Introduction

Legal positivism is the idea that the existence and content of law depends on social facts. Since law has a primarily social basis, and there is no reason to believe that society will necessarily be moral, there is thus no conceptual relationship between morality and law; law and morality are essentially separate. This separability thesis thus forms the core of the Hart-Fuller debate that has so shaped Anglo-American jurisprudence.

The positivist account, basing the existence of law on certain social facts, thus requires an account of the source of law that is fundamentally social. This can be contrasted with Thomas Aquinas’s theory of law, which saw human law as having to conform to natural and eternal law in order to be valid as law in the first place.  For Aquinas, then, the source of law can be traced to God. A positivist account of law will have to trace the source of law to society.

One positivist account of the source of law is Austin and Bentham’s command theory of law. According to Austin and Bentham, the source of the law is the Sovereign: the persons with absolute de facto power. Law is thus a subset of the sovereign’s commands: those commands which are general orders that apply to a class of people or actions and that are backed up by force.

Hart rejects the command theory of law. For him, the command theory is unable to realistically capture the essence of laws, such as contract law, that create the framework for daily life. Instead, Hart introduces the idea of the external and internal aspects of law. The external aspect refers to the rules that govern outward behaviour. The internal aspect refers to the underlying rationale of law, the rules specifying the criteria of legal validity and the rules that determine when and how law changes and is adjudicated. Hart then proposes two necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of law. Firstly, the citizens of the legal system must generally obey the external aspects of law. Secondly, the officials of the legal system must accept the internal aspects of laws the common standards of official behaviour.

The question then arises: who are the officials in the system and what distinguishes them from mere citizens? Since it is only the officials who need have an internal attitude towards the system’s rules, this question is an important one. In the ordinary sense of the word, officials are simply the agents of the Sovereign, or members of the government who help rule over society.

This leads us to the question: who is the Sovereign? It would be inconsistent for Hart to say that the Sovereign is simply the person with absolute power in society. Since officials are appointed by the Sovereign, at least in some conceptual manner, we would revert back to a command theory of law if we simply say that the Sovereign is the one with absolute power. If we did, we could simply say that the only relevant command is the one where the Sovereign appoints his officials by force, and place Hart’s entire positivist account on the foundation of a command. Yet Hart insists, “Law is surely not the gunman situation writ large”.

The issue that this essay will attempt to address is thus formed. Is there some account for “who is the Sovereign” that a) allows Hart to distinguish between a Sovereign and a mere powerful gunman; and b) does not depend on some moral claim of legitimacy in order to do so. To answer this question, this essay will examine the political philosophies of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant introduced to us this week.

The Benevolent Thug

Hobbes’s political philosophy provides an answer to the question “who is the Sovereign”. Hobbes begins with the premise that people living in a state of nature are in a state of war of every person against every other. Living in such a state of nature would be, as Hobbes famously stated, “nasty, brutish and short”. Since every person, as a rational being, will see that a state of nature is inimical to his interests, he will consent to obey the authority of a Sovereign. This forms the basis of a social contract: the people mutually covenant with one another to obey a common authority, and they authorise one Sovereign to be that common authority.

The Sovereign, then, is the person who not only has absolute power, but who is also authorised with such power. He has authority insofar as that power is used to protect the security of the people. The Sovereign is thus distinguished from a mere powerful gunman because, in addition to having a powerful gun, he functions in such a way that protects the security of the people.

Taken alone, Hobbes’s political philosophy is insufficient to support Hart’s positivism. For Hobbes, the social contract provides a moral basis for the Sovereign, and thus the Sovereign’s law. The idea that the Sovereign is distinguished from a gunman because he protects the security of the people holds implicitly that the protection of security is morally good. Extending this critique, basing the legitimacy of the Sovereign on the fulfilment of any particular purpose is an implicit moral endorsement of that purpose. This would contradict Hart’s position on the separability of law and morals.

However, drawing inspiration from Hobbes, Hart may say that the Sovereign is the one who, in addition to having absolute power, uses that power in order to function according to some particular purpose. On this view, as long as the Sovereign is capable of functioning with respect to some purpose, the exact substance of the purpose (and its moral validity) is immaterial. Ironically then, Hart may then use Fuller’s 8 principles of legality as standards by which to determine whether the Sovereign is functional and to show that the concept of functionality is not meaningless.

Yet this still begs the question: defining the Sovereign as such, would Hart have escaped the command theory of law? It is submitted that he would not. If the moral purpose of the Hobbesian Sovereign is removed, then he can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from a powerful gunman. The idea of “functioning to achieve a purpose” is ultimately encompassed by the concept of power. Power here simply means the ability to achieve ends. Just as any gunman who orders that a monument be built in his honour is limited by the knowledge and mastery of physics at his command, any gunman who wishes to order society by law (ie, general rules) is limited by his knowledge and mastery of Fuller’s principles of legality. No distinction can be made between these two gunmen without making a distinction between the desirability of their respective purposes.

The General Whim

Rousseau provides a different answer to the question “who is the Sovereign” by introducing the idea of the general will. The general will is the common intention amongst the people within society to bind one another to some set of rules. According to Rousseau, the true Sovereign is the one chosen by the general will, and the general will speaks infallibly to the public morality. It is thus the general will which distinguishes the Sovereign from a mere powerful gunman.

Is the general will necessarily moral because there is some innate moral faculty universal amongst humans that guarantees knowledge of some objective moral truth? If this is true, Hart’s positivism will undoubtedly be defeated. If every community has a general will that guarantees knowledge of an objective moral truth, and the true Sovereign who is the source of law is chosen by this general will, then there will be a clear conceptual link between law and morality.

Fortunately for Hart, this conception of the general will is untenable. It is difficult to see why the general will guarantees knowledge of an objective moral truth. While reason may be a universal and innate faculty amongst humans, reason simply provides the capacity for moral knowledge and cannot guarantee it. Moreover, we may observe as a fact that different communities have different, and often times contradictory “wills”, and it would not make sense for two contradictory moral claims to both be objectively true.

We are thus left with a subjective moral philosophy to form the basis of Rousseau’s account of a general will. On this view, laws enacted by a Sovereign who is chosen by the general will are necessarily moral because morality is subjective and relative to the community’s standards. This account of Sovereignty and the source of law would contradict Hart’s positivism and Hart rightly rejects such accounts as dangerous. As Hart puts it, positivism helps us steer clear from the danger that “the existing law may supplant morality as a final test of conduct and so escape criticism”.

Nonetheless, Hart may attempt to modify Rousseau’s account of the Sovereign to make it compatible with his positivism. By removing any connection between the general will and morality (objective or subjective), he may use the general will to distinguish between a Sovereign and a mere gunman. Such a Sovereign may distinguish himself from a mere gunman on the grounds that he is chosen by the general will of the people. On this view, the fact that a Sovereign is chosen by the people elevates him to a position that is unique amongst any other gunman in society.

However, this account of the Sovereign would still not allow Hart to escape the gunman situation. According to Rousseau, every member of the community consents to sharing in the general will.  This consent entails that the citizen chooses to prioritise the general will over his personal will.  Hence, whenever there is a conflict between the general will and the personal will, the general will should be privileged.

However, without a claim that obeying the general will over the personal will is morally superior, there is no reason why the general will should be favoured over the personal will. Rousseau’s account for why the general will should be favoured is an inherently moral claim: the person who chooses the general will is choosing not to be free (on Rousseau’s positive account of freedom), and hence the community “forces him to be free”. Take away the general will’s claim to morality and we are left with the community which forces the person to obey. Hence, we return to a command theory of law and the gunman chosen by the general will is no different from any other gunman.

The Modern Mystic

Kant’s answer to the question of “who is the Sovereign” is derived from his moral philosophy. For Kant, an objective morality pre-determines what laws moral and rational beings can agree to. Hence, Kant’s social contract does not refer to any actual choice, but to the ideal choice of rational and moral humans. This social contract would then oblige the Sovereign to frame laws in such a way that the laws could be consented to by rational and moral men.

What can rational and moral men consent to? For Kant, the only basis for sovereignty that reasonable men could consent to is freedom. Freedom here is to be understood as independence. A person is independent if he is the one who decides the purposes his means will be used to pursue. Consequently, freedom requires that no person be subject to the choice of another. However, this freedom can only be achieved in a state of “rightful conditions”. These rightful conditions, then, make it necessary for the Sovereign to exist.

Kant’s account of the source of law thus does not end by simply accounting for the social contract that forms the basis for sovereignty. The source of law is not the Sovereign, but the underlying morality that both allows and requires the Sovereign’s existence. This underlying morality demands independence as a categorical imperative. Clearly, this vision of the source of law is in direct confrontation with Hart’s positivism and the separability thesis. The question we will attempt to address now is whether Kant’s philosophy defeats Hart’s positivism.

The structure of Kant’s philosophy is strikingly familiar with that adopted by positivism’s first rival theorist: St Thomas Aquinas. Like Aquinas before him, Kant attempts to present a comprehensive philosophy that coheres from “top to bottom”. Kant begins with a metaphysical thesis known as transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealism distinguishes between the world as it appears and another world of “things in themselves”. The latter is a transcendental realm that transmits sensory data from which we construct the world of appearances, but we may not know anything about this transcendental realm.

Adopting a transcendental metaphysics leads Kant to articulate an epistemology that draws a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are propositions which can be validated merely by an analysis of the meaning of its constituent concepts: for example, “Ice is a solid”. Synthetic propositions are propositions that cannot be validated by a mere analysis of the meaning of the concepts: for example, “Ice floats on water”. The proposition involves a synthesis of the subject with a new idea, and hence synthetic propositions tell us something new about the world while analytic propositions are mere tautologies.

The analytic-synthetic distinction is dependent on a division of the many characteristics subsumed under a concept into two groups: those which are included from the concept’s meaning (or definition), and those which are excluded. In the examples above, “solid” is said to be included in the meaning of “ice”, while “floats on water” is said to be excluded. This begs the question: how do you determine what is included in the meaning of a concept? This is where Kant’s transcendental idealism comes in: the “essential” characteristics of a given concept that constitutes its meaning is derived from the transcendental world of “things in themselves”.

Adopting such an epistemology then allows Kant to formulate his moral philosophy. Kant’s categorical imperative was a creative and novel combination of the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the older a priori-a posteriori distinction. Kant argued that moral statements are a priori synthetic propositions, and constructed an entire moral philosophy based on this idea. And, as already discussed, Kant’s political philosophy was then constructed based on his moral philosophy.

Just as Aquinas traced the source of human law to morality (natural law), to an epistemology based on reason, and then to God (eternal law), Kant’s account of human law can be traced to his moral philosophy, to his epistemology, and then to his transcendental idealism. Indeed, Kant may be said to be Aquinas’s true successor. However, just as Aquinas’s account of law was thrown into doubt when the catholic God was thrown into doubt, Kant’s account of law is thrown into doubt when his metaphysics is thrown into doubt.

One challenge transcendental idealism may face is from the growing study of linguistics. Particularly noteworthy here is the branch of linguistics known as cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics views the study of language as an integral part of understanding how our mind works.

