Challenging Old Fei Pang (肥彭) - Two Decades Too Late

Sir,

I was recently appalled by a piece written by the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten and included in your October 30th paper. Although of course not as famous and widely respected a personage as Fei Pang (肥彭), I nevertheless would hope that I may yet, from my humble position as an honest little groundling, address two points of disagreement I have with Chancellor Patten.

First, although I would not challenge Lord Patten's celebratory juxtaposition of the murder of Martin Luther King and the election of Barack Obama as an indication of progress, I did notice that he was particularly brief on this subject, noting only that there is "nothing to be grumpy about there." Yet there are certain respects in which the Presidency of Barack Obama constitutes some cause for concern. Primarily, my worry is with President Obama's continuation, and indeed, intensification of the policies followed by President Bush with regard to the Federal deficit, the "bailing out" and part-nationalization of certain industries and, with Ben Bernanke, the attempt to further reinflate the credit money bubble. These policies will bear exceptionally poisonous fruit over the long term, though their actual planting (started by President Bush) was unfortunately continued during President Obama's first weeks and months in office. I may not have the age-qualifications of old Fei Pang (肥彭), but I am certainly more than a little grumpy about President Obama's willfull pursuit of extremely dangerous fiscal and monetary policies.

My second point of disagreement with Patten is in his warning on the "seventeen-fold increase" in carbon dioxide emissions since the beginning of the 20th Century. That such a widely respected man as Lord Patten could say this despite the public availability of satellite data showing average global temperatures actually falling for the past ten years does not exactly fill me with hope; as carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise over the past ten years, but global average temperatures have not, it cannot therefore be true that carbon dioxide emissions create global warming. This is a matter of elementary logic which one would think, would not escape the attention of a Chancellor of Britain's most prestigious Oxford University.

I do not yet have children myself, but I know people who do (unfortunately my friends are other groundlings much like myself who must actually work for a living) - and I wonder to myself - how much will their children have to get angry about because of the way our higher-ups such as Chancellor Patten are behaving now and have behaved throughout the entire length of their careers?

Yours sincerely,
Michael Fagan

(Sent to the Taipei Times Editor: Friday, 30th October 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

More Vampire Blues Out Of Tainan

A closer look at the issue suggests that the problem lies in credentialism, or undue emphasis on degrees and other credentials.

These questions point to a conflict between the parental right to educate children and a child’s right to unrestricted character development.

Yet more evil gibberish from my one of my neighbours here in Tainan printed in the Taipei Times editorial section today.

Hey - Hsu Yue-dian (許育典) - I say you're dead wrong, and devious to boot. Here is the essential moral difference between you and me: I don't want the government to twist other people's valuations to favour my financial standing. I freely and honestly trade value for value as best I can manage. You hide behind the power of your bloated and prestigious taxpayer parasite.

Look: the problem had nothing to do with the "International Mind Research Institute's" credentials or lack of them, but it had everything to do with the utter fucking stupidity of those children's parents. I'm sorry, but there's no other more appropriate adjective here that would serve fidelity to the truth. Stupidity. There are people who are just stupid. They have children. Fucking deal with it. If you think "something should be done" - go and voluntary give those children private reading, writing and arithmetic classes yourself. Don't ever dare presume to further line your own pockets by getting the government to force people to put themselves into debt for your dirty "credentials and degrees" before they can try to earn a living. You ain't nothing but a vampire, sucking all the time. And that makes you far, far worse than some loopy "International Mind Research Institute".

Change your mind about who and what you are, or rot in hell with the rest of us.

Shying away...

The Taipei Times refused to publish my most recent letter outlining the case against gun control, and instead publish somebody's praise for them. Those poor souls. Now I have nothing against praise per se, but what is being praised in this instance, along with a story about leaks of missile testing, is a claim that the ECFA will lead to "closing schools and low birthrates".

Now I don't care much for the ECFA, but the implication that continued or increased trade with China will somehow force schools to close and increase unemployment is ... well... how do I even begin to clean up something as sweaty and dirt-encrusted as that?

As for the editorial article on page 8 of the October 20th paper, I have to say I would cheer at the prospect of universities, colleges and schools closing down and professors up and down the island losing their jobs. Bring it on I say - can't happen soon enough. Those parasites have become swollen and bloated upon the mangled lives of millions of kids for decades now. Their "educational" services are not a necessary means for achieving a life of productivity and they never were.

