| >Whether they claim credit or not is not something I care much about, since the wellbeing of political careers is not my problem. The question is not whether you support the wellbeing of others' political careers, it is whether you support the efforts to squash all opposition to the hegemony via legal means or otherwise. I am frankly not comfortable with the PAP holding so much power, this is why I consider it my problem. The more they manage to destroy the opposition with tactics like these the more they can operate with impunity. Impunity means they don't HAVE to listen to the opposition at all - something apparently you like. >having read quite a bit by LKY, I consider policies like minimum wage to be ideologically against what PAP stands for (or what Singapore has become). It's not especially. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them implement it at some point if the cries become loud enough. If you truly have read a lot of LKY then you should know that he puts pragmatism above all else. >Minimum wage is a rights infringement, in that it impedes consenting individuals from forming contracts at terms deemed "illegal". Libertarianism (20th/21st century) is kind of stupid and every privileged young white guy should probably grow out of it by their mid 20s. The unethical AXIOMATIC heart of its ideology is that "strong property rights" matter more than poverty. It's a corrupt justification for the abuse of the rich and powerful in other words. >It's been catastrophic in most countries it has been tried I don't know if this could be a more absurd statement. It's only 'catastrophic' for profit margins of companies that take advantage of people teetering on the edge of poverty. The economic incidence falls almost entirely on them (even the effect on inflation is very tempered, and unemployment almost never goes up). >For example, I remember Milton Friedman An absolute joke of an economist, who thought that you could control employment and inflation through interest rates (proven utterly and totally 100% wrong sine 2008). >commenting on how minimum wage had artificially restricted the number of fast food jobs available to unskilled teenagers, causing whites to be disproportionately hired over blacks, causing higher black unemployment amongst the working class. I'm always kind of wary about when rich, privileged white guys tell the unprivileged underclasses what's good for them. Especially when the empirical evidence for their claims is light. There's been plenty of empirical research that demonstrates the effect on job losses is negligible and a lot of hot air by apologist for the corporate/oligarch classes' whose profit margins depend upon a low/non-existent minimum wage still claiming that it's all wrong. Lies. >Minimum wage policy is being continuously introduced and voted down with over 70% of the popular vote in Switzerland The minimum wage introduced that got voted down would have been THE highest in the world. >where a waitress at a cafe can easily make 6k CHF/month thanks to market forces. Or because of the same trade unions that actually got the vote for the $25 minimum wage introduced in the first place. >The issue of course is that PAP can't outright say that its policy is often inspired by the Founding Fathers They draw inspiration from all over the place, but the only real ideology they have is pragmatism. They hardly paid much attention to the 1st, 2nd or 4th amendments to the constitution did they? >I find it hard to reconcile the criticism of the government as being corrupt, with the utter lack of actual evidence of, say, government contracts landing in the Lee family's pockets Why would he do that when he can just pay himself the highest prime ministerial salary in the world? What evidence there is (I believe there are bits and pieces, but from relatively unreliable sources) gets squashed more often than elsewhere because there's no free media and if you breathe a word of it without cast iron proof you will generally be sued into bankruptcy. Who is therefore going to dig for impropriety? Nobody. So, even if he WERE corrupt as hell, I doubt we'd hear about it. The stranglehold on information is too tight. LKY's son is prime minister now, too. If that doesn't scream nepotism, I don't know what does. >(if anything, Temasek seems to acquire companies AFTER they become successful, which is what you'd want them to do as a "shareholder"), Yeah, but pay attention to who they put on the board and what salaries they are paid. >(and reading the Wikipedia article, again on my home connection, completely unimpeded by government censorship, I see that he did raise $110,000 in legal fund aid to carry the case to completion). Gosh, you don't live in China. How wonderful. Yes, he raised $100k. Not enough to prove high level corruption. Not even close. Know how much a good forensic accountant is worth? Know how much of their time you'd need? I'd estimate probably at least 2 good ones for one or two years for a case like this to have a shot at making a good case. I'd expect bureaucratic stonewalling even then. >Court digs, finds allegations to be untrue Court DIGS? I really don't think so. Court does what court is ordered if court knows what's best for it. >How do you pick a side? I haven't