Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 4 January 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
I wonder how many hours of my life are spent waiting to pay money at tollbooths. And is this a good use of my time?
Tolled-Out

It was just the beginnings of a traffic jam that would no doubt become huge. Cars were starting to return to KL after the Christmas break and I was caught at the toll that marks the only entry point into KL from the entire eastern seaboard of Peninsular Malaysia. And I was not happy. I’m sure the people who own the tollbooths were very happy and they will be for another 1,000 years (I think that’s how long the concession will last), but I don’t suppose anybody in this unnecessary traffic jam was happy. But then again, who cares about these little people? Obviously, as a good Malaysian, I want a handful of important people to make gigantic amounts of money for absolutely no work, but as I sat in the jam, I did ask myself if this was an efficient moment. How many Malaysian hours are wasted every holiday (and every working day) waiting at a tollbooth jam? If the highways are national infrastructure projects to enable goods and people to circulate around the country efficiently, then why are there tollbooths? The tollbooth creates jams that can add hours to a journey. It’s not an efficient use of time and fuel, which adds to the final cost of the product. If, on the other hand, the highways were built for the purpose of creating tollbooth chokepoints where drivers have no choice but to hand over their money, then I suppose it’s very efficient. If the tollbooths were not there, then everybody would be able to sail through on their journeys and proceed to a jam somewhere else, but at least they wouldn’t have to pay for the pleasure of sitting in this unnecessary jam.

For whom have these highways been built? And are tollbooths efficient for the nation?

Dear Kam,
I understand that you grew up in Britain during the Thatcher years. I admire her immensely.
Iron Lady

It just so happens that my wife is reading Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography at the moment. Every night, I see Thatcher’s face glowering at me from the book cover, reminding me that I am an utterly worthless person. It’s just like growing up in Britain during the 1980s when her presence was felt everywhere. She changed Britain and perhaps even the world and I witnessed her impact up close. I left Britain and returned to Malaysia on the very day that she was kicked out of office (by her own party). My journey was, as the English saying goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire because I arrived into Mahathir’s Malaysia. The two had much in common and they have both left their legacies.

The Thatcherite model was based on the idea of removing government from business life and allowing the strong to prosper and the weak to fail. As her vastly less intelligent acolyte Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The principle was sound and privatisation of government monopolies (rail, energy and so on) has led to greater efficiency and choice. But without subsidies, the car and coal industries collapsed completely leaving thousands jobless. Thatcher, however, didn’t care about them because they never voted for the Conservatives anyway. It might have been different if they were her voters.

The financial principle may have been sound but the practice was culturally harrowing. Thatcher’s time became synonymous with arrogant sharp-suited businessmen who believed that business was about wearing sharp suits arrogantly. One comedian summed up the age by creating a character called “Loadsamoney” who would shout, “I’ve got loads of money!” while waving a big bundle of cash in people’s faces. The psychological basis of Thatcherism was about being right all the time and the index for judging how right you were was money. If you’ve got loads of money, then you must be right. If you don’t, then you must be wrong. The arrogance and absolute self-certainty of Dick Cheney and Donald Trump mark them out as Thatcher’s children.

Having grown up with and been shaped by Thatcherism, I have wholly ingested the need to drive for greater efficiency but having witnessed Thatcher up close, I have become afraid whenever I see a tiny handful of people (just one person in Thatcher’s case) impose their will because they believe themselves to be always absolutely correct, and that it is only possible for a tiny handful to ever be correct about anything because the mass are nothing but ignorant fools. But that’s probably the danger inherent in government anyway. The greatest danger in Thatcherism is if the glossy modern business language of privatisation and the marketplace is just a smoke screen for inefficient monopolies by another name.

Reprinted with the kind permission of