Where to spend the rest of my life? In California USA or Baja California Mexico?

August 2008
By Jose Amate

I find myself bitching about Mexico to my Mexican wife and friends. Damn, there are no decent Chinese restaurants and I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with the largest Chinese communities in the United States. There are even fewer alternative Asian food options –none. How I long for those exotic flavors of Thailand, Vietnam and The Philipines. And forget about Italian restaurants. I grew up with Italian friends who owned five star eateries in San Francisco’s North Beach. I ate the best Italian food in those friend’s homes. The opportunity to listen to live Jazz and Blues is extremely limited in Mexico. Growing up in Oakland, there was soulful music everywhere. And speaking of Soul music, there ain’t any Soul Food restaurants in Baja either.

In addition to “my joneses” for food and music, Mexicans piss me off. The bureaucracy and the Mexican’s nature to ignore rational argument is frustrating at best. Obstinate behavior in a world that begs for creativity, flexibility and greater efficiency. All of these things, and more, agitate me into thinking lately about moving back to the good ole U.S. of America.

But then I turned on the news from San Diego and heard beach reports for this past 4th of July weekend. That’s right, the celebration of our independence from those onerous English Kings, on an especially hot 4th of July. Like most San Diegans, I would head for the beaches, with the following rules: no dogs, no smoking, no drinking, and no furniture other than your beach chair and no reserving spaces for your friends. These are the rules for all of San Diego’s beaches. Here in Mexico, you would have to put up with folks: smoking, with dogs, a wide arrangement of furniture, definitely drinking, potentially on horseback or maybe even driving on the beach.

The U.S. is still a great country - home of the free- if you work hard and get rich. My dad frequently took me to major league sports events in San Francisco and Oakland on a laborer’s salary. Today, only the very wealthy can afford an NBA finals ticket starting at $1,000.00 each. I cannot afford to take my son to a Padres baseball game in San Diego. The day would cost me a hundred and fifty dollars – for me that represents one thousand five hundred pesos. Forget about it. Then there is the cost of gasoline at $4.80 a gallon instead of the $2.50 I pay in Mexico. But that is because we don’t have the “free enterprise” oil companies.

In Mexico the nation’s vital resources are owned by the state. This is not good ole, Yankee competitive, free enterprise. Free market capitalism in the states provides competitive pricing, does it not? The consumer therefore wins, right? In Mexico, the repression is an autocratic limit on our freedom to get screwed. In the U.S., you are paying 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity to the free enterprise-guaranteed profitability- power companies. We pay five cents a kilowatt hour to the onerous governmental enterprise the “Federal Confederation of Electricity”. Sounds socialist and we know how dangerous socialism is.

Without the champions of free enterprise, Washington drug company lobbyists, U.S. citizens would not have the advantage of paying for all that research and development the freeloading third world takes advantage of. What patriotic American would accept Mexico’s repressive price controls on medicine. These ominous price controls force U.S. companies to sell their products in Mexico at a fraction of what they charge in the states. I’m surprised they don’t pull out of this government controlled, socialist marketplace.

Democrats are pushing for “socialized” medicine because forty million American “near do wells” can’t pay for health Insurance. While Mexican doctors and hospitals suffer from a government’s insistence that all Mexican citizens have a right to health care. Medical Practitioners must attend the sick whether they have money or not. This restricts the liberty of Mexican doctors to afford country club memberships. And, to add insult to injury, they must respond to “spoiled sick people” who expect house calls.

In the U.S., we cherish our “first amendment rights” of expression. And we must surely insist on our right to “in depth” news reporting about Britney Spear’s latest episode. How could our commander and chief have sold us on the noble Iraq war if the “free market” press community did not “fall in line”? Like good patriots, our respected press corp. listened attentively to their media mogul bosses.

Media folks are realists. They know we could not continue to be the world’s leading “military-industrial complex” without maintaining patriotic devotion in their reporting. Being the 5th column of government, they are obliged to promote our international goals of spreading freedom via the power to “shock and awe”. Having military occupants in seventy countries around the world requires positive reporting; so we are seen as freedom fighters and not imperialists.

I will never understand Mexico and Mexicans. But I do understand that I can afford to live here. And, unfortunately, no longer in my beloved Bay Area. But damn, I sure miss all those freedoms I use to enjoy as a yank. How about ya’all?

Jose Amate Perez is the founder of Mexicomatters, a foreign investment consulting firm, you can contact Jose at 619 819 9369 or in Mexico 646 1766759 www.mexicomatters.info