The state has no obligation and it has no inclination to protect our liberties- our right to earn a living, to form a family, to get an education, to travel, to vote and so on. What the state has is the obligation not to harm our rights and liberties as set forth in the Bill of Rights. And since it has no obligation to protect our rights and liberties except from itself, the state doesn't have much to do for all the money we give it in taxes.

Yes, all the money that we give the state in taxes and that includes, most of all, the lowly wage-earner who pays a withholding tax on her earnings and VAT for any small thing she buys.

So, since the state has so little to do except refrain from curtailing our constitutional rights like curbing our use of the internet and since it cannot even prevent women from being raped in LRT stations on Edsa, you would think the Philippine state would have all the time to check out an ongoing scheme promising people as high as an 80% return on cash where the bulk of their targets are precisely small wage earners, which is why some have committed suicide and why some are contemplating homicide.

But whom would they want to kill? Obviously the scammers, but they fled past the Bureau of Immigration. Just as obviously LGU officials who first encouraged and then discouraged their offices and constituents to invest in the scam and then did not stop it because it was too late to stop it without triggering the collapse of the pyramid scam before they could take out their own money.

Some may be tempted to ask who are so foolish as to invest on the promise of an 80% return on investment? Well, politicians who invest campaign contributions toward their own elections and get back hundreds of millions of pesos more in pork and commissions, cabinet secretaries who earn millions in allowances and bribes for approvals. We could go on. But let's not forget retired workers, cops and soldiers trying to make ends meet with the interest on their small pensions at 0.3% per annum.

Is there a conflict between the freedom to be fooled and the expectation to be protected by the state? No. Because there is no freedom to be fooled, do you see it in the bill of rights? There is however the expectation to be protected by the state from harm whose other duties only involve not doing anything else. So, with so little to do, protection is the least the Philippine state can give us for all the money we give it in taxes.

Keep well.