Since the Prime
Minister has said that Singapore needs to get ready for a recession, I’ve had
to reflect on one of the most prominent changes in my life. I spent my late
twenties and thirties as a freelance agent in an industry that is constantly on
the look out for the “sexiest” thing around. Then in the last year of my
thirties and now my forties, I’ve had something of an “unbreakable” rice bowl
in and industry that likes old fashioned things (liquidators are paid from the
assets of the liquidated company and so, we like the old-fashioned stuff like
construction and shipping because these industries are inevitably asset-heavy).
I make no secret
of the fact that I loathe the bureaucracy (office time) in the insolvency trade
but it’s been an educational experience and it’s been educational. Just as
speaking to office inhabitants depresses me, being around the second-hand good
traders and workers that I’ve fired enlivens me to the workings of the world. I
face these two contrasting situations on a daily basis and I’m grateful for it
because somehow, I’ve managed to see a “main truth” through the various
realities that my stakeholders face.
The main truth that
I’ve started to see is the fact that our entire economic situation is the thing
Einstein called the “definition of insanity.” While Singapore is not the only
place defining insanity, we’re a small place and so our examples become even
more intense.
In a way, its
hard to “complain” about Singapore. Everything looks good and as I’ve so often
said, whenever the locals complain, even people from the West, look at you and
ask “What are you complaining about?” Since we are a “clean, green, rich and safe”
place, it’s a legitimate question on the surface. However, if you dig a little,
the retort is “is it a clean, green, rich and safe” space for everyone or just
select few.
The answer lies
somewhere in between two extremes. Singapore is for now, a pretty OK place to
live in but if things continue as they are, the clean, green, rich and safe label
is going to apply for a degreasing number of people.
The reasons for
this came from a Youtube interview I watched between Patrick Bet-David and Dan
Price, the CEO of Gavity Payment. In this interview, Mr. Price stated that what
we call capitalism is not actually capitalism. People are not making money by
providing clever ways to make life better for customers. Instead, a select
group have come together to monopolise resources and screw the consumer. The
interview can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7XZlFnqnBU
These are industries that for the large part
have stayed pretty much the same for the last fifty years and they function on
monopolising things and an exploitative economic logic. When cases of Covid 19
exploded in the dormitories two years ago, it was clear to everyone except
people in ivory towers that the cause of this was obvious – conditions in the dormitories
were ripe for virus breeding. Sure, the tax payer had to bail out the dormitory
owners for getting us into this mess but things remained the same – the government
simply confined the workers to the same unsanitary conditions that had caused
the outbreak in the first place and despite making lots of nice noises, the
Minister of Manpower, Mr. Tan See Leng would only visit the “renovated” dormitories
in a hazmat suite.
Yet, the logic
for doing this is that its necessary to ensure Singapore remains prosperous in
the capitalistic world. We have drilled it into people that the rich have to
get richer and at the expense of the poor because its good for everyone including
the poor. For example, we need the world’s best paid ministers and an army of
expats to tell the grunts what to do because its good for everyone. We cannot
have a minimum wage because it will scare away investors and everyone will be poorer
for it. Singaporeans must learn to face competition but our large local
companies are shielded from competition because its somehow beneficial to the
people if monopolies set prices for inferior products.
Nobody questions
this and peripheral social problems like the lack of babies are tackled
according to this economic logic. Just throw a few grand at people to have a
baby. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked and instead of questioning why it hasn’t
worked, we’re trying to do more of the same.
This is where Mr.
Dan Price comes in. Mr. Price is the founder of Gavity Payments, a credit card
processing company that he set to give small businesses a cheaper alternative
to Visa and Mastercard. Mr. Price came to fame in 2015 when he slashed his own
salary from US$1 million a year to US$70,000 so that he could raise the wages
of all his employees to a minimum of US$70,000.
This move earned
Mr. Price, the ire of the late Rush Limbaugh, a radio talk show host, who spent
a lifetime telling white American men that they should rub their testicles in the
radioactive slims he was spewing and it was somehow the fault of the Mexicans when
the subsequent cases of impotence exploded.
Well, nearly
seven years after this “socialist” experiment, Mr. Price is very much alive and
nowhere near the bankruptcy courts. Employees who have seen an improvement in
their lives thanks to the wage increase have actually become engaged employees.
Mr. Price has apparently made his top line go up three times and when the
company took a battering thanks to Covid, employees were willing to take pay
cuts. More of the story can be found at:
The rich getting
richer and the poor getting poorer is not “Viagra.” Its toxic slime that’s
going to ruin people and societies in the long run.
The government needs
to look at its approach and be bold enough to break away from this orthodoxy.
It should throw out any orthodoxy produced by the likes of Mr. Limbaugh and
focus on the actions of Mr. Price. Governments around the world, including
Singapore’s, need to understand that while Mr. Limbaugh made a lot of money, his
only contribution was to create generations of impotent wimps while Mr. Price is
showing that you can make money and help create a better society.
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