April 11, 2009

Single Payer Government

Let me introduce you to Mouahssine, my gendarme in Morocco. I call him "my gendarme" because whenever I had to go to the gendarmerie I always asked for him, and he was almost always available. Once they woke him up from a nap. That's the epitome of service. Oh, and he was essentially assigned to watch over me. Any time I travelled outside of the Ouarzazate region I had to text him and tell him when I would return.

But I digress. Mouahssine was straight out of central-casting for law-enforcement-officer-in-a-foreign-land-once-occupied-by-the-French. Balding and just shy of pudgy with just past his prime folded skin around his mouth and temples, he had the best blue-green eyes. He smoked at his large paper-strewn desk, while he held meetings, and while he typed on his antiquated IBM computer. The best part: his phone played Tainted Love whenever someone called, endearing him to me all the more.

In order to stay in Morocco for more than twelve weeks I had to apply to be a resident. This meant filling out five copies of a six-page application by hand. At the time, this felt really unnecessary; why couldn't Mouahssine just photocopy my application? With a very sore hand and slightly grumpy demeanor, I listened as he outlined what else I would need to bring him: a letter from the country director stating my purpose in Morocco, my Peace Corps identification, and the entry and identification pages of my passport, all in quintuplicate form, plus a sixty dirham stamp from a local hanut. Being a pretty well-prepared and efficient young woman (and not wanting to make a second two hour fifteen kilometer trip to Ouarzazate that week) I already had all of those things with me and immediately went to my photocopy man up the street, got the copies and returned to Mouahssine's office.

Mouahssine was flabbergasted and elated. How had I gotten the copies so quickly? And then his face fell. I didn't have the proper stamps. I explained how I had gone to five different hanuts and no one had the elusive sixty dirham stamp. He shook his head, "No the government stamps for your photocopies." What? Copies, of any sort, just aren't trusted in Morocco. But clearly you can't have five originals of something, unless you've filled them all out by hand in the presence of a gendarme. . . It was all making sense.

Mouahssine directed me to the royal government offices across the street, where I found the photocopy verification unit. For two dirham a piece a woman looked at the original and then stamped (many, many times) the photocopy, stating that it was indeed accurate and correct. This took an entire afternoon. Only in a culture absolutely suspicious of technology would I be forced to do this. And only in a place where it's every man for himself would the government force such a wasteful tax on the individual. To be fair, I didn't pay taxes in Morocco and the law enforcement resources it devotes to Peace Corps Volunteers is quite remarkable and expensive (though I can't say how effective it is since I very rarely felt safe there). Needless to say Mouahssine was happy that I was able to obtain the official photocopy stamps and he even found the elusive sixty dirham stamp for me.

What all of this reminded me of was the Stamp Tax of 1765 levied by the British in the American Colonies. That caused a major uproar! Really, Americans have just always hated taxes, and this attitude has forced local governments to find a way around it in order to cover the expenses for all those things we take for granted, like roads, clean drinking water and law enforcement. That's why the headline, Cities Turn to Fees to Fill Budget Gaps, was so interesting to me this morning. We expect our taxes to cover everything that could possibly be used by everyone, like law enforcement or natural disaster responses. But what if they didn't? What kind of society would we be? It would be the cruel realization of a nation obsessed with individualism. I don't fish, why should I have to support the infrastructure that allows other people to do so. I don't drive or take taxis, so I only want my taxes to go towards the subway system. Or, worse, I don't live in that unsafe neighborhood, so I won't pay taxes to support extra police officers on the streets over there. Government officials who choose to raise taxes on individual services are just feeding into the mentality that individuals don't benefit from the improvement of the whole system. If a friend gets into an accident she already has to worry about the health insurance bills, now she has to worry about her ability to pay the police, too? That just seems wrong.

What does this have to do with my gendarme, Mouahssine? Not much, really. I was always aware that I was treated differently because of my nationality, receiving more attention and patience than what was accorded to most of my community, most of which was interviewed and lectured to about my safety. Mouahssine admitted to me that he had actually never even been to my poor little dirt road town, even though it was only fifteen kilometers away. It didn't need him, he said, but I did. The latter was definitely true, but I couldn't shake the feeling that if my town had been a little better connected, or not Berber for that matter, it would have warranted a more even distribution of the region's resources. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of society Morocco has, but I certainly hope I've returned to a place that believes in some sort of support for everyone in their hour of need.

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