Cognitive linguists are very interested in the study of metaphors. They view metaphors as the result of a special process for arriving at meaning. This special process is known as mapping: understanding one thing (the target domain), in terms of another (the source domain). For example, the statement “He is in danger” makes use of the metaphor states are locations. Here, the concept location allows us to understand the concept danger as a location that one can be in. Such metaphors are known as conceptual metaphors because they are mappings between conceptual domains in the human minds.

On this view, abstract concepts are understood by a process of mapping from literal, simple concepts. These concepts are said to be embodied, in that they arise out of the direct experiences between the human body and its environment. Such concepts would include spatial relations concepts which arise unconsciously from human perception. For instance, we automatically and unconsciously perceive an entity as in another, and hence form such a concept.

Consider then, the ontological claim, “A transcendental realm exists”. In order to meaningfully discuss this claim, one has to ask “What is the transcendental realm?” This may be answered, “It is a world that is beyond human understanding and which contains true and objective ‘things in themselves’.” A cognitive linguist may observe that our understanding of this abstract idea relies on a metaphorical mapping of basic concepts such as locations that allow us to conceive a world that is beyond something and that can contain something.

Consider further, the claim, “ДɷϣRØLEɷӟP exists”. When asked “What is ДɷϣRØLEɷӟP”, one may then answer, “It is a dog which is not a dog”. It is clear that such a concept would be meaningless and no meaningful conversation can be had about ДɷϣRØLEɷӟP. If our language and cognitive processes are fundamentally enbodied, then it would make no sense to discuss a transcendental realm. Such a concept can only be meaningful by reference to our own cognitive processes based on this realm, and yet claims to be beyond these processes. It is a concept which claims to break the links between itself and its constituent concepts, and in so doing loses all possible meaning.

The conclusion we may draw here, therefore, is that Hart’s positivism remains at odds with Kant’s philosophy and the latter does not defeat the former. Like Aquinas before him, Kant constructs an entire philosophy based on the acceptance of a mythical realm. This does not mean that there is no value in his political philosophy; it simply means that new foundations will have to be found for it.

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                                              

We return to the initial issue: Is there some account for “who is the Sovereign” that a) allows Hart to distinguish between a Sovereign and a mere powerful gunman; and b) does not depend on some moral claim of legitimacy in order to do so. Having considered Hobbes and Rousseau, we have seen that their accounts for the source of law are fundamentally premised on a particular moral philosophy. Should Hart attempt to modify their accounts in such a way to sever their political philosophies from their moral ones, he would invariable fail to meaningfully distinguish a Sovereign from a powerful gunman. This suggests an inherent tension between (a) and (b) that might be the grounds for more fruitful study.

The discussion then took a slight detour in an attempt to discuss Kant’s philosophy more fully. Kant has been characterised here as the successor to Aquinas: positivism’s first rival natural law theorist. Just as Aquinas’s account of the source of law can be traced to God, Kant’s account law can be traced to his transcendental idealism. It is suggested that this metaphysical claim is untenable and has been thrown into doubt, requiring the search for new foundations if one is to save his political philosophy.

However, even if one is able to find new foundations for Kant’s political philosophy, it may be observed that Kant’s political philosophy sets a very high standard for the Sovereign. Such a high standard will necessarily exclude many states that currently exist. If we adopt Kant’s philosophy and say that these states are not true states, what should we call their “laws”? This provides us with a justification for positivism: it allows us to incorporate currently accepted linguistic norms to facilitate discourse. Instead, Kant’s political philosophy can be seen as an account for what law ought to be.

Ultimately, then, legal positivism appears to be a more tenable philosophical position on the nature of law. However, Hart’s insistence that law is not just a matter of power leads to a difficult search for a source of law that is neither based on power nor based on morality. Perhaps it is time for legal positivists to abandon that search, and recognise that the source of law is power, and sovereignty belongs to those who can assert it. The mere assertion of sovereignty is not necessarily moral, and morality is a separate inquiry of what those with power ought to use that power for. In the wake of totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, this may even be a more morally justified position. After all, the first step to protecting your moral integrity as an individual is to recognise that the biggest threat to that integrity is the person pointing his gun at your face.

As the New Year and a new semester at school arrives, there is a temptation to make plans. I’ve always wished to be someone who was efficient and organised, but I know that that is simply not true. Since my primary school days, every year I would resolve to make full use of the school-issued journal: to keep track of homework and set deadlines and goals and be organised. Needless to say, I have never written more than a few sentences in any of those journals.

Should I be concerned that I don’t make plans? Well, that’s not entirely accurate either. In terms of broad, general goals that serve as overarching purposes of my life, I think I have those. It’s those little plans, those plans that ensure you don’t start watching QI a week before an examination, that I lack and have always lacked.

So I guess I’ll go on making it up as I go along, having nothing else to guide me but my on-the-spot judgments, for better or for worse.

Also, I hope to start blogging more. No matter how half assed this post is, at the very least I will feel more comfortable blogging after this bar-lowering post hahaha.

Bleh, that’s all I have to say right now. With a horribly runny nose I can hardly think straight.

So, here I am, just randomly writing down whatever comes into my head. No, this is not going to be one of those long winded essays that will probably gather some rolled eyes. This will just be a typical blog post where I just scribble down my thoughts quickly (before GSL starts).

Anyway, as I alluded to previously (GSL= Global Starcraft League), much of my time during this long post ORD break was dedicated to my hobby: E-Sports. Otherwise known as gaming. But really, it is a sport and I can now easily answer the question “so what hobby do you have” (which according to some law prof I can’t actually remember is an important question to have an answer to).

But of course, it is that time of my life where I will no longer be able to spend as much time as I have on my hobby because REAL LIFE is starting again soon. That means, tomorrow.

So yes, school finally starts again (after two and a half years) tomorrow and I am partly freaking out at the challenge that lies ahead.

It’s the build up, you know. For all my days as a sad little conscript, I held to the prospect of law school as a shield of sorts: a constant reminder that there is life after National Service Slavery. And now that it is finally here, there’s this fear that it will not be as awesome as I have hyped it up to be in my head for the past 2 years.

But overall, I’m quite looking forward to school. Challenge accepted.

And I can’t help but be reminded of that episode of Grey’s Anatomy where Cristina was all, “I don’t want to be in diapers. I want to HAVE to be in diapers.”

So yeah, I’ll try my best to keep my promise to myself to work my ass off and do my best. And to help me fight off my default lethargy, I’ll have to tap on the anger that I have cultivated for the past two years in the army.

That’s it for now, I guess. Hopefully I’ll get into the mood to write better posts soon. But for now, here’s just a happy little post to catch a breath before the dive.

The longest, and perhaps most heated, discussion centered on the compulsory Community Involvement Programme in schools. For some reason, I felt a deep disagreement with much of what the teachers were saying about CIP. I probably differ from the rest of my peers with regard to the extent of my disagreement; my disagreement is fundamental: beyond mere execution and implementation issues.

On hindsight, I probably did not articulate my disagreements convincingly. Given my temperament, the format of the dialogue, and the unorthodoxy of my views, it was probably inevitable that I would be more provocative than persuasive. On the other hand, perhaps it was more useful that I was provocative, since it was an ethnography exercise for the teachers anyway.

Yet thinking back on the incident, I had difficulty explaining my instinctive disagreements even to myself. During the discussion, I made several points that made sense separately, but which did not easily make up a coherent stand. It has hence taken me a full week after the event to finally be able to state clearly what is so wrong with compulsory CIP in schools.

I begin with a point that I made to the teachers: I do not believe that it is the business of the state to engage in “character building”. The phrase itself implies a blueprint by which the state attempts to create a certain mould of individuals. It is a fundamentally authoritarian school of thought.

However, the basis of this particular objection of mine lies in my belief that education, ideally, should be private. In other words, my problem with “character building” has got to do with my problem with the government being in the business of providing education at all. On the other hand, it is neither useful nor convincing to premise my objections to compulsory CIP on my objections to public schooling, given that we already have public schools which do not seem to be faring too badly.

Consequently, given that we already are in the business of character building, the question then becomes what kind of characters do we want to build. To the immense credit of our education system, we have most of it right. We teach our students how to communicate with language, how to calculate with arithmetic, how to understand the natural world, and how to understand the past, correctly. For the luckiest of us, we also learn how to understand understanding.

Should schools try to instill moral values, then? Fundamentally, I do not think there is a difference between teaching “The sun rises in the east” and “It is wrong not to help those in need”. Of course, there is a whole debate in epistemology about the difference between such claims but I won’t get into it right now.

More to the point then, I also do not think there is a difference between teaching “It is wrong to initiate force on peaceful individuals” and “It is wrong not to help those in need”. Since I believe that it is important for schools to teach the former, I cannot simply reject the latter by virtue of it being a moral claim.

In fact, it is neither possible nor desirable for schools to be value neutral: how can we decide what to teach if we have no standard of values by which to decide? Indeed, the decision to teach astronomy and not astrology is based on the value that says “fact is better than bullshit”. (I may have misspoke on this “value-neutral” subject during another part of the dialogue.)

Therefore, I reject my initial objections of compulsory CIP as authoritarian and value laden. The first is true, but not particularly relevant given that we already have state provision of education. The second is simply misguided: education has to have values, the question then becomes what kind.

Why then, am I still against compulsory CIP? My view is actually quite simple.

A particular CIP activity A provides X amount of utility/benefits/value to a student, be it an increased understanding of the world at large, or a personal sense of fulfillment. However, it comes at a certain cost Y, usually in terms of time and effort. When X>Y, the student will choose to undertake the activity whether or not it is compulsory. However, when A is compulsory, the student for whom X<Y will suffer a net loss of -(Y-X). Given that X and Y is different for every student, no bureaucrat can guarantee that no student will suffer a net loss from A being compulsory. Hence, there is absolutely no need for CIP to be compulsory: the student for whom the activity is beneficial will choose to undertake it regardless,  while a policy of compulsory CIP activities will inevitably lead to a net loss to at least some students.

I think this stand of mine was quite clearly implied in what I was saying. The teachers tried to respond to this argument in 3 main ways, and how they responded is particularly revealing as to how the reasoning behind compulsory CIP is flawed.

The first, is to say quite simply, students don’t know what’s good for them. They underestimate the benefits of the activity, or overestimate the costs of the activity. Hence, students cannot be trusted to make their cost benefit analyses. Instead, the educators shall do their own analysis, and impose whatever activity they deem to be beneficial.

This view was quite clearly implied by a teacher who asked us, “How many would do CIP if it weren’t compulsory?”, and then proceeded to recount a story of how a particular student was initially reluctant to go for a particular CIP activity and later found that it was enriching.

The problem with this view is that the educators were not only saying that they knew better than their students what was best for them. They were also saying that they knew better than the parents of these students.

Nobody is saying that young children or adolescents should be given full say on their education: clearly, many of them will be unable to make an informed choice. However, surely parents are in the best position to be cognizant of a student’s particular needs, compared to the designer of some CIP activity. At the very least, they are the best approximate of the particular needs and interests of their child.

