The successful “Let them rust” campaign should extend beyond pressuring Egyptian car-dealers to reduce their prices. Unfortunately, commercial fraud is widespread in Egypt, and many other sectors of the economy besides cars need similar customer-awareness campaigns or better government regulation. This is because at the moment Egypt is neither a free-market nor a state-controlled economy. Instead, we are creating an economic model that privileges a small number of businessmen at the expense of our national economy and consumers. A free-market economy is supposed to capitalise on and enhance a nation's best talents, which are eventually exchanged with other countries' best capabilities – a perfect theory that becomes completely warped when applied in Egypt. Ironically, our government is unwittingly implementing policies that stimulate people to value short-term deals over long-term industrial commitments. We tend to burden genuine investors with endless and costly bureaucratic red tape, while allowing businessmen to import products from almost any nation, regardless of quality. This results in fragmenting and weakening our national industries and privileging importers whose risks are naturally limited while ruining long-term, industry-driven capitalists. As a nation that consumes more than it produces, we need policies that reverse this state of affairs. Being a car salesman is the perfect profession for many people. It requires few qualifications and limited upfront investment, and the risks incurred if the market shrinks are minimal. It also perfectly matches the Egyptian business mindset, which prefers to sell a few items at a high profit margin than large volumes at low margins. As a result, we have an abundance of car-dealers and few reputable automobile repair workshops. Real estate is another industry where a small number of developers are permitted to expand their businesses substantially by constructing skeleton buildings and letting them stand in this unfinished condition for years until the owners of units in the new building are obliged to use their own funds to complete them. This practice prompts a handful of developers to construct series of unfinished buildings rather than develop a smaller number of finished ones. Additionally, Egyptian banks that are supposedly working to boost our economy have realised that extending retail products to members of the upper-middle classes by offering high implicit interest rates is more profitable than lending to genuine industrialists. Astonishingly, even when a bank customer spends a fortune using his credit card and pays all his dues, except for a tiny fraction, on time, many banks will still charge interest on the entire amount rather than only on the fraction due in a policy that obviously depends on the customer's ignorance. Only by permitting fully-fledged car-service companies that sell, maintain and repair vehicles to import cars will we increase the number of bona fide automobile workshops in Egypt and employ more technicians, while at the same time limiting the spread of casual automobile importers. Likewise, real-estate developers should only be issued licenses after they have placed the entire investment in a bank with an obligation to complete their developments within a strict timeframe. Most of the currently imperfect commercial practices are the result of defective public policies that do not take consumers into consideration. The problem of widespread corruption in Egypt could be better addressed by offering financial rewards to people who report wrong-doing. Offering a free apartment in the building of a real-estate developer who has broken the law to the first person who reports him should prompt many others to testify against law-breakers, substantially reducing the number of defective buildings. Publishing a simple comparative table showing the implicit and explicit fees and interest rates applied by the banks could also raise people's awareness of overcharges and prompt customers to switch to less costly banks, eventually causing the banks to revisit their policies and reduce their extravagant charges. However, the most fundamental aspect of a free-market economy is the strong application of the rule of law, which is problematic in Egypt. Egyptian courts are currently overloaded with commercial disputes due to the ambiguity of the law in many cases and the absence of clear contracts that frame the relationships between service-providers and their customers. Egypt needs to regulate the market better in order to stimulate people to invest in the industrial sector. Implementing more constructive public policies would also encourage many to team up in a single investment, doing away with the current phenomenon of greedy individuals and solving many of our problems. 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The writer is a liberal politician.
