There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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The top one percent of the top one percent

“There’s a powerful group of people out there who are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play god without permission…” 
 ~Mr Robot 

When Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, announced that the entry fee for Indonesians to visit the world’s largest Buddhist temple Borobudur would be raised from Rp50k (US$3.38) to an astronomical Rp750k (US$50.74) there was an understandable backlash from all sections of Indonesian society. But was such a decision so surprising? I don’t think so. Sure, it was an absurd move given that the main threat facing the temple is not tourists anyway, but rather acid rain which is slowly but surely eating away at the temple’s rocks. 

But Rp750k to someone like Luhut is not the same as Rp750k to the rakyat. Luhut’s net worth in 2021 was Rp716 billion. The minimum wage in Central Java, by comparison, is a measly Rp1.8 million. For a peasant to get as rich as Luhut he would have to work for 33,148 years and spend nothing. Luhut really is living in another world. Rp750k for him is nothing but loose change. 

 But it’s not just in Indonesia where the superrich make financial decisions that affect ordinary people. The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty, for example, are worth a joint £730 million. In the US, Biden ‘only’ has US$9million but Trump’s net worth is put at around US$3billion. And as for the leader of the Russian Mafia, Vladimir Putin, while there is understandably not much transparency, most estimates put his net worth at over US$70bn. 

Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Or so it is said. 

What about: whatever politician rules over you, they are hyper rich? 

It’s difficult not to be cynical but that does not mean there are not one or two exceptions. 

Like Uruguay’s Uru Jose Mujica who lived in a shack when he was president from 2010 to 2015. 



Long live the revolution!

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