Moreover, no single activity can benefit all students equally, and not all students experience the costs of the activity identically. Hence, it is not possible for the designer to be cognizant of the hugely varied cost-benefit-scale of all students. Why not simply make CIP activities optional, with the opportunity for student to opt out if they have their parents’ consent?

The second way one might defend compulsory CIP is to say: compulsory CIP is justified because society as a whole benefits from the particular activity, in spite of the fact that a student might be suffering a net loss. In this view, the individual student’s net loss -(Y-X) is less than Benefit Z that accrues to society, or the particular community or beneficiary, and hence the individual student’s loss is justified.

I think a teacher was alluding to this idea when he asked us, “Who has the moral authority to decide whether a particular activity is valuable?” Prior to that question, I was talking about how some CIP activities simply do not benefit the students at all: especially those of a menial nature. It seems to me, that the teacher was hinting at the idea that these CIP activities are valuable to society, even if they are not to the students.

My first objection to this view is that taking value from an individual by force in order to pass on that value to other people is inherently wrong.

More importantly though, is that if this is the justification for compulsory CIP, then we should call a spade a spade. Compulsory charity is not charity. It’s called taxation.

The third approach people adopt when trying to justify compulsory CIP is the most insidious one: a subtle point that has taken me some effort to identify. Indeed, nobody during the dialogue seemed to explicitly state this view. Hence, I will spend some effort explaining why I think this approach does exist in the minds of some (not all) of compulsory CIP’s defenders.

In this view, compulsory CIP is justified precisely because individual students suffer a loss from it. This loss that students suffer is called sacrifice, and it is this sacrifice that is held up to be a moral virtue. Since sacrifice is a virtue, and students (and their parents) will not willingly make these sacrifices, the state comes in to enforce sacrifice, hopefully teaching the students that sacrifice is virtuous in the process.

Accordingly, the whole point of compulsory CIP is to teach students not to be “selfish” or “self-centered” or “self-interested” or “egocentric”. Namely, students should not be bothered by the -(Y-X) loss they suffer, and embrace that -(Y-X) loss as a virtuous sacrifice.

Witness then, the glee with which some teachers talk about how the CIP experience is “humbling” for students. In this view, compulsory CIP is justified precisely because it puts those selfish, arrogant students in their place, by making apparent how small they actually are in the world, by demonstrating to them that their selfishness will not be tolerated, and by showing them that true virtue lies in their sacrifice. And when the prideful student finally admits that he is “humbled”, he is hailed as a success story of the programme.

I hope I will not be misunderstood to be against community service. Absolutely no way am  I against service freely rendered and happily offered. Yet there is a clear line between service and sacrifice. Service implies payment, be it in cash, in experience, or in personal fulfillment. Sacrifice is precisely the opposite: it implies loss, suffering and the offering of something precious for no payment.

I believe many of my friends can instinctively see why a moral code which holds sacrifice as an ideal is both horrifying and revolting. Of course, many (most?) will find my disparaging remarks towards the idea of sacrifice to be pure evil. Unfortunately, I will have to leave a detailed discussion of the doctrine of sacrifice to another day.

For now, it will suffice for me to identify that this is an approach that people do take when thinking about compulsory CIP. The doctrine of sacrifice lies implicit in many people’s thoughts about compulsory CIP. For now, I will have to satisfy myself with identifying its nature.

Hence, I believe I have sufficiently touched on the 3 main ways compulsory CIP is usually justified. First, compulsory CIP is said to be efficient in benefiting individual students, which ignores the fact that user choice is the most effective way of generating efficiency in any system. Second, compulsory CIP is said to be good for “society” or the “community” even if individual students might suffer losses. If that is the case, compulsory CIP is effectively a tax. Third, compulsory CIP is said to uphold the moral code of sacrifice, which says that precisely because students suffer losses that their actions are virtuous. Ultimately, I will perhaps show in a different post, such a moral code leads to suicide.

In this analysis, I will attempt to focus this election into one fundamental issue which I will then discuss. I do not declare this issue to be fundamental arbitrarily: I will show the reasons why I believe this single issue to be the most fundamental.

Establishing Parameters

In order to make this analysis, I will make the assumption that this election is about the PAP versus the Workers’ Party. Firstly, I regard the WP as the most credible opposition party, while I have severe issues with the ideas of the other parties. Secondly, it would be extremely unfair for me to write of the opposition as though they are one nebulous blob, considering that the opposition parties are not identical.

Now, let us look at what this election fundamentally is about.

The PAP would like us to view this election as about policies and management of the economy. They tell us that the election is about electing new PAP members who are, in the future, going to be the elite managers of our economy. They are, perhaps, most at home discussing concrete policy issues. They are also very comfortable lambasting parties such as the SDP for having a spending proposal amounting to $60 billion.

If the election is about whose policies are better, there is no doubt in my mind that I would vote for the PAP. However, no rational voter should view this election as about policies and economic management for one simple reason: We are not choosing between two executive teams. The PAP without a shadow of a doubt, will be the next government, and continue managing the economy as skilfully as they have. Even if all 23 WP candidates get elected, the PAP will still have a supermajority (more than two thirds) in parliament, and will still get to choose the next cabinet team.

The PAP would also like us to believe that this election is about municipal issues. Here, they talk about issues such as HDB upgrading, management of town councils and maintaining the value of your residential property.

While localized municipal issues are important, the national election has next to zero impact on municipal issues. Most municipal issues are not taken care of by your MP: they are overseen by government agencies such as LTA, NPB, NEA and the URA. The only thing the MP, and his town council, does is contract cleaners to clean your estate and organize some community club activities. It does not take an IQ of 200 to hire a cleaning company or organize some community get together: I am sure the WP can do such things as well as the PAP. This is evidenced by how Hougang’s HDB value is at around $500k+ compared to Pasir Ris’s HDB value around $400k+: at the very least it demonstrates that the WP is not so bad that it will destroy the value of the municipalities it governs.

Most importantly, if you make municipal issues the fundamental concern underlying your vote, you are giving up consideration of a far more important choice: a choice that is uniquely Singaporean, and which will affect every other issue this country will ever face.

Hegemonic Democracy or Liberal Democracy

With its message “Towards a First World Parliament”, the WP has been pitch-perfect with its recognition of this choice voters have, and the centrality of this choice.

On the one hand, we have the PAP which sincerely believes that liberal democracy is flawed, and that its vision of democracy (a hegemonic democracy, if you will) is better. Hence, you hear PAP leaders talking about how a strong opposition presence hampers the governance of a country. This is evident in their driver analogy (don’t distract the driver with your backseat driving), as well as PM Lee’s speech in 2006 about how politicking in other democracies is a distraction to actual governance.

Drawing inspiration, perhaps, from Plato’s idea of a country ruled by Philosopher Kings, the PAP envisions a political system where a single party acts as an enlightened hegemon with near absolute power. Such an idea does have its appeal to Singaporeans: the PAP has played its part as economic masterminds well; arguably better even than the elected politicians of most liberal democracies.

On the other hand, it should be clear that the WP’s vision for a “First World Parliament” is a vision for a liberal democracy. And the first step towards a liberal democracy is greater opposition presence in parliament.   If one were to pay close attention to their rally speeches, they have been constantly posing one underlying question to voters: what kind of political system do you want?

For those who support liberal democracy and all the ideals it entails, to simply reject hegemonic democracy as totalitarian is foolhardy. While hegemonic democracy in Singapore may have deviated greatly against traditional liberal democracy, it has characteristics that separate it from totalitarianism: respect for property rights and the rule of law being the most important.

More importantly, to satisfy oneself with just calling hegemonic democracy undemocratic is to ignore the true concerns of those who sympathise with or support hegemonic democracy: hegemonic democracy under the PAP does have its merits compared to a traditional liberal democracy.

I myself am personally torn over this issue. For almost any other country, I would recommend a liberal democracy over a hegemonic democracy. Yet in Singapore, the PAP has done well at the helm of hegemony. What are the consequences of maintaining PAP hegemony, and what tradeoffs might we expect if we move towards a liberal democracy?

The Consequences of Political Servitude

If we choose to vote for the PAP over the WP this election, we are not choosing them to be our executive government: that was never in doubt. In actual fact, we would be choosing to maintain PAP hegemony. We would be choosing to subject ourselves to the absolute power of the PAP; essentially, we would be choosing political servitude. I do not think such a choice to be totally invalid, but such a choice has its consequences.

1.       An Aristocracy of Pull

Whenever people think about the dangers of politicians using political power for personal gain, they think about corruption: the trading of political favours for financial gain. Yet what is often ignored is the potential for a different kind of trade: the trading of political favours for personal favours.

Hence, the phrase “aristocracy of pull” refers to a class of people who have political power and can thus trade political pull and political favours amongst one another. This phrase was coined by philosopher Ayn Rand. The Chinese have something similar: what we call guan xi or “personal connections”.

However, there is one crucial difference. Guan xi is usually used to describe personal connections in the business world. In the business world, when you trade favours, you are trading your own property and putting your own property at stake. If Steve Jobs gives Bill Gates’ son a top paying job at Apple in exchange for Bill Gates’ giving Job’s son a high paying job at Microsoft, they are trading on the basis of their own property. If I am a manager and I choose to hire a friend’s son for a job, I am risking the ire of my boss (and my own job) if my friend’s son is incompetent.

This is different in the political world. A politician who trades political favours trades on the basis of power and property that ultimately belong to the taxpayers. Moreover, a politician with absolute power puts nothing at risk when he makes such a trade.

Political pull works in insidious ways. While corruption will always leave a paper trail, it is almost impossible to track the exchange of political favours. How can we tell when A does a favour for B, who does a favour for C, who does a favour for D, who is A’s son? Because it is so hard to tell when an aristocracy of pull has arisen, we must look at the conditions that will prevent it from arising in the first place.

In particular, there are two factors that contribute to the creation of a modern day aristocracy. The first is the scope of political power: how much you can do with your political power. The greater the scope of political power, the more power a politician has to control more segments of society, the greater his ability to trade political favours. It is not by coincidence that communist countries like the Soviet Union undeniably had an aristocracy of pull. With total economic control in the hands of the government, which entails the ability of the government to control prices and output, rationing of goods, and even assignment of jobs, the politicians in communist and socialist countries have an immense scope for their powers.

The second factor is the concentration of political power: how few or how many parties hold political power. The greater the concentration of power, the greater the ability the politician has to exercise power with impunity. Again, it is not by coincidence that one-man or one-family dictatorships like in Saudi Arabia have an aristocracy of pull. Except we usually call it a dynasty instead.

Let us consider the scope of political power in Singapore. In Singapore, the PAP’s political power extends beyond the reaches of the executive. It has influence across the judiciary, the media, academia, the civil service, the military, grassroots organizations like the PA (People’s Association), GLCs (Government Linked Corporations), and SWFs (Sovereign Wealth Funds). Its powers also extend into our private lives: it controls what we can watch, how we spend our savings and whom we may make love to.

On the other hand, it must be stated that the PAP has limited the scope of its exercise of power by not interfering with economic property rights much; it has managed to maintain high levels of economic freedom. Thus, while the scope of PAP’s political powers is still large, it is nowhere near as large as the scope of political powers that exists in socialist or communist countries. This is something to bear in mind, since some policies proposed by the opposition will increase the scope of government power.

