The Minister and Don Quixote

According to a Liberty Times report on May 29, 2003, Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien visited the Hsinchu City Police Bureau to check on the investigation of the Hsinchu Tenth Credit Cooperative armored car robbery. Expressing dissatisfaction with the cooperative's riddled security loopholes, he stated that he would issue an official letter demanding the cooperative's insurance company deny compensation for its losses. If this news report is accurate, aside from admiring the moral courage and decisiveness demonstrated by Minister Yu in pursuit of his administrative goal of achieving zero crime growth within three months, what else is there to say?

Whether the security loopholes of the Tenth Credit Cooperative can serve as grounds for the insurance company to refuse compensation depends entirely on the terms agreed upon in the contract between the two parties. If the terms of the insurance contract do not designate such loopholes as grounds for refusing compensation, then unless the law provides for explicit exceptions under constitutional premises, claiming insurance payouts is a right of the Tenth Credit Cooperative; the government cannot use administrative orders to demand that the insurance company deny compensation. If there is a dispute between the parties over whether the contract terms designate this as a ground for refusal, in principle only the court has the authority to judge and determine right from wrong, and administrative officials have no business meddling or dictating. The aforementioned principles—respect for citizens' vested rights, the autonomy of private law, and the separation of powers—are fundamental constitutional tenets of a modern liberal state governed by the rule of law. As an administrative head, Minister Yu is bound by the spirit of administration according to law and cannot be exempt from these principles. Minister Yu's intention to issue an official letter demanding that the Tenth Credit Cooperative's insurance company deny compensation directly conflicts with these basic constitutional principles.

Even if the Tenth Credit Cooperative indeed suffered from the numerous security loopholes alleged by Minister Yu, and even if these negligence issues were the reason for its repeated robberies, the Ministry of the Interior should still resolve the problem through lawful and effective channels—namely, exercising its statutory authority to supervise the cooperative in making substantive improvements. Instead of taking this proper path, Minister Yu resorted to means completely beyond his jurisdiction and in obvious violation of constitutional common sense in an attempt to force the cooperative to improve on its own. Setting aside whether this would be effective (according to the same report, the insurance company is well aware that the Ministry of the Interior has no authority to meddle in its compensation decisions and has thus politely indicated it cannot comply), if the government cannot achieve its administrative goals through lawful and normal means, and instead has to resort to unorthodox remedies that do not even qualify as lawful "administrative guidance," then the governance and execution capabilities of everyone from political appointees down to the entire civil service become self-evident. Comparing this with the various measures introduced by the Ministry of the Interior under Minister Yu's tenure in pursuit of public order performance—such as parading suspects without hoods and establishing a universal fingerprint database—all of which traded human rights for administrative ends, one grows increasingly concerned about the governance capabilities of the public security authorities.

Relying on a government apparatus of such low efficiency while grandly claiming to achieve the grandiose goal of zero crime growth within three months makes it difficult not to associate Minister Yu with Don Quixote, who rode a skinny horse with a suit of battered scrap metal and dreamed of fighting windmills. Regardless, both men possess the moral courage to press forward even against a myriad of foes, which commands a certain degree of admiration.

※ Published in: Liberty Times