Meanwhile - I myself receive praise in a comments thread at Samizdata. Yes it's very nice, but I question whether I really am deserving of Mid's superlative ("greatest respect") - there are people out there reaching to a far greater radius than I am and on a much more consistent and, I dare say, high quality basis - you know, I do have a life outside of putting stuff up on the internet and writing to the Taipei Times.

Force Equalizer

Sirs,

Pacé the ruminations of Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), there should be no question of a general legalization of firearms ownership. My reasoning for this claim is as follows...

There are only two principle ways in which people can interact with each other - the use of reason, or the use of force. That basic choice exhausts all possibilities of human interaction – it always has done, and always will. I dare say it ought to be clear enough to just about anyone, that the use of reason is preferable to the use of, or threat of force. Persuasion and trade are far superior ways to get what one wants from others than violence and theft.

Unfortunately however, we find ourselves in circumstances in which this basic choice, including all its’ implications, is not widely understood.

Within modern society, there are two great institutions – two great powers – each of which operates according to either the principle of reason, or the principle of force: one is the Market, the other is the State. The market operates according to the principle of voluntary trade – buyers and sellers freely agree to exchange value for value according to their own valuations. The State operates according to the principle of force – its’ subjects are taxed for their income and their actions regulated to the smallest details under ultimate threat of overwhelming force.

Firearms are a means of exercising force; maximum, deadly force. They can therefore provide a critical incentive for people to reject the principle of force in favour of the principle of reason.

This is because firearms, unlike any government law, are in fact the greatest force equalizer in human history. Firearms place the weak, the vulnerable and the old on an equal footing with the strong, protected and the young. Firearms eliminate the force advantage of the twenty-something thug over the sixty year old woman home alone. Without firearms, such a woman would end up as nothing more than just another victim of a senseless crime. With her force equalizer however, she can eliminate the threat to her life and limb with the mere pull of a trigger. Private firearms ownership is the single most effective deterrant to human predation known to us.

The current ruminations of Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) are disgustingly insolant. The people of Taiwan ought never to have been stripped of their freedom to defend their lives, families and property from human predation in the first place.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Saturday 24th October 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Tolerating The Intolerable

British reporters tolerate the intolerant as evil thugs bay for the blood of a brave man outside the palace of westminster. This is the descent of western civilization into chaos and barbarity. Britain is becoming more and more like Mordor every year. Hat tip to Perry De Havilland.

Evil Monster Or Perpetrator Of Worst Political Gaffe Ever?

Media Matters For America offers a "debunking" of Glenn Beck's claim that "the most important political philosopher to her [Anita Dunn - the White House Director Of Communications under President Barack Obama - pictured] is Mao Tse Tung.

It is an astonishing claim to a "debunking" given that Anita Dunn herself actually said that, along with Mother Theresa, Mao Tse Tung was one of the "two political philosophers" she "turns to most". Media Matters For America claims a debunking on the grounds that Anita Dunn did not actually use the words "worship" or "idolize" in reference to Mao Tse Tung. Yet the difference between "worship" or "idolize" and "turn to most" in the context of a political aid relating to the deeds and words of political philosophers is merely one of a direct meaning as opposed to an indirect meaning. Anita Dunn indirectly let it be publicly known that Mao Tse Tung is a source of inspiration to her.

Even if MMFA were to say that Anita Dunn may "turn to" Mao for inspiration but that that doesn't necessarily mean she endorses his destruction of the lives and political liberties of many tens of millions of people, this would still be an excessively weak defence of her. For if that were indeed true (I believe it most certainly is not and that the woman is an evil monster), then she would still be guilty of perhaps the worst political gaffe I can remember - a context drop that is quite literally frightening. And another thing, it's not as if there aren't a plentitude of alternatives when it comes to political heroes from whom one can infer the moral of "fighting one's own battles". American history alone is replete with such characters but without the stains of forty to over seventy million destroyed lives on their hands. Yet despite such obvious alternatives, Anita Dunn deliberately chose Mao Tse Tung. She wasn't making it up on the spot either - she was reading from a prepared speech. A sane person can only conclude that her reference to Mao Tse Tung was deliberate and not without purpose.

