Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is quite an interesting enigma. He’s sort of like Donald Trump in personality and approach to exercising power. If Trump weren’t so constrained by the U.S. Constitution, he’d act more like Duterte. Trump has to search for technical loopholes that allow him absolute, or near absolute power, like using Cold War era legislation that allows a sitting President to almost unilaterally institute any tariff he wants on the grounds of national security. Duterte doesn’t have to find any such loopholes. He can just act. And he does.

Duterte has his passions and pet peeves, like his ruthless war on drugs (no comment), but he does seem to have a sense that decentralization and private ownership as opposed to government ownership is generally a good thing. Meaning, he’s no socialist ideologue with utopian views of equality, and he’s certainly no fan of political correctness. He does seem to have a basic understanding of how economies work in reality, unlike, say, Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro or the late Hugo Chavez who are vastly more dangerous. Maduro or Chavez types will just keep pushing their catastrophic economic inanities until there is either absolutely nothing left and everybody starve to death (which is happening now in Venezuela), or they are assassinated (which almost happened earlier this month to Maduro).

Duterte may have a personal hatred for gambling, made clear in his recent suspension of any further licensing for casinos, but he knows where his money comes from and he’s not stupid enough to actively try to harm the gambling industry in his country. The suspension of new licenses will hurt consumers a little bit by raising prices due to constricting supply, but this is not the start of a crackdown on the gambling industry as a whole.

That the gambling industry is not coming under general attack is clear from the privatization of PAGCOR casinos this year. This move is likely to increase the efficiency of PAGCOR’s gigantic collection of gambling venues. The fact that Duterte, generally characterized as very controlling, is cool with this shows that he does have a good amount of sense. He seems to understand that allowing current casinos to operate independently will only help him collect more taxes, which is his real goal. Philippine tax revenues continue to roll in at records under Duterte, and he’s not going to endanger that.