Central America Data . Com put out this interesting Editorial about how real entrepreneurs and CEOs do not need a state official, who will never be an entrepreneur, to tell them how to run a company and increase revenues.
EDITORIAL
In Costa Rica, the government continues to believe that state officials can show employers how to do their job and how to generate wealth.
Having failed in its task of promoting favorable conditions in infrastructure, training and availability of human resources, access to credit and facilitating paperwork for the creation and growth of private enterprises, swift and effective commercial trade justice, the pachydermic state apparatus in Costa Rica continues to create bureaucratic organizations to “develop production” and obliterates others that yesterday were touted as the miracle food for the country’s development. The new invention, this time from the Solis administration, is the Productive Development Agency, for Innovation and Added Value which of course already has a corresponding and always imaginative short name: FOMPRODUCE.
If you want to waste your valuable time reading the usual litany of platitudes in the announcements of its birth, published by each of these organizations which intend to “save the country”, we have provided a the link to the statement issued by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Trade. However, if we forewarn you of the presumptuous title of the statement, you might lose your desire to read it: FOMPRODUCE TO TURN ON ECONOMIC ENGINE.
Governments should take note of what have been resounding failures of these institutions which aim -from the State- to tell employers how to run their business, what products or services to produce and sell, with whom they should make partnerships. And the worst part is that at the end of the day, public officials embroiled in tasks of alleged promotion of production and the economy, become simply routers of tax exemptions, resources for training which never have any evaluation of their results, and managers of entrepreneurship contests that rarely generate a successful business and are only a source of income for the consultancy industry.
Public officials should be devoted to paving the roads for companies, NOT to trying to advise them about which of these paths they should choose or how to behave on them. State public officials never manage to create entrepreneurs, for the simple reason that they do not think like them.
If the government wants to “turn on the economy” they should provide entrepreneurs with loans at competitive rates internationally, relieve the infernal red tape that overwhelms any endeavor, remove taxes on all businesses, not just those who have lobbying capacity, allow free competition and promote market transparency. And do all that at a reasonable cost.
What they should NEVER do is believe that the state knows better than an entrepreneur how to generate wealth.