I believe her purpose was to say something truly evil under a rather thin veil of acceptability. In the context of high school students, the reference to Mao was ostensibly (if we can ignore the forty to seventy million deaths) a call upon students to think outside the box with respect to their future careers. (I gag back the obvious rejoinders). Yet the fact that it was Mao, rather than say, Ben Franklin, that she used to announce her encouragement to students renders this rather beyond the pale. The real, and rather lightly veiled, subtext to her remarks was that Mao's "refusal to accept other people's definitions" means political decisions ought to be left entirely to the discretion of political leaders - absent the value of rational criticism. Anita Dunn was encouraging to students to become pig-headed and to allude to such behaviour being normal among "visionary" political leaders too.

Yet rational criticism is one of the foundations of civilized life for without it, conflicts over common resources or cooperative ventures can only be resolved by failure or violent suppression - the life of the thug. The capacity to listen to and respond rationally to rational criticism is especially important to politicians and other public "servants" in positions of great power, such as Anita Dunn and others like her in the current US administration. This woman quite publicly rejected this value. My question: what does it take to do that?

Mandy Chou

One of the most severe critiques is that the nomination came two weeks after Obama became the US president. I think this issue should be measured against the quality of time spent in office rather than the quantity of time.

Wrote Mandy Chou in yesterday's Taipei Times.

I agree with her; the quality of time spent in office is much more important than the quantity of time spent in office. Unlike Mandy Chou, however, I regard the quality of President Obama's time in office as nothing less than one violation after another of basic principles of action that make people human beings rather than depraved monstrosities.

Zero 7

I absolutely adore this track Salt Water Sound by Zero 7; always reminds me of snorkelling in Kenting earlier this summer with my girlfriend, her sister (+boyfriend) and my dog. I love the ocean. I just cannot get enough of it, and never want to leave once I get there.

Erasers, Out!

Ed Rasimus writes what needs to be written on the nonsense of zero-tolerance policies in schools. On top of what Mr Rasimus says I would add that a zero-tolerance policy requires the absence of the mental powers of discrimination; this is nothing less than the deliberate erasure of the human mind - and that is increasingly the real purpose of schools these days.

More Nobel Kool-Aid

The awarding of the The Nobel Prize For Economics to two researchers in the United States, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, for work on "economic governance" is reported in the China Post (reprinting an AP piece by Karl Ritter and Matt Moore) in light of the relevance their research has for the current economic crisis:

Issues of governance have been at the heart of the ongoing world economic crisis. The failure by boards of directors, for instance, to police excessive compensation, or prevent bonuses that reward excessive risk taking, can be considered a corporate governance issue.

There are two things that annoy me about this quote. First, the application of the modifier "excessive" to other people's judgements of appropriate levels of risk and reward betrays a misunderstanding of the origin of values. Value cannot exist independently of a person (or company of people) facing a choice between different courses of action. What level of risk and reward is to be considered "excessive" is a question exclusively for those bankers and financiers deciding how to pay their employees. Were Karl Ritter and Matt Moore to start telling me that my intake of coffee, for example, was "excessive" I'd quite rightly tell them to get stuffed (there is no category error in this comparison - don't fall into that hole).

Second, other aspects of the economic crisis, including monetary policy for example, are not even mentioned as contextual limits to the importance of Ostrom & Williamson's research. Would such corporate governance problems have arisen to such a degree had the US Federal Reserve not kept interest rates so low for the best part of the last two decades? One does wonder...

Through Austrian Eyes

How long will it take for more people like this to come across Austrian Economics? A good start can still be made with The Theory Of Money & Credit (scroll down to hit the pdf download). There is a reason why I keep the Von Mises quotes thing in my sidebar.

2 + 2 = a John Dewey Hi5!

We rebel against all organization and all stability. If modern thought and sentiment is to escape from this division in its ideals, it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of steady reorganization of custom and institutions.

- John Dewey, "Impulse and Change of Habits," Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Modern Library (1922): 95-105. Found here.

A rebellion against all organization and stability? The absence of demarcating contextual referents here is, ahem, regrettable. What exactly did this man have in mind? If we are to take that word "all" seriously then we suddenly find ourselves overlooking an abyss of human depravity - theft, rape, murder and such like are transvalued into acts of romantic rebelliousness. With reference to John Dewey, Newt Gingrich had this to say to Robert Costa of National Review:

Deweyism is the creation of an educated class which knows nothing. Dewey wrote about this: ‘You don’t want them to know too much history, because that limits their plasticity’; ‘you don’t want them to know too much math or science, because that limits their plasticity.

