This is an excerpt from my friend Christopher’s blog [Post: So this is what people call a “dangerous idea” dated 9-12-2009]:

I once told a friend that it is ‘optimal’ for a government gahmen to keep a nation’s people in a borderline state called: 吃不饱，饿不死 [Translation: Not filling but yet not starving].

Consider the two extremes. If the people are starving and dying then they will rise in revolt because they are likely to have nothing to lose but their lives anyway. If they are well fed, then they will start having all sorts of funny ideas on how to make things better and start meddling in how things are run. The in-between condition means that people will be kept in a situation in which they fear losing more if they rise up in revolt, but are saddled with enough burdens to keep them from being too meddlesome.

In Singapore, this condition is achieved through so-called “affordable public housing”. It is interesting to note that in Chinese it is written as: 负担的起的公共房屋. The reason being the words 负担 (in noun form) simply means burden. It would not be ironical, if one were to say that housing is now synonymous with burden – even for public housing built by the HDB. In China, there is a term for this: 蜗居 – which literally translates as the dwelling of a snail. Quite aptly put, since like snails we are all carrying our housing loans like a snail carries its shell.

Thus, it is almost comical when the Minister Mentor Monkey Mentos reassured Singaporeans that HDB will continue to build “affordable”flats when he also said, “‘Well, they have got to decide if the country is going to go up or go down. If the country is going to go down, then the economy will go down and their incomes will be down – unemployment will go up and property values will come down.”

It is interesting to note how the gahmen uses the economy to argue things their way all the time. On one hand they argue that we should bite the bullet and take pay cuts, not to expect huge bonus and good pay increments because of the current status of the economy. On the other they now justify the ridiculously high prices of our so-called public housing as a reflection of the economy. It is almost as if the Singapore economy has a split personality. That’s not forgetting, while the MM tells us to decide ‘if the country is going to go up or go down’, the gahmen said it was due to external factors and it got nothing to do with them when the economy headed south not very long ago. To me they might as well just say, “Tough. But there’s nothing much we do about it!’

In other words, what we decide about our economy has no effect on our economy at all. Even if what we decide has any effect, can we actually expect our pay to go up in tandem in terms of percentage just like our property prices if we decide the economy is to go up?

If I am not wrong, a minister (can’t remember who) once said that the gahmen considered our housing as ‘affordable’ as long as the monthly installments is not more than 20% of our income. Right, that means for every dollar you earn, you give 20cents away to the gahmen to pay for a house which you technically just lease from the gahmen… for the next decade if you are lucky (and for a couple of decades or so if you are not). Frankly, I wonder just how many Singaporeans are saddled with a housing loan that would require them at least 15 – 25 years to pay it off. Would the HDB be so kind to provide us the figure? Is that what is meant by affordable – i.e. being burdened with a debt that would take one almost one generation to pay off?

Is it a wonder why in the end, the Singaporean worker is the most meek and they continually suffer in silence as some of the worst paid workers in the developed world (without even considering what a lapdog our so called gahmen-controlled union)? Is it a wonder why many low level Singaporean workers just swallow their pride and keep quiet in the face of some of the most incompetent middle level managers in the world even when they could have been right?

So, I felt what Christopher has written makes a lot of sense because if we Singaporeans aren’t in the current predicament we are in, we would gladly tell some of these pathetic managers off, and even ask for better remuneration at work. If we Singaporeans aren’t saddled with all these burdens and worries, we would have no reservations making our decisions at the ballot box because the sum of our fears (for many Singaporeans) is simply the fear of losing our financial stability. The Tali-PAP has certainly done well in equating political stability with economic stability and thus indirectly our personal financial stability.

Even though I do not believe that Tali-PAP deliberately ‘created’ this system of modern serfdom or slavery through housing, I am convinced that they realised that it would be the most prefect method to keep majority of Singaporeans in a 吃不饱，饿不死 condition which will keep them in power for a long time to come.

The day when Singaporeans wake up from the fact that the ‘Singapore Dream’ of owning a property of his own is nothing but a nightmare, will perhaps be the day Singapore turn out en mass to vote the Tali-PAP out of power. Perhaps, that day is now though I suspect there’s not much a new gahmen will do to change this if they come to power.

I forgot to mention… the best and most tangible baby bonus, is to build real affordable housing.

Recommended Reads:
FoxTwo’s Microblog: Bureaucratic Stupidity
Growing your tree of prosperity: So this is what people call a “dangerous idea”