Every May Day, someone posts a photograph of a jeepney driver holding a hand lettered sign demanding that the government seize the oil companies, and every year the post collects several thousand likes from people who have never once totaled a fuel receipt against a day’s earnings. It is an old ritual. It changes nothing, and it costs nothing to post, which is precisely its appeal.
However, Simply Wall St calculates that during the past five years, Petron Corporation has grown its earnings at an average annual rate of 45.7 percent. Would the government taking over the oil industry be justified? History already ran that experiment, more than once, and the results were never flattering.
The 20th century’s flirtation with Communism and Marxism left, by conservative accounting, more than 65 million dead. That figure gets recited so often that it has lost its capacity to shock. The connection is not incidental. Once a government claims the obligation to decide what goods and services an economy should produce, and at what price to buy and sell, it has already claimed the authority to set everything else. That includes who eats and who does not. The same command structure that fixed the cost of bread in the Soviet Union and placed grain quotas in Maoist China turned famine and purge into instruments of policy rather than accidents of history.
Someone will inevitably raise the ‘kind and gentle’ objection: what about the safety net without the show trials, socialism with a human face. That objection misunderstands the argument. A public road is not socialism. A government hospital treating a patient who cannot pay is not socialism. Those are simply government spending on goods a market tends to underprovide, and every functioning capitalist economy does some version of it. What matters is whether a government claims the authority to decide what a private business may produce, what it may charge, and who is permitted to profit from doing it well.
Venezuela deserves particular attention, because it began the 21st century as one of Latin America’s wealthier nations. Its economy has since contracted by roughly 80 percent, a collapse steeper than the United States endured during the Great Depression, with inflation surging past 475 percent in 2025 and nearly eight million Venezuelans leaving the country. All that happened because a command economy insisted that a handful of officials, rather than millions of buyers and sellers, decide what things are worth.
Consider the sari-sari store on any Philippine corner. Aling Puring does not consult a central committee before pricing a sachet of shampoo. She watches what her neighbors will pay, what her competitor two doors down charges, and what she has to pay for the shampoo this week. That constant, unglamorous negotiation is the price mechanism functioning as intended, and it explains why the store survives while a government run commissary typically does not. Multiply that store by millions of daily transactions and you arrive at why market economies outperform command ones. It is only arithmetic that makes it work, not ideology.
The Philippines has its own quiet evidence of this. The national poverty rate fell to 15.5 percent in 2023 from 18.1 percent in 2021, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. This was driven largely by income growth among the poorest households, which outpaced growth at the top and outpaced the rise in the poverty threshold. Do not call it ‘wealth redistribution’ when it is actually ‘wealth participation’ in a market that rewarded labor and enterprise faster than the cost of living rose against it.
Even China and Vietnam, neither of which abandoned their political architecture, were forced by economic reality to adopt market mechanisms decades ago, because no theory survives a war with an empty store shelf indefinitely.
What should concern Filipinos is not that the Command Economy will come here in uniform, complete with flags and tribunals. The threat arrives dressed as convenience: a populist promise here, a price control there, a demand that someone else’s earnings be redirected toward a grievance that feels entirely justified. It rarely announces itself as ideology. It shows up as resentment toward whoever worked longer or started earlier, and the belief that their greater income or wealth is itself an injustice.
Communism reaches the same endpoint by force, socialism by vote, and the road differs while the destination, historically, does not.
The jeepney driver with the sign will post again next May. The sari-sari store, meanwhile, will still be open early in the morning, pricing shampoo the old fashioned way, still run by someone who showed up. One of these arrangements has never lifted anyone out of poverty. The other keeps doing it.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.