Malone Vandam calls this "knowledge without context" but I'm not sure I agree. On his interpretation, "too much" knowledge would mean facts bound by contexts, whereas "enough" knowledge would simply be facts devoid of context - facts with very limited meaning and thus usefulness. That's easy enough to see in history for example, with something as crude as "white men A, B and C did D, E and F to the native Indians on date G". However, I don't think it is possible to have knowledge without some context. In the above example, the lack of context is illusory since the terms "white" and "native" allude to a context, which is easily ascertained by reading between the lines, of collective racial criminality.

Because the content of education is controlled by the State, there is a political fight to control the context in which facts are taught. But more than that, there are sections of the Left that fight for a general numerical reduction of taught knowledge. I can recall, around this time last year, for example some of my University students not having done their homework on the grounds that their department had asked them to sell coffee to the public to help raise funds for an excursion. Such incidents can of course be dismissed if isolated occurrences, but I think that there will be more and more of this sort of thing.

On The Nobel Kool-Aid Prize

Sir,

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama had a "surprise" value to me of precisely zero. The award has been corrupted by the political left for decades now. The awarding of the prize to Obama is directly related to the extreme Statist ambitions of Obama's administration combined with the Statist bias of the Peace Prize committee. Rehearsing the scandalous history of the "prize" in full would be more tedious than a simple link to the wikipedia entry.

I merely suggest that the Taipei Times either ignore future Nobel Kool-Aid Prize awards, or relegate such stories to minor columns, as the prize (along with its sister the Nobel Prize for Literature) has been so degraded over the years, and particularly with this latest award, that it is clearly nothing more than a badge of ultra-coolness for the Statist left to pin upon their heroes.

Peace can only emerge from justice - and achieving justice is extremely difficult, so much so that in the Middle East it can appear impossible at times. The Nobel "Peace" Prize actually has nothing whatsoever to do with this most daunting area of human endeavor - everyone should just quit acting like it does.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Saturday 10th October 2009. Published in the Taipei Times: Tuesday 13th October 2009).

Vistas of distortion

I write this having just sat down inside a coffee shop (Sarwa [no website] - about five minutes drive from Tainan City's Cheng Kung University). They allow me (and, as of now, three other customers sitting around me) to use their wireless network to connect to the internet for free - or, if you like, for the price of a cup of coffee. It is a fact which affords quite a view across a landscape of - what to call it? - silliness.

My problem was that, after chinese class this morning, I wanted to read and write my homework in Cheng Kung University. The reasons for this are largely unimportant and personal - but are to do with convenience. What I want is quite simple: I want to use my textbooks and notebooks, I want a fairly large table to rest them upon and I want to use my own laptop computer to connect to a wireless network. There are two reasons why I want to use my own computer to connect to a wireless network - the first is that I want to use documents that I have saved on my desktop and the second is that I want to use an online dictionary (MDGB Chinese-English) to help me check how my teacher has written certain characters (her handwriting isn't a very clear guide for someone learning traditional chinese characters), and to look for other words which I may have occasion to use in my writing.

The University were singularly unhelpful. First of all I was told that I was not permitted to use their wireless network because don't have a student ID and password. When I asked if I could apply for such, I was told this wasn't possible due to the fact that I currently study part time (10 hours per week) rather than full time (15 hours per week) and thus am not eligible for a student card or a library card. When I asked why this was the case, I was then told it was because full time students pay for these extra services. When I asked whether I could pay for them I was told that this wasn't possible again because I am "only" a part time student. When I asked why this was considered important, I was met with a blank stare and the assertion that the University "must follow its' policy". When I then asked why this policy was in place, i.e. what the purpose of excluding part time students from the use of the wireless network was (as well as use of the library facilities) the head clerk ended up on the phone to the director of the department who, although she refused to speak to me (perhaps a lack of English), requested me to ask my question via the department website. This little Q&A took place inside the building of the University's Chinese Language Centre where I was accompanied by another British student (a very pretty girl called Natalia from Surrey), and it transpired that the University has some other seemingly arbitrary policies - for instance, not only are part time students forbidden from using the University Library, but so are staff and full time students are forbidden from bringing textbooks into the library (not just their bookbags, on the just about conceivable grounds that students might steal valuable books, but the actual textbooks themselves!). And despite the fact that part-time students and staff are forbidden from using the library, I was informed that members of the general public are actually permitted to use it! None of which makes any sense to me.

