Sunday, June 24, 2012

The Economic Views of the Newly Elected Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt

Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been declared the new president of Egypt today in an announcement that triggered massive cheers in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

What should Egyptians expect from their new president? Economic moves in the direction of central planning that will result in more suffering and poverty in the country.

Morsi doesn't understand the importance of free markets and holds the naive belief that, through central planning, he his going to manage the country toward prosperity. Boy, is this dude in for a surprise.

Here are some of his views on economics as he delivered them in a speech on January 6, 2012.

He starts off by mouthing platitudes about freedom:
..the FJP emphasizes that it seeks to grant citizens the freedoms they deserve, to safeguard the fundamental rights of every Egyptian, and change all practices or legislation that challenge or restrict these freedoms or violate these rights. Freedom is one of Islam’s duties. “Indeed We have honoured the Descendants of Adam” (Quran, 17:70).

He then spends most of the rest of the speech explaining how he is going to take freedoms away. For example, he calls for minimum AND maximum wage controls:
The FJP attaches great importance to the issue of wage structure imbalance in the Egyptian market. The party will endeavor to set minimum and maximum wages to ensure a decent life for the Egyptian citizen, with increase in wages linked to inflation rates, and to prevent senior management personnel from taking more than one job or being on the boards of more than one company or Fund, to give the opportunity for others to benefit from remuneration made for those posts.
Of course, minimum wage laws will make it difficult for the unskilled to find jobs and maximum wage laws will remove incentives for the highly skilled to work. In other words, Morsi is going to make even more of a mess of the employment situation in Egypt.

It also sounds like he wants to make a mess of the housing secto:
...the housing issue: The FJP believes that this critical issue is of major concern to every family and every young person. Therefore, the party was keen to find a viable solution to it through geographical re-distribution of construction development and population, to match human resources quality and quantity with development essentials and national security requirements, through the division of the state into development regions, and working to attract people and talent from regions with denser populations and less resources to regions with the less dense populations and greater resources.
This is more maniac central planning. The free market is the best allocator of resources. The micro-management of housing construction will distort the sector from where it wants to go and result in all kinds of distortions, from poorer quality, to shortages in some areas and over supply in others.

Morsi, obviously hasn't read Walter Block's book on transportation. Morsi stated:
...the problem of transportation: In its program, the FJP adopts the concept of integration of the four methods of transport: road, river, sea and air, so as to raise the performance efficiency of this sector domestically and internationally, through the Ministry of Transport playing a key role in overseeing all the various activities of the sector, setting the necessary policies for this sector to efficiently play the role it is entrusted to do, to avoid conflicts among the different bodies currently overseeing the sector, including the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Environment, local authorities... etc.
Not surprisingly, Morsi is also big on government involvement in education, pollution control, healthcare, tourism and on and on.

Expect a major mess and major corruption. When power centers are many, the corrupters come out of the earth, like ants who emerge at the loacation of a dead bug.

9 comments:

  1. With someone from the Muslim Brotherhood in charge, i think women, Christians and Jews at least won't have to worry too much about their economic policies.
    They'll have plenty of other things to worry about.

    And so, just as America's involvement in Iran and putting in place a puppet in the 50s ultimately led to the revolution in 1979 that turned the country into an oppressive hellhole, the same thing may just happen to Egypt.

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  2. I think this read of the election is telling:
    http://www.thedailybell.com/4006/Islamic-Psyop-Israel-Worries-About-Egypt-We-Told-You-So

    Seems plausible to me, that Morsi is a puppet of TPTB, who stand to gain from his central planning solutions.

    More criminality and shaking down of the populace, under the cover of 'government.'

    Kind of like here in the USSA.

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  3. The Muslim religion doesn't allow for a free market. Islam is more than just a religious belief system. It is a complete theocratic governmental system that controls and dictates every facet of one 's life. This includes economics, banking, jurist prudence and education to name a few.

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  4. I have been following Egypt closely since the Tunisian revolt started.

    I don't think a single Egyptian or a single expert on TV has been able to explain why Egypt's 40 years of crony socialism failed so miserably.

    It is also failure of us who were not able to explain it to them. We need to send Wenzel, Woods and North down there to draw up a mock constitution for Egypt.

    Scandinavian in Asia

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  5. Islam is a totalitarian religion which espouses the collective over the individual, so this guy being a "central planner" really isn't that big of a surprise. Why is this news?

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    Replies
    1. Exactly. All totalitarians are the same be it red commies, pink Democrats, black anarchists, brown national socialists or green islamofascists

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  6. Sounds like Barry's gobbledygook.

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  7. @Tony I didn't know that there are still Jews left in Egypt. But Christians were already persecuted and barred from some occupations, but I guess it will get worse know and that the abduction of Christian woman and girls for mariage with a muslim won't stop.

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  8. "When power centers are many, the corrupters come out of the earth..." This sounds like an argument FOR central planning.

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