picked a side. You can't pick a side on this case. It's like like being asked to pick a side in a murder case in the middle ages where all of the evidence is hearsay. Any third party who claims to know which side is lying and which side isn't is lying themselves. I SUSPECT that this allegation might be false simply because it's an allegation where the PM decided to use the nuclear option. It's a good tactic to scare anybody else with evidence into shutting up if occasionally you pick off somebody who did make an unprovable false accusation. I don't really know though. Even if he didn't, the chances of the case going his way are nil. I'm saying that if the court case is to be at all meaningful then the defence fund needs to be charged up to at least $4-5 million dollars before we can be convinced that the trial was fair, because PROVING financial impropriety at that level (which is what he is being asked to do) IS ACTUALLY that expensive. If they don't do that (and they won't) then it's a sham trial. End. of. story. >Where is the evidence? Where are the hard facts? That's all I ask for. Here's the thing: you're NOT asking for that. You're offering up a weak apology for the ruling party who intentionally created a rigged court case. The US does this too, of course. Plenty of people are charged with a crime and have their assets confiscated, meaning that they can't put up a meaningful legal defense. It's one of many ways the state abuses its power. |
It's even more dramatic if you log scale it: one little island somehow raises itself from one group to the next (and avoids the dramatic rise and crash typical of a FDI bubble). But I'm not going to debate libertarianism (or Objectivism) vs social-democracy vs whatever else, or any economics, because that leads absolutely nowhere and each side is firmly convinced they are right, based on facts and their value system, other than to say "white young men grow out of it in their 20s" strikes me as a poor argument (as are all ad hominem). FWIW, I also don't buy the "check your privilege" line. I've already put on my "trade", my money where my mouth is, by moving to Singapore.
High civil service salaries are a demonstrated way to avoid corruption by raising its economic cost to prohibitive levels, in emerging markets, and to attract the best talent, in developed countries. You can disagree, you probably will - Thatcher was a fan, and I a fan of hers. I also belong firmly in the camp that would rather hire an exceptional developer for $600k/year than 6 average ones for $100k/year, for the same reasons (the cost of a bad hire is exponentially higher than the money spent).
Regarding LKY's pragmatism, sure, that's what he preached and wrote about. 40 years of action shows a certain alignment with perhaps Jefferson or Patrick Henry, that few politicians today have had the balls to so systematically copy. Whether he derived it himself from "pragmatism" or (more likely) read up on history and watched the world, drew his own conclusions and then carefully avoided ad hominems by creating his own brand of politics doesn't matter to me - I see a 40 year track record and it is good - that PAP is systematically blocking attempts at creating a minimum wage is one more data point.
In fact, this track record leads me to rethink my view of government. Overwhelming global historical evidence tells you not to trust government and to keep it small. But Singapore's story flies in the face of this.
Regarding the CPF case, only time will tell. It's not something that keeps me awake at night. FWIW I think PM Lee ought to have accepted the small damages, strategically (as the blogger would then have publicly admitted not having evidence), but I understand his being more than a little annoyed at being accused of corruption, if it was unwarranted.
It seems to be the only evidence of impropriety brought forward, and I disagree with you that other evidence could meaningfully "just disappear" in the 21st century. Why did nothing surface on Wikileaks except that fairly mild assessment of the opposition? The US government has the means for "forensic accounting" as you call it. Why aren't the exiled (and perfectly free and ressourceful) Singaporean opponents finding things out? One option is that the ISD is extraordinarily good, the other option is that there's nothing to find out because well paid and competent civil servants see no point in cheating when it is more profitable to be honest in a system designed that way.
I do agree with you on one thing: we don't know where or how this will end. My experience has been (although it is Western) that it is incredibly hard for second or third generation wealth to maintain the same quality of thinking that the dynasty creator had. The problem is thus whether LKY has been able to create a legacy that will outlive him and his family (in which case Singapore has great days ahead) or whether the island will finish like Venice, with its ruling class making it increasingly difficult for entrepreneurs and those not born within it, walling off the moat, enjoying a few decades of decline and toasting the fall with overtaxed Dom. Very, very few emerging markets actually emerge, statistically, and for good reasons (cf Robinson/Acemoglu, although you might disagree).