My alternative options seemed to be: McDonalds, Starbucks or Tainan University of Technology. McDonalds is attractive to me because, like Cheng Kung University, it is close to my apartment and also because they have some very wide and high tables which are ideal for resting my large graph book on for writing in chinese characters. Yet their wireless internet can only be accessed by a card which must be applied for through the national telecoms giant - Chunghua Telecom (which I could do, but which would likely put me through another hour or two of inconvenient time wasting). Starbucks is similarly appealing for reasons of convenience - although they only have pathetic little coffee tables which are too low for serious work - but I don't know what the terms of their wireless network service is (I suspect it is the same as McDonalds). This is quite intriguing to me, because I would think that both McDonalds and Starbucks would be aware of the potential benefit to them from allowing customers to connect to the internet via their wireless networks for free. Certainly, I would spend a lot more time and money in one of the two were this possible. It makes me think that the problem lies with the still partially State owned Chunghua Telecom exercising control over their service provision to McDonalds and Starbucks. It seems that both of these two companies may not have the legal right to dispose of their purchase from Chunghua Telecom as they might please. This calls for more attention.

The Tainan University of Technology has a fantastic modern library building with large, open tables excellent for students with architectural drawings for example. They also have staff with a very relaxed and helpful attitude (even if that help is itself somewhat incompetent!) - unlike Cheng Kung University. Tainan University of Technology also has a wireless network connection which I find somewhat perplexing. At first (i.e. about 20 minutes from 11.30am onwards), there is a "default" network to which one can connect without encountering any firewall or other barriers, yet from just before 12.00pm onwards, the "default" network disappears entirely leaving one blocked by the firewall for the University's TUTNET network. Actually the staff (just a couple of students) were quite willing to help me get past this problem - they just were unable to do so and were also a little too busy serving other students with checking out books and so on.

And yet here I am - finally - in an independent little coffee shop with its' own wireless network which it allows customers to use for free - no passwords required either. It is simple, there was no fuss and its' exactly what I want.

Now if a coffee shop can do this - why can't the others? Why, for example, does a University - any University - require a firewall or passwords to restrict access to its' wireless internet network? The problem of free-riders was suggested to me by Natalie, but I don't think this makes sense because the number of free-riders could never be very significant at least due to reasons of physical space and the limited radius of the wireless network. And it seems unlikely that the University would be charged by their ISP (again Chunghua Telecom) by volume of traffic. I'm quite certain that they must (like everyone else) pay a fixed monthly charge, so the problem of free-riders seems entirely insignificant.

I think the answer lies with the application of the concept of private property.

Structurally, it seems that, at least in the case of McDonalds, they do not have property rights over the service they have purchased from Chunghua Telecom (and they must have purchased at least the hardware from Chunghua). Culturally of course the concept of private property, whilst readily understood in terms of its' immediate practical implications by small businesses like this excellent little coffee shop I'm sitting in right now, is regarded throughout Universities generally as, at best, an artificial legal construction created and sustained by government for purely utilitarian economic reasons - which of course is pathetically wrong. Moreover, the concept of private property - with all of its' short and long range ramifications does not sit well within a government supported University with an overwhelmingly bureaucratic culture. In such a bureaucratic culture, who can get what is not determined by economic calculation (i.e. by means of price signals), but by political calculation (i.e. by means of bureaucratic identity-processing). The concept of private property also has important ramifications for how people conceive of their relations with others and consequently how they interact with them. The girls on the desk at Cheng Kung University were quite rude to me (example: [me]: "Could I apply to use the University's wireless network connection to the internet, please?" [girl]: "I don't think so!") because they do not conceive of themselves as employees of a business or of me as a paying customer of this business - even though they are providing a service which I am freely choosing to pay them for. Rather they conceive of themselves as political guardians at the gate of a State controlled resource to which only the privileged few (and who is privileged is decided by quite arbitrary means - but never mind) deserve access and the undeserving rest nothing but contempt. Whether such contempt is concealed or openly displayed is a matter of institutional indifference, as a desk girl at a University cannot be disciplined for something as insignificant as refusing to help customers in an insulting manner.

