Tan, up close and personal

The problem, according to business tycoon Lucio Tan, is that the government treats taxpayers like cows.

In an informal gathering with reporters, the usually reticent Tan shocked his audience of hardcore banking reporters by volunteering his insights into education, tax management, development spending and world history, even waxing philosophical about statistics and probability.

Among his various skills, Tan had been known among business reporters as an elusive guy who shuns interviews, especially the ambush-type.

Recently, however, Tan has been more open to interviews as if he had gone through some kind of a personality change, a change that culminated in that unusual meeting which he began by taking a business card from one reporter, palming it and making it disappear in a sleight-of-hand trick.

As the conversation progressed, Tan intimated that he first brought up his cow analogy during a meeting with top government officials when he volunteered a solution to the burgeoning budget deficit.

"No! I don’t have P200 billion!" he was quick to add, to the serious disappointment of the finance officials he was meeting with. "I told them, you politicians know only how to milk. But the cow is skin and bones, they don't feed the cow, it's very dry yet they milk and milk."

According to Tan, government must never sacrifice fattening the cow to whatever other problems it is trying to grapple with. "Milking is only secondary," he pointed out. "Government’s primary responsibility is to fatten the cow so that it can be milked and be fattened some more."

Tan went further and drew parallelisms between the colonial history of Latin America, Africa and even the United States.

"Our Spanish colonists took every step in order to prevent us from getting education," he said. "This is still one of our most serious weaknesses. Our educational system is popular but largely ineffective."

Tan observed that a huge number of Filipino teachers are starting to pour into China which has embarked on a massive campaign of language education as their economy opened to the global economy.

"If I were the government, I’d be scared," he said. He added that the country's educational standards have been declining. Contrary to general expectations, he warned that the working class would soon discover that it is no longer as competitive as it believed itself to be in terms of literacy and language proficiency. Tan also expressed worries over the country’s exploding population, even advising health officials how to handle the population control program without courting the ire of the Catholic Church already touchy over the capital punishment issue.

"All you have to do is show the difference between the rich and small families in Europe against the huge and poor families in countries like India and Pakistan," Tan said. "Make them choose. People are smart, they will make the right choice if they know about their options."

After touring world history, good governance and population management in one evening, Tan wrapped things up with a comment that reverberated of the so-called monkey postulate.

The postulate assumes that given an infinite amount of time, a monkey banging on a keyboard at random would eventually end up typing the entire Shakespearean script for Hamlet.

Tan said he was chastised by Malacañang for saying that the peso would soon hit P100:$1. "But before, no one believed the peso would go P42:$1. Now it's P52!," he said. "If time is infinite, nothing is impossible."