When Goals and the Policies to Meet them Don't Match

Perhaps it is from too many years spent in the world of practical politics, but I am burdened by the twin beliefs that public policy ought to be logical and that diplomacy ought to be strategic.

This week actions taken by President Evo Morales violated both those rules, in my view. I write of them here because I think political debate and disagreement is valuable. This is not a debate over the aims that the Bolivian government seeks to achieve (I agree with those aims in this case) but the means with which it seeks to secure those aims.

New Cars Only Need Apply

Earlier this week President Morales announced an executive decree that will ban the import of any car into Bolivia that is more than five years old. Morales' stated goals are twofold, to reduce auto emissions and traffic in Bolivia and to stop the nation from becoming a dumping ground for cheap used cars being imported in from Japan.

As someone who breathes the troubled air in Cochabamba and commutes in by public transit from Tiquipaya each morning, these are both great goals. But does a ban on six-year-old Toyotas really advance them, and at what cost?

First, it is a wicked myth that the cars flooding into Bolivia these days (the Associated Press reports that the number of cars in Bolivia has doubled in six years) are junkers.

The wave of incoming vehicles can be seen first hand at a sea of steel called the Zonafraco. Aisle after aisle of 1995-2000 Toyotas and other brands, various models, stretch across a muddy field. These autos are called 'transformers', not because they can be converted into robots, like the toy of the same name (that would be cool). They are called that because they arrive from Japan with the steering column and all the controls on the right side of the car. An army of Bolivian mechanics then 'transform' all those controls to the left side, in a manner so expert now that the average buyer can't tell.

A year ago, when my family and I moved out to the boonies beyond Tiquipaya, we finally broke our nine-year no-car rule and bought one of these, a 1995 Toyota Rav4 with about 50,000 miles on it. We paid $6,500 to a woman who runs a small business importing these cars through Chile, doing the 'transformation', and the Bolivian paperwork, which is expensive and formidable.

Now even back in my car-crazed home state of California, a 1995 Toyota with 50,000 miles is far from being considered a 'junker.' It may be the vehicle of choice for a 25-year-old with a massive student debt, but it is not junk. In Cochabamba a 1995 car is considered, by most people, virtually a new car. The same holds true for the 1995 Toyota Corollas ($4,500) and similar 'transformed' Japanese imports that make up the nation's fleet of taxis and smaller public transport.

What will the new policy accomplish?

It will certainly raise the price of cars. I dropped by the Toyota dealer on my walk through the city this morning. Price of a 2008 Toyota Corolla: $24,000. Price of a 2008 Toyota Rav4: $33,000. If you can find any used 2004 models (the oldest that would be allowed for import next year) they will probably be cheaper, but not by much. And you can bet that the resale price of older cars will jump as well.

This is essentially the age-old policy of reducing demand for a good by raising its price – which is a very odd approach for a government that seeks to be an advocate of the people with limited means.

The other sure effect will be to eliminate a large number of jobs in a nation starving for them, and we aren’t talking abut jobs for a wealthy elite. One low-income family I know has been hoping to get into the expanding taxi-trufi business (public transport lines that are always full) giving jobs as drivers to at least three of them. That's gone if they have to pay $20,000 for a car. Thousands of mechanics are employed moving all those steering wheels around. Kiss those jobs goodbye. The woman I bought my car from is also no lady of wealth. It's a side business added on to the microscopic store she runs downtown selling soda and groceries.

One person was killed this week in a clash between the government and people raising a road blockade to protest the proposed ban.

So what about those laudable goals of reducing traffic and pollution? There are plenty of good options, most all of them better than arbitrarily setting five years as the retirement age for imported cars.

If reducing the number of cars in Bolivia is the aim, the government could pick from a variety of options. It could limit imports but not shut the door on older cars that regular people can afford. It could create a buy-back program to get rid of the real junkers, as other governments have done.

If Bolivia wants to reduce the use of cars in its traffic-clogged cities, there are better options for this as well. The government could develop a plan to make Bolivia's streets something more than a death challenge for cyclists. It could encourage more use of public transit by allowing only public transit vehicles in the center of the city. It could add a heavy surcharge on families who own more than one vehicle.

Should Bolivia try to reduce emissions from cars? Again, absolutely. But anyone who has ever been in traffic in Bolivia knows that the big contamination isn’t coming from a 1995 Corolla taxi that, like 95% of them, has been converted to natural gas. It is the thick black smoke belching out of the back of those 1970s vintage, diesel-burning Dodge Microbuses. In addition to being dirty, they are also big and slow. That's why anyone here who can is switching to the much quicker (and cleaner) gas-powered 'taxi-trufi' lines.

But those lines are populated by the very same 1995 Toyota Ipsums (seats 8) that Morales' decree would now keep from entering. So where is the logic for that?

No Ambassadors from Obama

The other news-grabbing initiative from the Bolivian government this week came on the foreign policy front, at a meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Presidents in Brazil. President Morales introduced his suggestion with a spot-on prediction, "I want to make a proposal that many are not going to like." He then called on his Presidential colleagues to join him in expelling all U.S. ambassadors from the region until the U.S. government agreed to lift its decades-old economic embargo against Cuba.

The proposal was quickly shut down by the other Presidents. Brazil's Lula da Silva said, "We must be prudent and diplomatic and wait for Obama to assume power. I am hopeful that American policies toward Latin America and the Caribbean will change.”

Again, the problem here is not with Evo's objectives. The U.S. embargo against Cuba is a Cold War relic that only serves to make life worse for the people who live in Cuba and which has certainly not achieved its stated objective of bringing the Castro government to its knees. Truly, if someone poked a dog in the face with a stick every day for almost fifty years to make it move and the dog never moved, would we still buy the argument that, "it's only a matter of time?"

The embargo has never really been a policy about Cuba as much as it has been about the politics of the Cuban-American voters in South Florida. If Florida were not a swing state in U.S. Presidential politics the embargo would have come down about the same week as the Berlin Wall.

The issue, again, is not the end but the means to it.

In Washington last month I heard from people close to the new administration a consistent refrain. President Obama will have his hands full almost completely with the global financial meltdown and his efforts to pull troops out of Iraq (and put them into Afghanistan). Latin America? It will be abut as close to the bottom of the Obama priority list as a continent and a half can be. Cuba? Farther down still.

Is the best way to pave the way for a change in Cuba policy to poke a new president in the eye?

Certainly other presidents didn’t think so. If the new president of the U.S. is anything he is shrewd. He and the advisors around him, including on Latin America, will be very keen on looking strong as both the U.S. people and foreign government size him up. The last thing he is going to do is change Cuba policy because he is being threatened by the President of Bolivia. If anything, such a move by Morales and others will also make it less likely that he lift the embargo.

Diplomacy rule #1: Put yourself in the shoes of the one you are trying to persuade and ask the question, "What are the politics?"

In a Democracy Ideas Need to be Challenged

In both these cases – of used cars from the east and diplomacy with the north – the basic lesson is the same. In governing it is not enough to have the right goals. You also need to have the right policies that get you there.

Getting the right policies rarely comes from unilateral decrees declared on the fly without much thought. We all need to be challenged, to have our logic tested. It makes everything we do smarter.

In the case of Evo's call for a diplomatic expulsion threat against the U.S., his presidential colleagues provided that challenge and a policy that didn't make much sense was set aside. In the case of the ban on cars manufactured before 2004, there was no space for the policy to be challenged, no time or room provided for debate. Which is why Bolivia may end up with a very goofy policy, and one which could do a good deal of damage to the very goals it is supposed to advance.

Undermining a government and challenging its thinking are two different things.