Let us consider the concentration of political power in Singapore. Simply put, political power in Singapore is concentrated completely within the PAP. No organization independent of the PAP has any significant political power at all. Hence, PAP’s political power may and has been described by many as absolute. In fact, having absolute power concentrated within the PAP is the defining feature of PAP’s vision of a hegemonic democracy.

Given that political power in Singapore is completely concentrated within the PAP and that the PAP’s powers extend across many aspects of the country and our lives, we must consider the dangers of cultivating an aristocracy of pull. For all we know, such an aristocracy may already exist. Do I have any evidence that such an aristocracy exists in Singapore? No. Do I think the conditions are in place such that there is a significant risk of an aristocracy of pull arising? Yes.

2.       A Monopoly on Ideas

In a hegemonic democracy, the ruling party’s ideas are imposed, completely and absolutely, throughout the entire state machinery. Ultimately, through policy, these ideas are imposed on the people. The ruling party becomes the sole arbiter of the validity of ideas, and a monopoly on ideas arises.

Like most monopolies, this monopoly is created and maintained by the use of political power to erect high barriers of entry for any competition. In particular, the GRC system, constant gerrymandering by the election committee under the PM’s office, and the PAP imposed logistical difficulties for oppositional outreach programmes at the grassroots level has made it nearly prohibitively difficult for opposition parties to compete with the PAP.

For supporters of a hegemonic democracy, this is the whole point of hegemony. After all, as long as we get the ideas right, we will be able to get it fully right, without hindrance or dilution. Therefore, they conclude that however “unfair” the political playing field is, the ends justify the means. Even though I am sympathetic to this reasoning, I believe there are three flaws that come with the PAP having a monopoly on ideas.

First, some of PAP’s ideas are downright wrong. Of course, some are right and I am glad policies that reflect those ideas are fully in place and working. Specifically, I fully support PAP’s ideals of meritocracy and respect for property rights.

However, the PAP’s total lack of regard for personal freedom and equal protection under the law is reprehensible. In particular, the belief of a core group within the PAP that gays are a group of social abominations is deeply wrong and the resultant policies have been extremely harmful.

Second, like in any monopoly, PAP’s monopoly results in a lack of incentives for them to improve and innovate. Improvement and innovation may come in many different ways. It may come in policies that address the concerns of Singaporeans in a way that is still sensible and logical. It may also come in the form of better public communications of its ideas.

While critics of the PAP often accuse PAP politicians of conceit, contempt and complacency, I do not lend such allegations any intrinsic weight. However, such accusations are an indication that the PAP’s monopoly on ideas has allowed them to ignore their duty to communicate their ideas clearly to the public.

Its monopoly on ideas has also led to the lack of incentives for the PAP to find new ways to rejuvenate its party at less monetary costs to the taxpayers. This brings me to my third and final point.

Thirdly, a monopoly grants the monopolist supernormal profits and the PAP charges the taxpayers extremely high for its ministers. Now, whenever one discusses such an emotionally charged issue, one must always be ever more vigilant that one’s logic will be compromised.

In particular, some criticisms of high ministerial pay are wrongheaded. For example, the argument that high ministerial pay will prevent ministers from understanding voters is false: nobody would require his doctor to have had cancer before treating him for cancer. High ministerial pay will not compromise the abilities of ministers to understand issues. I also reject the argument that the rewards of political office should come primarily in the form of feeling satisfied with serving the public: I do not judge political self interests to be nobler than economic self interest, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking material rewards.

If a monopoly were to arise naturally out of the particular circumstance of the market, there would be less concern of the monopolist’s supernormal profits. Similarly, if the PAP gains a natural monopoly in the marketplace of ideas without any artificial, politically imposed barriers to entry, its high ministerial pay will be justified.

However, a monopolist’s supernormal profits become an issue worthy of consideration when such profits are maintained even when an alternative exists. In this case, the alternative is unable to enter the market due to artificially erected barriers to entry. Voters deserve the right to choose an opposition party that has near identical policies and management skills as the PAP but which is willing to work at a lower cost, if such a party exists.  The WP has shown indications that its ideas are similar enough to the PAP, and has shown signs that they may be competent managers as well. Given that such an alternative exists, PAP’s artificially maintained monopoly and monopolistic profits become less justified.

3.       The Lack of Accountability

Whenever people discuss the issue of accountability in Singapore’s political system, the supporters of liberal democracy will point out that Singapore’s hegemonic democracy lacks accountability. In response, those who support our hegemonic democracy will shrug and point to the PAP’s track record, in an attempt to show that despite lacking accountability, hegemonic democracy under the PAP has benefitted the people nonetheless.

I believe a re-examination of why a government should be accountable to its people is in order.

The necessity of accountability in any political system is based on a single, fundamental premise: No government can exist without taking property away by force from its people, the taxpayers.

Since a government exists solely on account of private property owned by taxpayers, such taxation is only justified if the government is acting in some kind of fiduciary capacity. In other words, taxation is justified if and only if the government is acting as an agent of taxpayers.

Such were the underlying principles behind the American revolutionist’s cry “No taxation without representation”. In protest against their British colonial masters who taxed them and yet did not represent them, the Americans chose violent revolution to protect their property. That choice, and the subsequent decision to enshrine accountability in their constitution, has had immense effects throughout history across the world.

The only way taxpayers can check and ensure that the government is acting as their agent is if there is some mechanism within the political system through which they can hold their government accountable. At the very least, such a mechanism must allow taxpayers to discharge the government from its fiduciary duties.

No self respecting investor would choose to invest in a company whose managers cannot be held accountable; no self respecting shareholder will accept a company where there is no way to discharge managers for failing to fulfil their fiduciary duties. Similarly, no self respecting taxpayer should choose to pay taxes to a government which they cannot hold accountable to them.

In fact, the need for political accountability in political governance is much more important than the need for corporate accountability in corporate governance.

Firstly, as an investor, you make an active choice to place your property in the hands of a particular management team managing the company. In contrast, as a taxpayer, the government does not require your express consent to take your property from you: it does so with a gun.

Secondly, as an investor, you may sell your stake in a company if you no longer believe the management to be working in your best interests. In contrast, most taxpayers do not have the luxury of choice to move to another country with another government.

Thirdly, as an investor, the maximum amount of control the management team has over your property is the quantity of your investment. If your investment in a company fails, the most you will lose is the entirety of your investment. In contrast, as a taxpayer, a government has the potential to control every single aspect of your life. The absolute worst that can happen if you fund the activities of the wrong sort of government is for you to lose every single thing you value in life: witness North Korea and Myanmar.

Consequently, the argument that the PAP government has performed its role as the agent of taxpayers well thus far carries no weight. As taxpayers, we cannot take it on faith that the PAP will continue to act as our agent and fulfil its fiduciary duties into the future. Even more absurd, is to make this leap of faith on the basis of the PAP’s kindness and goodwill. There needs to be an in built mechanism that gives taxpayers oversight on how the government spends their money.

By completely insulating the government from the oversight of the taxpayers, the lack of accountability is the single most important reason to reject PAP’s hegemonic democracy on principle alone.

The Risks of Economic Serfdom

I will now discuss the tradeoffs involved if we choose to move towards a liberal democracy by voting for the WP. Here, I will not be discussing specific WP policies for the aforementioned reason that we are not choosing between two executive teams. Moreover, I believe I have touched sufficiently on the policy shortcomings of WP compared to the PAP, though such shortcomings are fairly minor, in another note.

Instead, I will be discussing certain trends of thought that underlie the arguments of a core group of WP supporters. I believe some of these trends, if promulgated, will move Singapore towards economic serfdom and deterioration. To the extent a Singaporean liberal democracy will lend these trends political clout, accepting liberal democracy will also mean accepting the risks of economic serfdom.

1.       The Collectivist Configuration of Society

In order to explain what I mean by the “collectivist configuration” and how it permeates much of our socio-political discourse, I shall first explain my view on the configuration of society: what I call the individualistic configuration of society.

The individualistic configuration of society begins with a single fundamental premise: You naturally claim ownership of your own person. This claim springs, at least in part, from the uniquely intimate knowledge and control of your bodily processes; it springs from the constitution of your being. By extension, you claim complete ownership of the fruits of your labour, and you and you alone own your property.

Therefore, if you were to walk along the streets and a stranger were to ask you to give him some money, you have the right to give him some of your money, but you also have the right to refuse. Moreover, while you might be more inclined to offer him assistance if he explains his situation, you would be shocked if he said, “Give me back my money” instead of “Could you please help me”.

More importantly, you would be horrified if the stranger took out a gun and robbed you of your money. No matter how much the stranger needed your money, it would be wrong for him to use force to take it from you. The fact that the stranger might have the support of a majority of your neighbours to rob you shouldn’t make it any less wrong.

In contrast, the collectivist configuration of society holds that the substructure of the country is fundamentally collectively owned by society. One way to think about it is to say that you own the soil, but society owns the flower pot within which your soil sits. In that way, societal ownership is more fundamental than individual ownership.

The government, then, is the overlord which represents society as a whole. Since society ultimately owns everything, the government as society’s appointed representative can override the ownership of any particular individual. Property then, is a set of permissions determined by the government and delegated to you by the government. When a rearrangement of property would be good, that’s what the government should do.

Now, all I have done so far is to make an existence claim: the individualist and collectivist configuration of society exist in the minds of people. I will now show that the collectivist configuration of society is given particular prominence in the language of people who tend to support the opposition in Singapore.

Specifically, let us consider the narrative of the economic pie that opposition supporters often use.  In this narrative, the economic pie in Singapore has been unequally distributed: the privileged few take a disproportionately large part of the pie, while the ordinary many are left with little pieces of leftovers. Hence, there is a need for the government to divide the pie more equally.

If one were to look deeper into this metaphor, it is saying this: Society, collectively, has produced a pie. Therefore, society collectively owns the pie. Hence, the government, as the representatives of society, should divide the pie equally amongst society.

This makes no sense under an individualistic view of ownership. I bake my pie and you bake yours: there is no one “mega pie”. If you want a piece of my pie, you can ask me for it, but you do not get to use force to take it. The economic pie narrative only makes sense if one assumes a collectivist view of ownership.

As I am writing this, I see a comment which has given me another example of how the collectivist’s language is embedded in our language. The commenter writes, “The educated can find employment anywhere in the world but this is not the case of the old and blue-collared. This does not mean we discard them because they are past their ‘use-by’ date.”

Again, this makes no sense under an individualistic view of ownership: how can I discard something that I have never owned? If I choose not to buy Nike shoes, I am not, in any sense of the word, throwing a pair a Nike shoes away: I am merely giving up the opportunity to buy those shoes. On the other hand, this makes sense under a collectivist view of ownership. In the comment, the discarder in question is “we” the people, “we” as society. And since under the collectivist view society ultimately owns everything (including people), “we” should not discard these people whom we own (only property can have a “use by date”).

Hence, there are good grounds to believe that if we move towards a liberal democracy, the collectivist view of society will gain political traction. I will now explain why I believe this to be a bad thing and how this can thus be considered a “risk” of moving towards liberal democracy.

