Nggak mikir kan, secinta apa rakyat kalian ke negara kiamat ini? It's an act of love. You don't know what love is. That's why you see it as a threat. You know nothing about love, so you call it violence.
Yang menjijikkan dari skandal di Badan Gizi Nasional bukan hanya dugaan korupsinya. Namun juga cara banyak pejabat dan elite politik tiba-tiba berbalik arah setelah kasus itu meledak.
Ketika MBG diluncurkan, kritik hampir tidak diberi ruang. Setiap pertanyaan tentang anggaran, tata kelola, kesiapan infrastruktur, transparansi pengadaan, hingga risiko kebocoran dana dianggap sebagai sikap anti-pemerintah atau tidak mendukung perbaikan gizi anak. Buzzer dikerahkan, bahkan militer meneror ortu yang mengeluhkan kualitas MBG. Padahal sejak awal MBG adalah program raksasa dengan anggaran yang terus membengkak, bahkan menjadi salah satu pos belanja terbesar negara.
Saat itu, banyak pejabat berlomba-lomba menjadi juru bicara program. Mereka memuji tanpa reserve. Mereka menjual optimisme, mengulang slogan, dan menampilkan keberhasilan yang jauh dari terbukti. Kritik dianggap musuh dan antek asing.
Kini, orang-orang yang dulu paling keras membela program mendadak menjadi pengkritik. Mereka berbicara tentang perlunya evaluasi, pengawasan, audit, dan transparansi. Seolah-olah mereka tidak pernah menjadi bagian dari barisan yang membungkam pertanyaan-pertanyaan itu sejak awal.
Fenomena ini menunjukkan moral
hazard.
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.
This chart is a brutal reflection of why public frustration toward political elites in many emerging markets continues intensifying because it shows that Indonesian lawmakers are compensated at levels that look extraordinarily disconnected from the underlying economic reality faced by the average citizen, with parliament salary reaching roughly 14.7x GDP per capita, among the highest ratios globally and second only to the Philippines in this dataset, despite Indonesia still remaining a country where purchasing power remains relatively weak, informal employment is massive, public service quality remains uneven, infrastructure bottlenecks persist, legal enforcement often feels inconsistent, and upward economic mobility for large parts of the population remains structurally difficult.
And this is precisely why charts like this become politically toxic because citizens naturally begin asking a very simple question: what exactly are taxpayers receiving in return?
In high-income countries, lawmakers may also earn very large nominal salaries, but those economies simultaneously generate far stronger productivity, higher institutional quality, better healthcare systems, stronger education outcomes, more efficient bureaucracy, higher legal predictability, and materially better public goods overall, meaning political compensation exists within a much larger and wealthier economic ecosystem.
But in Indonesia, the optics become far more uncomfortable because the political class increasingly appears capable of extracting upper-middle-class or even developed-market lifestyles from an economy that still struggles to generate broad-based prosperity for much of the population itself.
And perhaps the harshest part is that compensation alone is probably not even the real issue. The real issue is performance.
Citizens are generally willing to tolerate highly compensated leaders if the country visibly becomes richer, more efficient, more meritocratic, less corrupt, and economically stronger over time. But when corruption scandals remain persistent, policymaking appears inconsistent, infrastructure projects repeatedly face rent-seeking concerns, and wealth creation remains concentrated among political insiders, conglomerates, and connected elites, high political compensation begins looking less like professionalization and more like institutionalized extraction.
Importantly, this also helps explain why anti-elite sentiment, populism, and distrust toward institutions continue rising globally because once the gap between elite living standards and ordinary household realities becomes too visible, citizens increasingly stop believing the system operates primarily for collective national advancement and instead begin viewing politics as a mechanism for self-enrichment among those already close to power.
Ultimately, this chart reflects something much deeper than salary levels alone because it exposes the uncomfortable reality that in many emerging markets, the political class often succeeds in upgrading its own prosperity far faster than the nation it supposedly represents, and over time that divergence itself becomes corrosive to institutional trust, social cohesion, and long-term political legitimacy.