Lee Bailey, the head of the Montego Bay cruise shipping council, appears to have a weird notion of private enterprise and the operation of the free market.

A week ago, Mr. Bailey was quoted by this newspaper as calling on the Government to stop granting permits for the construction of all-inclusive hotels in Jamaica, on the basis that the presence of this type of accommodation will wipe out small properties. We suspect that Mr. Bailey equates a small hotel not only by its size, but by the plan on which it operates. The label non-all-inclusive or European plan hotels is interchangeable with that of small hotels.

But definitional issues apart, there are other matters that should cause Mr. Bailey to think again about his proposal and to test its logic.

His concern is that almost all of the several hundred new hotel rooms that have been built here over the past three years and that the many more on the drawing board are all-inclusives. Indeed, nearly 80 per cent of Jamaica's hotel rooms fall under such plans.

The fact is that it is the all-inclusive concept that has proved viable to the Jamaican environment over the past quarter of a century. It is into this market that the mostly Spanish interests have in the past three years spent billions on hotels.

It is the sector of the industry which they believe that Jamaica has comparative advantage, on which they can make a return and is, therefore, worthy of their investment.

It would be foolhardy of any government of a country that has not enjoyed robust economic growth and is hard up for investment to turn away capital in an attempt to determine where firms put their money.

What the Government can responsibly do, assuming that new hotels do not breach the country's carrying capacity, is to create an environment where competition can thrive. The basis of this cannot be heavy-handed and arbitrary action to limit the areas of investment.

Indeed, if Mr. Bailey had thought about, and deems it timely to do so now, he would arrive at the conclusion that more tourists, even from those who currently come to Jamaica, would eat at restaurants, travel in taxis and visit attractions if they could do so in reasonable peace and the absence of fear on the part of their hosts.

The fact is that the problem, in so far as there is a problem, is not all-inclusives of themselves, but the state of crime in Jamaica. We are ourselves concerned when our guests travel outside specific enclaves. Moreover, the all-inclusive hotel, up to now, has proven to be a viable business model.

The answer is not to create artificial limits, but to do the things in which competition will thrive, and in the case of tourism it must start with fixing our serious problem of crime. If Mr. Bailey should apply some logic to this matter.

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