Madagascar lacks electricity coverage. We can export electricity to Madagascar and it would be a win-win for both of us. We can build an interconnector to Reunion too to better manage our electricity needs and build one to Rodrigues, where we can build solar farms or even a small modular nuclear reactor (they are climate friendly). We’ll have economies of scale, and cost savings and that will be our point of entry into capital-intensive industrial manufacturing. The biggest factor inputs that we can have control over and compete in are electricity prices, if we can do it cheap enough, and transport subsidies that the government can give. The manufacturing will automatically come if the factor inputs are cheap enough.
Semiconductors will come, and all kinds of electronics that will cluster around it. We could even give an automobile company a preferential tariff agreement to gift them the domestic market as long as everything is manufactured here for export in Africa. Population growth is not going to magically come overnight. But those two things, I just mentioned, would be our win condition in the short-medium term. This is me being very serious. This is not a choice we can avoid. We either stay stuck in limbo or you do capital intensive stuff and become a developped economy. But all of this hugely fucks up a lot of actors in the economy who relies on trademarks and what not for their ‘boute’. The ‘boute’ economy we currently have is a planned economy. What we need is a free market economy. This is why this will never happen with the old guard who will always protect their own interests and not the country’s interests. But we need economies of scale, nothing else will cut it. Our output per worker is not 11 or 12k, it is around 9-10k at best. That is the peak you will get stuck at doing labour intensive industries without generous trade deals. It’s not easy but it is the only path to success that does not require us handing our sovereignty to another country to be its satellite state. We currently are doing semi doing that. Nothing is free in life. Cheap loans that seems too good to be true have fine print. Being a satellite state. A stooge like Lee Kuan Yew liked to say. I am very sorry to tell you this but not a single satellite state has ever progressed in the history of human beings. Anyway doing all of this will only be profitable for you the people of the Republic of Mauritius in the long run but will hurt the bottom line of all the elites in ways you cannot even imagine in the short run. Your real wages across the board are what will go up in this scenario. These kinds of things will allow us to become an advanced economy and you to have any dream you wish. We need to open the country up completely to foreign capital so there is competition. It is very important for Mauritius to build its relations with the US in other sectors, other than financial services so that we may actually become America’s favorite place to set up ANY business in Africa rather than SA. You do that by building relationships with lots of US businesses. But this is what our country dislikes. Competitors.
Do you even realise what reliable electricity access would do for Madagascar? People in this country always moan that we must do agriculture, but why should we when there is a country that has a thousand times our arable land? Why should we do agriculture when they could do it and we could do the better thing (the core activity rather than the periphery activity) and just buy agriculture from them with our export earnings of electricity by both being better off with free trade? My vision for Mauritius is not farfetched, we can become the core of Africa. We can have a country where anybody can become president, where anybody can become the richest, where everybody has a bill of rights protecting them, and where we can have the Mauritian dream exist for everyone after 56 long years. This country can become more than just a ‘fake paradise’, it can become the absolute best place to live in the entire world. This country can belong equally to all citizens. We can become the industrialised economy of this part of the world. All of this is very doable and all you need to do is let the truly competent people come in and do what is best for our country.
Politics in our country has been pathetic for more than thirty years now. It has always been this silly dance involving theatrics, and a dumb game of inbreeding that is practiced with the complicity of the private sector, which is true of most places to be fair. The US does the same thing, but the US has a private sector that keeps it growth steady. We do not. We have no growth ( We expand only after contractions to get back to the initial point only to contract again and repeat that cycle). We have wasted the last 10 years just doing this. We can go 10 more. Hell we can go 20, 30 more. Unless you wake the fuck up, and let go of the preconcevied notions that you were indoctinated with growing up. Accept that the elites of this country across the board, are holding it back. Can you do that? Accept the taboo truth this country must confront to be able to ever hope to progress even a single step forward. Because until we do that. Everything else is pointless, any discussion is pointless. I am wasting my time, you are wasting your time and anybody that wants a better Mauritius is wasting their time because guess what ? The people in charge want no part in a better Mauritius. They want good old dynasty Mauritius where they get to do whatever the hell they want. It works for them. It has worked for 56 years and it will work for 56 more at your expense. By exploiting you at every downturn for their sweet sweet abuse of owner’s distribution and the personal slush funds they build up over some time which will ultimately put them at risk of good old insolvency ; for not keeping enough capital in their business to cushion a sudden drop in profitablity — completely messing up their cashflows which will turn negative but there is good news. Your tax money will save them once again as it has for 56 years. As one people, as one nation, in peace justice and liberty, nou verser 56 bananer encore. Ecarter toujour ki to l’ai mo dire toi. Mo alle etirer, mo vini moisi la.
On another note, inflation expectations have shot up even more given COL adjustments have gone from 1500-2000 for this year to 4925 which is more than 10x the cost of living adjustment of 2020 which is starting to become scary. Its almost 17x. So cause and effect wise, this increased cost of labor will be passed on in the goods and services fully because productivity naiba - increasing the RER which means the potential output (supply side) is going to go down which means the lower bound of the unemployment curve has to increase substantially. But it also means elections have to be this year, because inflation is getting out of control and you cannot raise the key rate, that would be a death sentence, because public finances cannot afford to pay to at higher rates. By mid september the population should be showered with central bank money, and parliament should be dissolved before 9 Oct to go for elections quickly the next month before inflation becomes too big a problem.
I was slightly wrong on the strategy that ended up being used. it seems central bank money is being used as a carrot for votes. Milking that sweet sweet misery the government itself has been spreading through inflation to deleverage itself and the private sector. All in one fell swoop. Crazy 9000 IQ moves.
Footnotes
Yes, I know that colors are just EM waves being processed by the brain, we are walking here not running↩︎