Old Habits Die Hard if They Die at All

There is the saying: “Old habits die hard,” but usually this means personal habits like having bad table manners or driving fast in a school zone. What the saying does not mean to convey is latching on to old conclusions when the original premise that led to them turns out to be false. And yet, this is what you see these days from people who should know better but are so motivated by political considerations, they ditch everything they were taught about intellectual integrity – if indeed, they were taught anything at all in this field.

A case in point is the latest work by Dalibor Rohac who is a policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute; supposedly a prestigious think tank. Rohac wrote: “The Arab Spring Needs Economic Freedom,” an article that also came under the subtitle: “The Middle East won't have democracy soon, but economic liberalization can help.” It was published on July 24, 2013 in National Review Online.

As you read the article you get the feeling that the author is operating with two minds. You detect a mind that wants to be honest in describing the situation as it sees it in the Arab world. And you detect a mind that struggles to hang on to current habits and obsolete ideas. The latter has the habit of attributing to all the Arabs every deficiency it encounters in each country. It will also argue that things are bad in the Arab World at this time by asserting that they were better in the past. It will then contradict the assertion by suggesting that the Arabs have, in any case, been a hopeless lot all along.

The title and subtitle of the article being about the need to have economic reform and liberalization in the Arab world, you look closely to see how the author views the current situation, what he says needs to change, and what the situation should look like after the change. Thus, you see him start like this: “the revolution that overthrew Mubarak was driven by lack of economic opportunity.” This says flat out that the situation was bad since the beginning of the Mubarak era if not before it.

So now you want to know what happened after that. And the author says: “Unfortunately, the country's newly elected government under Morsi failed.” It means the situation remained bad even after Mubarak was gone. What then? you want to know. Even in the months leading up to the recent military coup, the situation remained as bad as ever, says he. The conclusion you must draw is that: It was bad all along – from A to Z.

That situation seems a little strange to you, and the author surprises you by calling it strange as well. But he says so for a reason that is different from yours: “Strangely enough, among politicians and Middle East experts, economic issues seem to be on the back burner.” He goes on to tell what is needed to fix things: “radical economic reforms could go a long way in improving the lives of ordinary Arabs.” Oh, look at that. It's not only the Egyptians he is talking about; it's all the Arabs now. Thus, from the strange situation that nothing was done correctly in Egypt since before the Mubarak era, he now associates the bad scene with all the Arabs in their 22 countries.

Maybe that was just a slip of the tongue. Was it not? Oh no. In fact, now that the author has started riding the idea of lumping the Arabs together, he stays with the theme: “After Africa, the Middle East is the most rapidly growing region.” He goes further than that by attributing to the Arab World what he says is wrong with each country: “In Morocco, those with the highest level of educational achievement face unemployment rate of 19.4 percent ... To register a claim on a piece of real estate in Algeria it takes ten procedures ... In Egypt, entrepreneurs pay 42.6 percent of their profit to the government.” And so on.

Is there an end to this collective incompetence of the Arabs? Apparently not: “In the past two years, Arab governments have done little to liberate their citizens economically. If anything, the situation has been made worse in some places.” So then, what's the answer? The author responds: “The Middle East is reaching a point at which reforms are becoming unavoidable … the governments need bold reformers...” And so you innocently ask the question: How do you do that?

Unfortunately, you find out the hard way that you should not have asked this question. You know why? Because, to answer it, the author uses full force to clobber you over the head not with a baseball bat but a steel bar. Here is the guy that has been saying how bad things were since before Mubarak – and have remained bad throughout the decades – now advising that to solve the region's economic problems: “In some cases, such as Egypt's, this means a simple return to the economic liberalization and privatization that had been gradually occurring in the years before the Arab Spring.” Pow! How much more can my head take?

And how is the bump on your head, my friend? Yes, these characters of the think tanks are paid good money to come up with articles such as these. Worse, they find politicians who will listen to them and formulate policies based on the rubbish they spew. What a shame!