Firstly, the collectivist configuration of society is wrong in principle.

One, a human being is a conscious being with autonomy and independence. There is something deeply wrong with forcing one man to work for the sake of another man at the point of a gun. For the exact same reason, slavery and serfdom are wrong. Consequently, while I completely agree that fair and equitable economic outcomes are a good thing, it is wrong to use governmental force to achieve it. To do so would be to initiate force on peaceful individuals whose only “crime” was to be able and productive.

Two, the principle of equality under the law must accord equal protection to a man of means and a man of needs. It sometimes scares me how some people seem to think that men of wealth are not men who deserve justice at all. Even though we may feel that a poor man should get more protection from the law, it is not by coincidence that the symbolic figure of justice, Justitia, wears a blindfold.

Secondly, accepting the collectivist configuration of society will lead to bad outcomes. This is primarily because people who accept the collectivist view tend to favour a command based economy, as compared to a market based economy. I cannot go into a huge discussion on why the former is much worse than the latter. It would suffice for me to say that throughout the 20^th Century, the poorest people of the world have been running away from societies that more fully embrace collectivism to societies that do so less. Specifically, North Koreans run South, East Berliners ran west, and the Chinese people ran to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

All in all, these are the reasons why I do fear that a movement towards a liberal democracy in Singapore will allow collectivism to gain a stronger political foothold.

2.       Voter Biases

Believers in the PAP’s vision of a hegemonic democracy often sincerely hold an unstated belief that should Singapore have a liberal democracy, voters would choose wrongly. Of course, any time such opinions are expressed by them, they are accused of being elitist and they choose to remain silent about it next time.

Here, I will discuss why there are indeed good grounds to believe that the average voter is biased in such a way that prevents them from truly engaging certain issues on a rational level. I must first clarify, though, that I am not saying that voters are stupid, or incapable of understanding issues. Instead, I am saying that there are certain systemic biases that seem to exist within electorates of any modern democracy. If it is true that such biases exist, it can only be a good thing for voters to become more aware of them.

I will be addressing two biases that I think exist strongly amongst the Singaporean electorate.

(a)    Anti-foreign Bias

The anti-foreign bias is the tendency for voters to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners. I can cite two reasons why I think such a bias exists.

First, let us consider the argument that foreign workers steal jobs from Singaporeans. The argument is simple: I am applying for a job to wash the dishes of a restaurant and I am willing to work at $5 an hour. A foreign worker who is identically skilled as me is applying for the same job, and is willing to work at $3 an hour because he comes from a country where $3 is a lot of money. There is unfair price competition here; the foreigner has stolen my job.

Yet consider a similar argument. I am applying for a job to wash the dishes of a restaurant and I am willing to work at $5 an hour. A dishwashing machine is able to wash dishes at the same rate as me, but it costs only $3 an hour to operate. This is unfair competition: I cannot possibly compete with a machine which never needs to rest. Yet I am not going to say that a machine has stolen my job. I will say that I need to learn new skills and move with the times.

In the first scenario, many people would recommend government action that make the foreigner more expensive to level the playing field so local workers can compete. Yet almost nobody would recommend that the government should tax all machinery that reduces the need for manpower. And certainly nobody in their right mind would demand that the government control the “influx” of technology by some quota system or another.

The economic impact of cost savings in both cases is the same. And many people can immediately see that the cost savings from better technology is immensely beneficial: nobody would recommend we ban calculators and hire people to do calculations by hand in order to create more jobs. Yet when the cost savings in question come from a human being from a foreign land, all of a sudden these cost savings are bad: they “benefit employers at the expense of employees”, or they “lead to inflation”. If these were at all true, then perhaps the government should restrict our access to technology as well.

Second, let us consider the argument that the presence foreigners in Singapore has led to a rise in the costs of living. Again, the argument is simple: foreigners buy consumer goods, and hence make these goods more expensive.

However, most of the people who make this argument simultaneously believe that the government should do more to incentivise locals to raise children. In fact, they precisely wish for there to be more locals so that there can be fewer foreigners. Yet new citizens in the form of new Singaporean children will also buy consumer goods, and hence supposedly make consumer goods more expensive as well.

What these examples seem to mean, is that many people simply do not like foreigners. This innate dislike creates a tendency for these people to distort their reasoning, leading many of them to simultaneously hold contradictory conclusions. The gymnastics I have seen some people perform with their reasoning have left me quite astounded at times.

(b)   Anti-market Bias

The anti-market bias is the tendency for voters to underestimate the benefits of the market mechanism. In particular, many people do not understand how prices allow society to coordinate itself without central direction by providing us with information. Often times, they see prices as simply  a result of the greed of the businessman, rather than the result of the interaction between the businessman’s willingness and ability to produce and the consumer’s demand. The fact that prices can be true, in that they truly reflects the circumstances of the market, and therefore cannot be denied no matter what the government does is also lost.

More important, perhaps, is the perception of the market as an “impersonal force”. How can we place our trust in something that cannot be seen or heard? Hence, people conclude that we need to place bureaucrats to control the market at every turn. After all, a bureaucrat in charge of the market will humanise the market and make sure we humans are protected.

Now, many people have criticised me of not taking this or that factor into account in my analyses. Yet the sheer number of possible “factors” in any given issue also means that it is impossible for a sincere bureaucrat to really take them all into account; what more the bureaucrat with political interests to protect.

Clearly, my view that there is anti-market or anti-foreign bias is based on the premise that several of the people’s views on such issues are misconceptions. I cannot go into every one of them, so I leave it to the readers to decide if such biases exist. It would suffice for me to say here that, should such biases exist, voters in a liberal democracy may make the wrong choices and I will have to accept the risk of voters making such wrong choices as part and parcel of liberal democracy.

Weighing the Tradeoffs

Thus far, I have characterized the choice for voters to be between PAP’s hegemonic democracy and WP’s liberal democracy. In examining the different choices, I have put forth the idea that choosing hegemonic democracy would mean accepting the consequences of political servitude, while choosing liberal democracy would mean accepting some risk of economic serfdom and decline.

This is not an easy choice for me to make, so I shall attempt to carefully weigh the tradeoffs involved.

Firstly, while economic freedom is deeply important, political freedom is an important freedom as well. Therefore, it may make sense for us to trade a little bit of our economic freedom under the PAP’s hegemonic democracy for a huge bit more political freedom under WP’s vision of a liberal democracy.

More importantly, while I do think economic freedom to be more important than political freedom, I do not wish to understate the importance of political freedom. In particular, the lack of political freedom and respect for civil rights in Singapore has led to an entire community of gay and lesbian Singaporeans to be outcasts, criminals even, in their own homes. This travesty leads me to lend much more weight to the desire for greater political freedom than I otherwise would have.

Secondly, I seriously wonder how the PAP’s hegemonic democracy can be sustained at such high levels of efficiency. It seems to me that the success of the PAP’s hegemonic democracy has always been about having the right people in charge. At the moment, the PAP has an excellent leader in the form of our PM Lee. However, a system that depends on having the right person at the right time seems doomed to eventual failure. Indeed, even MM Lee seems to agree that it is only a matter of time that the PAP’s system fails to deliver the goods, be it a matter of 50 years or 100 years one cannot tell.

Given that hegemonic democracy at current levels of effectiveness cannot be indefinitely maintained, there is a strong need for us to start exploring a different type of democracy.  A liberal democracy ushered in by a party like the WP would be different from a liberal democracy ushered in by the SDP: we should begin evaluating the capabilities of the various opposition parties. I believe the WP has proven to be credible enough to sit for the examination the Singaporean people will give it if it gains more political power.

Thirdly, one must not misunderstand the choice I have put forth as either the PAP’s hegemonic democracy, or WP’s liberal democracy. The choice is: PAP’s hegemonic democracy, or a movement towards WP’s liberal democracy. Even if we all vote for WP, the PAP’s system will still exist and likely exist for many years to come. The idea of movement here is very important: we can always turn back if we do not like the results.

Specifically, if I vote for the WP this election, and I find that they have done badly in the next 5 years, I can always vote them out the next time. Since any change that we make to our political system is necessarily gradual, there is nothing much for Singaporeans to lose by experimenting with a little bit of change.

Finally, I take point from one of my personal heroes, Milton Friedman. In a TV interview a few years before he died, the interviewer asked Mr Friedman, “If you are made dictator for one day…” Mr Friedman cut him off and said, “No no, I do not want to be made dictator. I don’t believe in dictators… If we can’t persuade the public that it is desirable to do these things [the reforms he was suggesting], we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it.” Even after decades of being called various names by his opponents, Mr Friedman refused to fantasize even for a second about having the power to silence these opponents and to ram his ideas down their throats.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in the choice between a hegemonic democracy and a movement towards a liberal democracy, I choose the latter. This is because the consequences of continued political servitude to the PAP are dire, and PAP’s hegemony is ultimately unsustainable. Hence, I am willing to take a little bit of risk, bearing in mind that I still have the power to reject liberal democracy even after this year’s elections.

With the fullest consideration of my choice, and the fullest concern for the tradeoffs involved, I choose to move towards a liberal democracy, and not to sit still with a hegemonic one. I choose to move towards a first world parliament.

The very first member of parliament I met in my life was the late JB Jayaretnam. The MP of Anson constituency in the 1980s, I believe no introduction of mine can do his eventful  life justice. Perhaps wikipedia will do better.

I met him when I was 15 in 2005, when a group of friends and I were at Raffles City. For those of us who don’t remember, Mr Jayaretnam was occasionally sighted selling his books at the top of the escalator leading into Raffles City from City Hall MRT.

Somehow or another, my friends and I began a brief conversation with him. I remember being quite curious because I knew who he was and of his troubles with the authorities. For that same reason, I was apprehensive about talking to him. With hair that reminded me of the mane of a lion, I was perhaps also a little intimidated by the man before me.

Mr Jayaretnam tried to persuade my friends and I to buy his book The Hatchet Man of Singapore. We hesitated. Finally, he persuaded us to share one book amongst ourselves and we agreed to purchase one. Without our even asking, Mr Jayaetnam asked us for our names, addressed the book to us, and signed the book.

I was the one who was to be the first to take the book home to read. After reading it, I felt like I had learned more about my country than I had during the past 15 years of National Education.

In 2008, I read an obituary written by The Economist on Mr Jayaretnam. It sent shivers down my spine, and I read the article quietly to myself a couple of times. In my own way, I suppose, I mourned his passing away.

The second member of parliament I met was Ms Sylvia Lim, in 2006. At the time she was not yet a member of parliament, though she would eventually get an NCMP seat after that year’s elections.

I had the opportunity to meet Ms Lim alongside my peers in the pioneer batch of the Victoria Integrated Programme at VJC. Our teachers had invited Ms Lim to talk to us after a series of lessons on political philosophy.

It was an informal talk, with only 120 of us. During the talk, Ms Lim told us her views about public accountability and the need for checks and balances on the government: more or less the stuff that she now thunders in front of tens of thousands of people.

At the first sign of an opening, I leaped at the chance to ask her a question. I asked her what she thought about our judicial system and whether it was politically independent. She answered by explaining the law against contempt of court, and then said that she had no further comments.

