Viewpoints
Development: From the bottom up
By +Oscar V. Cruz D. D.
In underdeveloped countries – or “developing” nations for socio-political correctness – economic progress and its accompanying societal and personal gains are usually identified with and confined within the elite thereof. In the same way, political authority and influence are continuously held by the same social stratum of distinct wealth and affluence. Governmental work for national development –this remains the usual avowed goal of those in tenure of government authority, government funds plus pursuant government options.
It can be said that such well publicized and much acclaimed “work in progress” avidly undertaken by governments of the so called “developing” or “third world” countries, have essentially the same features: One, the usually several successive governments with different nomenclature and faces of power, remain substantially one in its dehumanizing principle and consequent value system. Two, the much propagandized development efforts remain long and expensive yet the nations concerned likewise remain underdeveloped and their peoples stay poor, deprived and depressed as well. Three, those in long and/or prolonged government service, together with their families and preferred collaborators may not be faulted at all and in any way as far as their personal and/or dynastic temporal over-development is taken into account.
But even in the far fetched assumption that a particular government in all it’s legislative, executive and judicial departments were honesty and honorably committed to national development, the same would eventually fall in case its developmental efforts do not start from the bottom up. In other words, it is both a farce and hypocrisy to work for the development of a country from the top level of the socio-economic down to the ground level – thinking that such effort would automatically fall and reach and thereby finally develop the poor and miserable. The inherent defect of this top to bottom developmental approach precisely consists in promoting progress among those already progressive in life and thereby in fact denying it among those in the retrogressive level of their living conditions.
Thus it is that abundant production in effect emerges disastrous if there is not extensive consumption by those who can afford to buy the produce. In the same way, huge capitalization becomes a nightmare when labor remains in a dissenting mode for being continuously overworked but underpaid, and therefore consistently underfed and malnourished. This is why even elementary knowledge affirms that production and consumption, capital and labor cannot but be in the same page – so to speak – under pain of steady and stable socio-economic underdevelopment.
In the same way, when public authority really serve but private interests, when a government is actually pro-self than pro-citizens, when the rich are in reality pro-rich and anti-poor, these factors alone already guarantee evasive national development, and thereby categorically affirm and promote a country’s underdevelopment. Unlike the law of gravity whereby what is up ultimately goes down, in genuine development efforts, what is down finally goes up. This is development – from the bottom up.
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