On the THSRC mess

Both the Taipei Times and China Post have recently reported on the circumstances of the change of CEO at the High Speed Rail Corporation. What has happened is the following:

- The old CEO Miss Ing has stepped down to be replaced by Mr Ou Chin-der.
- The government has apparently made three decisions: first to refuse to make further tax dollars available to the company; second to 'persuade' the banks along with the five original shareholders to offer a new NT$390 billion loan and thus restructure the company's debt obligations; third to enforce the continued operation of trains, despite the company's problems, which are:

- Debts of around NT$450 billion, primarily in the form of two large bank loans.
- Capital depreciation costs.
- Passenger numbers far Lower than first envisaged - reportedly 80,000 per day as opposed to 230,000 per day - thus resulting in either operational losses or a very small profit margin.

The first event seems little more than a career story at this stage; I do not see how the new CEO is in himself a substantial reason for optimism that the current mess can be resolved one way or another.

The decision not to provide further tax dollars to the company is understandable from the point of view of a government attempting to maintain its' popularity among the voters, but otherwise somewhat ridiculous. Were the government to simply cough up the principle of NT$450 billion, then the banks would be happy and the company's immediate financial problems would seem to be over. There are several ways the government could finance this, the only remotely viable one being budget cuts elsewhere in the government's program of public spending. Alternative methods of government refinancing of the HSRC (borrowing-inflation and tax increases) are so bad as to be not worth contemplating.

The second decision to 'persuade' the banks and the five original shareholders (Fubon Bank, Continental Engineering, Teco Electric, Evergreen and Pacific Wire & Cable) to agree to a new loan of NT$390 billion is little more than a set of taxes in thin disguise.

Yet the third decision - to keep the trains operating - despite the company's financial problems brings to light the source of the company's current problems. The high speed rail project was not purely and properly conceived as a business. Its conception was based on mixed premises; on the one hand it was to be an investment in the economy by the government, on the other hand it was to be an efficiently run business to eventually be turned over to State control and above all it was to be a store of symbolic political value - unifying the north and south of the country in defiance of their political antagonism whilst projecting a modern and technologically sophisticated image of Taiwan. The high speed rail project was not a soberly considered business venture aimed purely at making a return on investment.

The problems with the high speed rail, as a business venture, include the following:

- The business assumptions were irrationally optimistic at the time (back in 1994) and have since proved to be invalid. It was assumed that both GDP growth and domestic flight passenger volume would both continue to increase or at least remain stable until 2033 at which point the company would transfer responsibility for the project to the government. That these assumptions were optimistic is indisputable, but that they were irrationally so may be evidenced by the economic emergence at the time of China and other South East Asian countries into industries in which Taiwan had long dominated - textiles and manufacturing. The comparative advantage of cheaper labour and utilities costs, and the implications these facts would have for Taiwanese industry, should have been obvious even then.

- It is too long. The railway connects Taipei to Kaohsiung largely for political value, but demand for the trains has been reasonably high between Taipei and Taichung yet pitifully low between Taichung and Kaohsiung. This left the company with the problem of financing about two-thirds of the capital costs for the entire project (i.e. that part of the rail link from the south to just past the middle of the country) from sources other than operational revenue. A soberly considered business would run the rail link only from Taipei to Taichung and reject any further extension to the south as unprofitable. It is too late for that now.

The current government's decision to keep the trains running between Taipei and Kaohsiung has nothing at all to do with protecting the interests of customers and everything to do with avoiding the political shame of allowing the high speed rail project to be shut down following a declaration of bankruptcy by the banks.


As to the future of the project, there are a number of possibilities.

It seems to me that the most obvious outcome in the short to medium term is that the banks along with the big five original shareholders will continue to be strongarmed by the government into financial maintenance of the high speed rail company against their own commercial interests. Until the emergence of a credible political opposition to the KMT, the banks and big five shareholders may find it difficult to put up any resistance.

In the longer term, the political costs to the government of choosing to force the continued running of the high speed rail at commercial loss would certainly be very significant if not unaffordable. Legislators will inevitably see the high speed rail crisis as an opportunity for pork barrel projects which will of course not only fail in themselves but further complicate any sincere attempt at reform in the future. These attempts must be publicly criticized and rejected. A genuine reform effort would need to consider the possibility of dismantling a large proportion of the rail link (e.g. between Kaohsiung and Taichung) and selling off the land - either to previous owners such as farmers, or to new investors who might make more productive use of it. Of course this is unlikely to happen barring a drastic change in political weather.