Perhaps I should have preempted her answer. I knew about the law against judicial contempt, of course: I had just read the book by Mr Jayaretnam the year before, and it detailed how he was charged for contempt of court after accusing a judge of political bias, and how he was tried for contempt by the same judge he had accused of bias. I guess I was hoping to hear Ms Lim’s opinions since Mr Jayeratnam was her predecessor as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party.

After the talk, my friends jokingly said that I had “owned” Ms Lim with my question. I suppose to most of us sixteen year olds, ownage was asking an important person a question she could not answer. As a Singaporean who could not get a clear opinion on the issue from someone as courageous and informed as Ms Lim, I felt like I was the one being owned instead.

I asked Ms Lim a second question that day. I asked her how one might go about volunteering for the Workers’ Party. She replied that the minimum age requirement for volunteers was 18, and that I was too young. After thinking it through, I decided that the best thing I could give the Workers’ Party was my attention. And for the past five years, I believe I have.

The third MP I met was Mr Teo Chee Hean in 2008 when I was in J2. At the time he was serving as Minister for Defence, and he subsequently earned the added responsibility of Deputy Prime Minister.

I had this opportunity because I was one of a group of students who participated in a grassroots awareness programme organized by our school. I was attached to Pasir Ris-Punggol GRC, for which DPM Teo was a representative.

One of the many activities the programme involved was a chance for me to sit in a meeting the grassroots leaders of the GRC had with DPM Teo. During the meeting, leaders of the GRC discussed the various grassroots activities they were organizing as well as various budgetary issues of the GRC.

Most interesting for me, was near the end of the meeting, when the grassroots leaders would reflect the concerns on the ground to DPM Teo and ask him various questions, while DPM Teo would respond to those concerns.

The one question that struck me the most, was the question of why the government does not subsidise oil in order to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Singaporeans who were struggling to cope with high oil prices. In response, DPM Teo explained the fundamental economics of subsidies and their inefficiencies, the political addiction such subsidies would create, and why it would be too costly for Singapore as a whole. All this was done in ordinary, laymen’s terms, supported by examples from other countries.

I was thoroughly impressed. What I had learned in the form of tedious graphs and definitions during JC economics was eloquently explained by DPM Teo in ordinary, oral speech. I think the grassroots leaders at that meeting did gain a level of understanding they did not have before. Perhaps they were convinced by DPM Teo’s explanations and went on to explain such reasoning to other residents who had this concern.

From then on, I was even more motivated to deepen my understanding of the science of economics, so as to be able to explain such economic reasoning as simply and understandably as possible.

Those were my personal experiences with three MPs, and I do believe I have walked away from each and every one of those experiences a better person than I was before.

Amidst the fever and fervour of the general elections, it is sometimes easy to forget that great minds exist on both sides of the political aisle. Of course, moronic ones exist on both sides as well.

Our duty as voters, then, is to refrain from engaging in hateful identity politics. Neither gender politics of the “Vivian vs Vincent” variety, nor class politics of the “Kate Spade” kind, should have any space in our political discourse. The only relevant identity should be our identity as rational human beings who live together in a nation called Singapore.

Instead, we must exercise our rational mind to its fullest extent: always looking at empirical facts, always examining the logic of our reasoning, always opening ourselves to questions, and never satisfying until all doubts can be answered as fully as possible. Such is the human mind that the ideas of democracy were based on; a mind without which democracy itself will surely fail.

It is my hope, then, to pen my thought processes with regards to this year’s elections. I shall hope to be as clear and comprehensive as possible. And perhaps at the end of this exercise, I will have arrived at an answer, or perhaps the vast number of voices on the internet would have helped me arrived at one.

 Why I Might Vote for PAP

I shall now attempt to look at the various issues that I feel work in favor of my voting for the PAP. Here, I shall address arguments raised by the Opposition camp and various PAP policies.

1.       Foreign Workers

The opposition’s arguments here are fairly straightforward: The government’s duty, first and foremost, is to its people and not to foreigners. Hence, there is a cause for concern if foreigners are benefitting at the expense of Singaporeans.

I reject such arguments completely. Consider this: a Singaporean business owner has a job opening and two candidates for the job: a Singaporean, and a foreigner. Hypothetically, the foreign worker would provide him with a net value of $1000, while the local worker would provide him with a net value of $500. Naturally, he would choose to hire the foreign worker. However, if the government forbids him (perhaps with a quota) from hiring the foreigner, he has no choice but to hire the Singaporean. Gun to the head, the government has taken $500 worth of value from one Singaporean, to benefit some other Singaporean.

We all accept the general principle that our neighbours have no right or claim on our property. As much as possible, nobody should dictate how we should spend our money, be it in our capacity as consumers or producers. How then, can the opposition justify taking away the property of one Singaporean to transfer it to another?

The issue here is not about protecting Singaporeans against foreigners, but about protecting Singaporeans from the false entitlement claims of other Singaporeans.

Next, Singaporeans as a whole benefit from foreign workers. Foreign workers are hired because they provide more value to their employers (Singaporeans), and part of this value is transferred to the consumers (again, Singaporeans). Behind every single foreign worker hired, is a Singaporean who benefits. He would not have been hired otherwise.

There is also considerable political bias intrinsic within this debate. It is very visible if you take a pay hit because of foreign competition: you can say, perhaps, that you make $500 less in order to compete with foreigners. Yet it is far less visible how much you have saved throughout your lifetime, as a result of foreign workers in the economy. Nobody has yet calculated how much more we would have to pay for our consumer goods if we truly cut back on foreign workers. The large number of foreign workers present in our economy suggests such savings to be extremely high. (They would not have been hired if they did not represent cost savings.)

Now, let us examine the policy proposals of the various parties. Broadly speaking, there are three main ideas put forth by the parties, moving forward.

a)      Foreign worker levy (PAP + SPP)

This is basically a tax on foreign workers. For every foreign worker hired, the employer has to pay a levy to the government. The PAP currently does impose a levy (http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/foreign-worker-levies/Pages/levies-quotas-for-hiring-foreign-workers.aspx), and recently increased it for non-English speaking foreign workers. The SPP wants to increase this levy to 17.5% (http://www.spp.org.sg/?p=132). Simply put, I prefer the lowest levy possible (for reasons explained above), and hence I support the PAP’s policies here.

b)      Foreign worker quota (WP +NSP)

This is the proposal for the government to determine, by fiat, the number of foreign workers a company is allowed to hire. To be fair, the WP manifesto is not explicit about instituting a quota system. But I do strongly recall WP’s Low Thia Khiang, speaking in Parliament, saying last year that levies were not sufficient and quotas have to be put in place instead. (http://darylyong.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/letter-to-today-conceited-delusional-and-unjust/) On the other hand, the NSP is much clearer. They propose, in their manifesto, “a basic quota of 25%… for all sectors”, with adjustments for the sectors that are less popular with Singaporeans.

c)       Employment priority (NSP + SDP)

This is the proposal that every company should give a Singaporean employment priority over a non-Singaporean, regardless of the particular costs/benefits evaluations in question. The NSP manifesto is quite vague: it wants to “grant priority to Singaporeans in employment”. The SDP, on the other hand, is much more explicit: they “will require businesses to demonstrate that the kind of skill that their company requires is not available among Singaporeans before they are allowed to hire a foreign worker.”

Both b) and c) are terribly wrongheaded.

First, they are much more inefficient than a tax. Under a tax system, the aim is to level the playing field by removing the price competitiveness of the foreign worker. However, if the foreign worker is so superior to the local applicant that he is still preferable, the company may still hire him and pay the levy. The final choice remains up to the company in question. Under a quota or priority system, the company has no choice whatsoever: whether he can reap the savings of a foreign worker or not, depends on getting the approval of an Authority.

Second, they will lead to rent seeking behavior, and increase business costs. When a company’s bottom line is dependent on getting government approval for a particular action, they will have to spend resources persuading the Authority to approve their requests. This is worst in a priority system: every time a company wants to hire a foreign worker, it has to “demonstrate” the necessity.

Third, they will lead to a huge expansion of the existing bureaucracy. In order to impose a quota, you have to arm yourself with expert bureaucrats, who attempt to fine tune and engineer the most “appropriate” quota. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit) Even worse, in a priority system, you have to have a huge department of bureaucrats sitting around deciding whether every single company in Singapore has sufficiently “demonstrated” its need for foreign workers. And who is going to pay top dollars for those bureaucrats?

All in all, with regards to the issue of foreign workers, the PAP comes out way on top for me. It is the single most important reason why I would hesitate voting for any opposition party, with particular emphasis on SDP who has proposed the most horrendously anti-freedom, pro-control-economy policy on this issue.

2.       Taxation and Transfer Payments

After the 2006 GE, the Singapore government made a deceptively simple, yet stunningly brilliant move: it increased the GST to 7%, decreased the personal income tax and corporate tax and introduced a form of transfer payments shortly after (Workfare Income Scheme). This move was made at a political cost to the PAP, and it is a move that has rather impressed me.

Three things are of utmost importance when considering the tax structure of a country.

The first is simplicity. In many countries such as the US and UK, the tax code is famously complicated. It is bloated full of exceptions and deductions, credits and subsidies, put in over the years by politicians seeking an easy way to gain votes. Economists have estimated that just simplifying the tax codes in those countries could lead to huge savings. But of course, any simplification would step on one vested interest or another.

In contrast, the GST in Singapore is extremely clear, and extremely simple. For every commercial transaction, you pay a tax. This amount is very clear to parties before the transaction, and is consistent for future transactions so you can make proper decisions. There is no rent seeking behavior to try to qualify for a lower GST, no lobbying for exemptions.

By increasing the GST, the Singapore government increased the proportion of revenue that came from very simple taxation, hence giving it the space to reduce the more complicated taxes.

On this issue, the SPP, SDP and NSP all call for a reduction of GST for “basic goods”. I disagree: adding in exceptions for certain categories of goods would greatly reduce the simplicity of the GST. It would result in rent seeking behavior and an expansion of bureaucracy: every product will claim to be a “basic good”, every company will want to qualify for the tax exemption, and we will have to pay bureaucrats to sit around to decide which basic goods are “basic enough”. (And you wonder why there are so many career business lobbyists in the USA.) Just a brief mention here: if the concern is whether low income groups can buy basic necessities, it is far, far superior to give them the cash to do so, under a separate social security structure.

The second important issue is known as temporal neutrality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax#Economic_impact) A tax is neutral if it does not alter the spending behavior of people, and hence does not distort the allocation of resources.

When the government taxes your income, it reduces your incentive to invest and work to earn that income. When the government taxes businesses, it reduces the incentive for businesses to invest and innovate to earn that income.

In contrast, the GST is neutral. It applies to all consumer goods, so it will not distort your spending behavior and allows all consumer goods to compete equally for your patronage. It does not distort your incentives to make a good living for yourself, and it does not discourage businesses from investing and innovating. By shifting away from taxes that discourage investment, the increase in GST coupled with the decrease in income and corporate tax reduced the distortion taxation usually has on the economic development of the country.

The third issue that has to be addressed is the issue of regressive vs progressive taxation. This is the opposition camp’s primary criticism of the increase in GST: the GST is a regressive tax because the lower income groups pay more GST as a proportion of their income, compared to higher income groups.

It is absolutely true that the GST is a regressive tax. However, it is also trivially true. The concern is not whether the GST is regressive, but whether Singapore as a whole has a regressive tax structure. In other words, the question is whether low income groups currently pay more taxes overall today.

This is what the NSP has tried to prove in their manifesto. In Annex A of their manifesto, they tried to show that the average low income household contributed 13% more in taxes than in 2003.

                                                                                2003                                       2008

GST                                                                          4%                                          7%

Low Income Household

Ave Monthly Income                                     1400                                      1400

Yearly Income                                                  18200                                   18200

Personal Income Tax                                      0                                              0

Case 1

Annual Household Expenditure               10 000                                   10 000

GST Payable                                                      400                                         700

Total Tax                                                             400                                         700

GST Credit (2007-2010)                                                                                250

Additonal Tax Payable                                                                                    50

% Increase in Tax                                                                                             13%

Based on this table, I am assuming 13% was reached by: (700-250-400=50)/400= 0.125 =~13%

This calculation is misleading because it does not take into account the transfer payments paid by the government to such a household. In particular, the government instituted the Workfare Income Scheme after increasing the GST in 2006. A person with an average monthly income of $1400 (as in the example) would have received $450 in transfer payments. (http://mycpf.cpf.gov.sg/Members/Gen-Info/WIS/WIS_Information.htm#guide) When you take that into account:

(700-250-450-400)/400= -1 = -100% in taxes

In other words, while this household paid $400 in taxes in 2003, it now pays $0: a 100% decrease in taxes. This calculation does not take into account the Workfare bonuses and special payments paid over the years.  If we included that, we would find that such a household would have received more money from the government than it paid out.

I am thus concerned that the NSP has chosen to ignore such transfer payments completely in their calculations. It was made quite explicit, as I recall, that the government promised lower taxes to the lower income groups despite the GST increase by a separate transfer payment scheme (ie, workfare).

If there is fault to be found in my number crunching, do let me know. But having looked at the numbers myself, I am convinced that the tax structure in Singapore is not regressive.

3.       Minimum Wage

Of all the policies suggested to help the lower skilled or elderly segment of society, perhaps the most counterproductive one is the suggestion for a minimum wage law. The NSP and SDP are guilty of suggesting this terrible policy in their manifesto. I find no mention of it in WP and SPP, so I hope they are not in support of this policy as well.

I could try to explain why a minimum wage law will work against low skilled or elderly workers, but I would never in a million years be able to do so as well as one of my personal heroes: Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca8Z__o52sk

Just as Friedman calls the minimum wage law the most “anti-negro law” in America, I think it would be the most “anti-elderly” law in Singapore. I think the most important insight there is the observation that a minimum wage law essentially makes it illegal for employers to hire low productivity workers. If a worker is worth $4 an hour and the minimum wage is $5 an hour, I cannot hire him. I am banned, by law, from hiring him unless I am willing and able to engage in charity. I can seriously see this law having horrendous consequences for the people whom it is trying to help.

I am proud that Singapore is one of the few countries in the world which has not fallen prey to such horribly fallacious thinking

4.       Poverty and Income Inequality

Before I discuss the next issue, I must first explain my view on the configuration of society. My view is based on this first premise: You naturally claim ownership of your own person. This claim springs, at least in part, from the uniquely intimate knowledge and control of your bodily processes; it springs from the constitution of your being. (http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/12/06/daniel-b-klein/against-overlordship/) By extension, you claim ownership of the fruits of your labour, and therefore, you own your property.

Given that you own your property, government action that takes your property away from you must bear a burden of proof. Usually, they will prove that their action benefits you, specifically. For example, a government must tax you in order to provide you with a police force.

In the case of poverty and income inequality, the government is taking your property away from yousolely to benefit somebody else. Does such an action satisfy the aforementioned burden of proof?

I am perhaps willing to accept that such a burden of proof is met in the case of another person’s life and death.  Therefore, the PAP’s public assistance policies that seek to provide sustenance to ensure nobody literally starves to death may be justified. In the same vein, any opposition policy that seeks to ensure that nobody “falls through the cracks” and starves to death will have my tentative and hesitant support.

However, I believe that there is no absolute poverty in Singapore, where absolute poverty means, very narrowly, nobody starves to death. In that regard, PAP policies have been a success.

As I see it, the debate today is no longer about “absolute poverty”. It is about “relative poverty”, or just income inequality. The unhappiness within the opposition camp stems from the fact that some people are flourishing so well that others feel poor as a result. As a result, they wish to take the property of those who are flourishing (by force) and give said property to those who are not faring so well.

One man’s envy of another man’s property does not entitle him to it.

Having said that, society’s best response to income inequality is to ensure social mobility: to ensure that those at the top approximate as closely as possible those who are able and competent. In this area, I believe Singapore is a fairly socially mobile place though I’d be happy to look at evidence to the contrary. In fact, our education system, though far from perfect, is consistently rated as one of the highest in the world. I do think that this is to the PAP’s credit.

Overall Impression of the Opposition’s Flaws

To the opposition and those who support the opposition, I have a short message for you here, before I move on to discussing why I might vote for you. Please do not try to cheat reality. You cannot lower the cost of living by making it more expensive to do business. (Foreign workers) If a worker is worth $4 an hour, you cannot make him worth $5: he will not be hired if he can only be hired at $5. (Minimum wage) You cannot want public transport to improve, and at the same time make it less profitable for people to improve public transport. You cannot claim to respect private property but at the same time take property away from successful Singaporeans for the sole reason of making other people happy. No matter how sincere you are, how well intentioned you are, please do not try to cheat reality because you cannot.

Why I Might Vote for Opposition

Having spent much effort explaining the reasons why I might vote for the PAP, I now consider the reasons why I might vote for opposition.

1.       Political Hegemony

Political hegemony is always, and anywhere, intrinsically dangerous. Up to this point, the political hegemony of the PAP has not been too detrimental to society, though its treatment of political opponents in the past has been extremely questionable.  However, there are very significant dangers that do currently exist today.  This Facebook note touches on some of these issues, and I agree with the author to a large degree. (http://www.facebook.com/notes/chazza-boags/whats-so-bad-about-another-pap-dominated-parliament/10150169247347727) In addition, I will discuss two issues that have arisen because of PAP political hegemony.

(a)    Group Representative Constituencies and Gerrymandering

There is no doubt, in my mind, that the GRCs were implemented in order to maintain PAP hegemony. There is also no doubt, in my mind, that gerrymandering occurs in elections, which is a sordid taint on our democracy.

My biggest issue with the GRC is that it is inefficient: by packaging MPs into teams, voters can no longer choose among the team members. Perhaps slightly simplistically, an analogy may be drawn to the web browser wars on the internet. If Microsoft had made Windows in such a way that Internet Explorer was the only web browser we could ever install, most people will still use Windows. However, we would not have the intense and amazing competition that exists between IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari, which undeniably has generated much welfare amongst all internet users.

With regards to gerrymandering, one can only hope that greater opposition representation will be able to push for less gerrymandering. I have my doubts, since countries like the USA actually see quite a lot of gerrymandering as well. This happens because both parties want districts that strongly support them, so you see many districts with strong support for just one party.

(b)   Judicial Independence

Whenever absolute political hegemony exists, there is always a danger that judicial independence might be compromised. As a wannabe legal professional, this is a very important issue to me. For the same reason, I have nothing more to add.

2.       377A

The PAP’s actions during the 377A saga was revolting and revealing at the same time. For one, the PAP could have used their political powers to allow 377A to be repealed without fanfare, along with the other archaic sex laws that outlawed heterosexual oral sex. Given that even MM Lee has gone on record saying that he agrees with the science that homosexuality is genetic, I think a good portion of the PAP leadership believes that 377A should go.

However, a much larger portion of PAP itself sincerely believes in the logic of 377A. The PAP says that Singaporeans are still conservative; the PAP has to listen to them. On the other hand, I think many PAP MPs sincerely believe that 377A is a good law to have.  http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/when-you-should-vote-pap/

Yawning Bread also reports that PAP MPs gave Thio Li-Ann a “thunderous applause” after she made her monstrous speech. (http://yawningbread.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/file_201103_22.pdf) I would feel terrible voting a party that consists of such monstrous people of hate.

Of course, the opposition Worker’s Party did not help the 377A cause much. I am unsure how much to fault them for it, but I do believe that they do not share the same ideas as the aforementioned PAP MPs.

Weighing the Trade Offs

I shall now attempt to weigh the trade-offs involved in a choice between PAP and the opposition. It may seem to some that I have spent way more words defending PAP policies, and I do think the PAP policies are largely on the right track and their successes should not be ignored (as I suspect they might have by some). On the other hand, reasons for reducing PAP’s dominance have been well covered in the link I provided, as well as a variety of other online material.

The following paragraphs are simply me thinking aloud: I am not 100% decided on these thoughts, and make them tentatively. I might change my mind as the elections continue.

There is little doubt in my mind (and perhaps in the mind of others), that WP is the most credible opposition party out there. In particular, it has not proposed a priority employment system, and it has not proposed to lower the GST or make it more complicated by adding in exceptions. I also have tremendous respect for Mr Low Thia Khiang and Ms Sylvia Lim.

On the other hand, I am not convinced that the NSP or SDP are thinking clearly about policies. The calculations I performed above suggests to me that NSP are being misleading with their numbers, and a recent video of Nicole Seah’s rally speech has greatly reduced her credibility in my eyes. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxD7_8nZjjA&feature=youtu.be) In that speech, Ms Seah went on a rant about not “keeping a cap on raw materials” This suggests to me an intense desire on her part to cheat reality: make raw materials cheap when they are not, in fact, cheap.

The SDP’s manifesto is quite ridiculous. They want to spend an additional $60 billion dollars: where that money will come from is left unanswered. They want to buy an additional 1000 buses: an absolutely arbitrary number. I am more interested in their message about human rights and freedom, though I don’t think they’ve been putting it across much this election.

The SPP is much reliant on Mr Chiam See Tong. I have great respect for that man, and salute him for running for elections even after suffering from multiple strokes. However, I do not think there is much future in the party after Mr Chiam’s eventual retirement from politics.

Having a political alternative has intrinsic value. However, I think that a poor alternative is about as bad as having no alternatives at all. Perhaps it is even worse, since a poor alternative in parliament can still push for poor policies. Therefore, I would support the PAP over the NSP, SPP and SDP.

The fight between the PAP and WP is much closer. For one, I think the WP does get a general idea of the rationale behind PAP economic policies. It might want to increase the payouts given under a transfer payment scheme, but I do not think such an increase would be too detrimental to society. It has not attacked the sensible tax structure of our country, though it has attacked our sensible foreign worker policy. I sincerely hope the WP does not support a minimum wage.

Furthermore, voting the WP into parliament will not affect the economic policies in the country. Even if they win all the seats they contest, the PAP will still have a super majority (two thirds). Hence, there is an opportunity for us to diminish the political hegemony of the PAP while maintaining the good policies of the PAP.

Therefore, I think I would vote WP this election. If the WP increases its political power, there will be more opportunities to scrutinize their policy ideas. As of this election in 2011, their ideas are not too bad (I actually agree with many of WP’s ideas on the government’s control of the  media), their leaders are sensible (Mr Low and Ms Lim in particular), and they would reduce the political hegemony of the PAP, if only by a little bit. The PAP has many good leaders that I respect, but unfortunately, also many MPs that I detest.

So, thank you for reading if you have read all 4000 words of me thinking to myself about my hypothetical vote. I hope that I will wake up on my 21st birthday to see the adults of Singapore having made the right choice on my behalf.

TL;DR

WP>PAP>NSP=SPP

PAP superior on policy ideas, WP close behind. Voting for WP this election will not affect PAP policy, but will reduce PAP hegemony (which is good).

Go East, young bureaucrat

Emerging Asia can teach the West a lot about government

WHEN people talk about Singapore’s education miracle, they normally think of rows of clever young mathematicians. The hair-design and beauty-therapy training centres at the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) are rather different. The walls are covered with pouting models, L’Oréal adverts and television screens. There is a fully fitted-out spa and a hairdressing salon. It all seems rather more “Sex and the City” than Asian values, though the manicurists, pedicurists, cosmetologists and hairdressers toil diligently.

Asked whether he wants to go to university, the holy grail of most Asian families, a young barber called Noel replies that he would rather open a hairdressing salon. Mei Lien wants to set up her own beauty salon; Shuner would like to work in hotels abroad.

Until recently ITE—dubbed “It’s The End” by ambitious middle-class parents—was the dark side of Singaporean education. The city state streams pupils rigorously and is unashamedly elitist: one school claims to send more students to Ivy League universities than any other secondary school in the world. But such a system also produces losers—and many of the bottom third who do not make it to university come to ITE.

This attention to detail has paid off. Many of the graduates have to compete with cheap migrant workers, especially in service jobs, but most of them are snapped up quickly. The hairdressers and beauty therapists are off to the new casinos, or “integrated resorts”, as they are prudishly known. Singapore, already near the top of most educational league tables, has created yet another centre of excellence that is beginning to attract foreign visitors.

Singapore is important to any study of government just now, both in the West and in Asia. That is partly because it does some things very well, in much the same way that some Scandinavian countries excel in certain fields. But it is also because there is an emerging theory about a superior Asian model of government, put forward by both despairing Western businesspeople and hubristic Asian chroniclers. Simplified somewhat, it comes in four parts.

First, Singapore is good at government (which is largely true). Second, the secret of its success lies in an Asian mixture of authoritarian values and state-directed capitalism (largely myth). Third, China is trying to copy Singapore (certainly true). Last, China’s government is already more efficient than the decadent West (mostly rubbish, see next section).

Fact or fiction?

For all the insults hurled at “Disneyland with the death penalty” (to use William Gibson’s gibe), Singapore provides better schools and hospitals and safer streets than most Western countries—and all with a state that consumes only 19% of GDP. Yes, that proportion is understated because it does not include the other fingers the government has in the economic pie, such as its huge landholdings, the Central Provident Fund (a mandatory savings scheme) and Temasek (a government-linked investment company). Yes, it is easier to serve 5m people on a tiny island than 309m Americans on a vast landmass. Yes, it has relied on immigration, which is now creating strains (and will be the main topic in the next election). And yes, Singapore’s bureaucrats can make mistakes, such as letting an Islamic terrorist escape in 2008. But its government does pretty well.

The Chinese are fascinated by it. “There is good social order in Singapore,” Deng Xiaoping observed in 1992. “We should draw from their experience, and do even better than them.” It sends streams of bureaucrats to visit Singapore. One of the first things that Xi Jinping did after being anointed in 2010 as China’s next leader was to drop in (again) on Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s minister-mentor, who ran the island from 1959 to 1990, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, who has been prime minister since 2004. The Chinese are looking at other places, too—most obviously Hong Kong, another small-government haven. But it is hard to think of any rich-country leader whom China treats with as much respect as the older Mr Lee.

So what lessons are the Chinese learning? There is an odd imbalance between the things that Singapore and others make so much noise about and the reasons why the place works. In particular, the “Asian values” bits of Singapore—its authoritarianism and its industrial policy—that the Chinese seem to find especially congenial are less vital to its success than two more humdrum virtues: a good civil service and a competitively small state.

The island that Lee built

Singapore is certainly a fairly stern place. It has been run by the People’s Action Party for half a century. The older Mr Lee, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who was originally seen as a bit of a left-winger, set up a parliamentary system in which it has proved curiously difficult for the opposition to do well. From 1966 to 1981 Mr Lee’s PAP won all the seats. It has opened up a bit, and in the most recent election in 2006 it won only 66% of the votes and 82 of the 84 seats. The media, and particularly the internet, have also got a little freer.

The Singaporeans argue that they have the perfect compromise between accountability and efficiency. Their politicians are regularly tested in elections and have to make themselves available to their constituents; but since the government knows it is likely to win, it can take a long view. Fixing things like ITE takes time. “Our strength is that we are able to think strategically and look ahead,” says the prime minister. “If the government changed every five years it would be harder.”

There is more truth in this than Western liberals would like to admit. Not many people in Washington are thinking beyond the 2012 presidential election. It is sometimes argued that an American administration operates strategically for only around six months, at the beginning of its second year—after it has got its staff confirmed by the Senate and before the mid-terms campaign begins.

Yet even assuming that voters are happy to swap a little more efficiency for less democracy, Singapore still seems a difficult model to follow. Not only is it manageably small, but balancing authoritarianism and accountability comes down largely to personal skills (and even the opposition admits that the two Lees have been extremely good at it). More generally, Singapore’s success as a planning state has a lot to do with the sort of people who run it.

One thing that stands out in Singapore is the quality of its civil service. Unlike the egalitarian Western public sector, Singapore follows an elitist model, paying those at the top $2m a year or more. It spots talented youngsters early, lures them with scholarships and keeps investing in them. People who don’t make the grade are pushed out quickly.

Sitting around a table with its 30-something mandarins is more like meeting junior partners at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey than the cast of “Yes, Minister”. The person on your left is on secondment at a big oil company; on your right sits a woman who between spells at the finance and defence ministries has picked up degrees from the London School of Economics, Cambridge and Stanford. High-fliers pop in and out of the Civil Service College for more training; the prime minister has written case studies for them. But it is not a closed shop. Talent from the private sector is recruited into both the civil service and politics. The current education minister used to be a surgeon.

Western civil services often have pretty good people at the top, but in Singapore meritocracy reigns all the way down the system. Teachers, for instance, need to have finished in the top third of their class (as they do in Finland and South Korea, which also shine in the education rankings). Headmasters are often appointed in their 30s and rewarded with merit pay if they do well but moved on quickly if their schools underperform. Tests are endemic.

How much strategic intervention takes place in the economy? The Lees have dabbled in industrial policy, betting first on manufacturing and then on services. Temasek manages a portfolio of S$190 billion ($150 billion). The country is now trying to push into creative industries, with limited success thus far, as ministers admit.

These attempts at dirigisme have made Singapore a more reserved, less entrepreneurial place than Hong Kong with its feverish laissez-faire. It certainly has far fewer larger-than-life billionaires. But it is hard to hail Singapore as a success of top-down economic management in the way some Chinese seem to think. Indeed, the core of Singapore’s success—its ability to attract foreign multinationals—owes far more to laissez-faire than to industrial policy.

Come in, the water’s lovely

Rather than seeing foreign investment as a way to steal technology or to build up strategic industries, as China often does, Singapore has followed an open-door policy, building an environment where businesses want to be. The central message has remained much the same for decades: come to us and you will get excellent infrastructure, a well-educated workforce, open trade routes, the rule of law and low taxes.

In other words, Singapore’s competitive advantage has been good, cheap government. It has worked hard to keep its state small; even education consumes only 3.3% of GDP. But the real savings come from keeping down social transfers and especially from not indulging the middle class. The older Mr Lee thinks the West’s mistake has been to set up “all you can eat” welfare states: because everything at the buffet is free, it is consumed voraciously.

Singapore’s approach, by contrast, is for the government to provide people with assets that allow them to look after themselves. Good education for all is one big part of it. The other mainstay is the Central Provident Fund. A fifth of everybody’s salary goes into their account at the CPF, with the employer contributing another 15.5%. That provides Singaporeans with the capital to pay for their own housing, pensions and health care and their children’s tertiary education.

But arguably the place that should be learning most from Singapore is the West. For all the talk about Asian values, Singapore is a pretty Western place. Its model, such as it is, combines elements of Victorian self-reliance and American management theory. The West could take in a lot of both without sacrificing any liberty. Why not sack poor teachers or pay good civil servants more? And do Western welfare states have to be quite so buffet-like?

By the same token, Singapore’s government could surely relax its grip somewhat without sacrificing efficiency. That might help it find a little more of the entrepreneurial vim it craves.

However, this letter was quite fun to write. It borrowed from the essay I wrote last year, and it was fun trying to tie things down to show one point concisely. Also, I was starting to get a bit annoyed with all the facebook comments about that maid carrying the NSF’s bag, even though some spoofs and photoshopped pics were really quite funny.

Dear Sir/Mdm,

I refer to the phenomenon of Full-time National Servicemen (NSFs) who prefer to “take cover”, and Mr Clement Puah’s question “Are NSFs getting soft?”. (31 Mar)

To answer that question, we should bear in mind an important observation made by Mr Thomas Gates, former US Secretary of Defence. He observed that conscription is a tax: a conscript who would volunteer for military service for $2000 a month but is conscripted at $800 a month is making a tax payment of $1200 a month, in the form of a service.

When the government raised the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2007, a significant number of people were unhappy with the tax. A healthy debate ensued. Yet even those who supported the tax did not call those who disagreed “soft”.

To ask the question “Are NSFs getting soft?” is to imply that it is wrong to be unwilling to pay a maximum amount of effort to the state. However, just as we sympathize with those reluctant to pay 7% GST, it is entirely understandable for people to be unhappy about being taxed.

Yours Sincerely,
Daryl Yong

Dear Sir/Mdm,

I wholeheartedly agree with Ms Ong that “what is good for future generations is up for debate”. (“Road building: Are other relevant authorities involved in decision?”, 7 Mar) Indeed, it is crucial for conservationists to explain how society benefits from retaining a piece of wilderness, rather than just making assumptions about the preferences of future Singaporeans.

In her attempt to show such benefits, Ms Ong argues that building a road would be irrevocable because “a sanctuary cannot be replaced once it is removed”. However, Ms Ong overlooks the fact that the decision not to build a road is equally irrevocable. The additional hours that commuters have to spend traveling as a result of the road not being built are hours they will never get back. The economic benefits that society forgoes by not having the road is continuously and irrevocably sacrificed as long as the road remains unbuilt.

Instead of relying on false distinctions between revocable and irrevocable choices, or making assumptions about the preferences of future generations, conservationists should explain the concrete benefits society can expect when good land is left undeveloped. To date, they have yet to do so.