Tropical Camel

This is pasted over from my other blog:
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On the news, the word’s out that apparently Singapore’s world’s 8th greatest forex hoarder.

This is remarkably and deeply disturbing.

Singapore is facing spiralling inflation, price hikes, wage stagnation and a coterie of other factors designed to harden people’s lives but not put them in a state where they actually have perfect justification to complain. (Or even if they do, one can just deport them and claim that they either ARE foreign and have no business complaining, or are just instigated by bad ol’ foreigners that harbour ill intent. Against what, our foreign exchange? 0.0)

Singapore also has significantly tinier populations than the top seven hoarders, namely China, Japan, the European Union zone, Russia, India, ROC (Taiwan), South Korea, and Brazil. Let’s compare populations, shall we?

Singapore – 4.5 million, approx.
China – more than 1.3 billion
Japan – 127 million
EU – 320 million
Russia – 142 million
India – 1.12 billion
ROC (Taiwan) – 22 million
South Korea - 49 million
Brazil – 183 million

Let’s be nice for now and see that, oh, Taiwan has the tiniest population out of the honchos who have more forex reserves than tiny vulnerable us. But they ARE still about 5 times our population size, and has a grand 36188 square kilometres of land. (No matter how Mrs Ho says they’ll narrow out, they can’t become our land area.) While we, Singapore here, proudly squishes all our people onto about 700 square kilometres.

We have no authority nor backing to pass judgment on other countries’ forex reserves. Take in mind, too, that despite their huge reserves countries like Brazil and China have renowned high Gini coefficients; huge income disparities.

We have no right to have income disparities. Swathes of land big enough to be big on the map inevitably make up countries that cannot be fairly expected to manage perfectly its widely-spread population. In Singapore, the artificial country (for we are not some messiah-declared nation like Israel, or an always-there country like China), where it takes less than 2 hours to drive from one end to another, how is it unfair to expect far better-managed fiscal and political duties to (so many, admittedly) people that are compacted into an easy-to-reach tiny space?

As our often-boasted ‘resilience’ and ‘ability’ and ‘foresight’ in our small populations provides an economic dividend, so has that dividend its duty to perform; if we have more capability than bigger countries, we have, too, less difficulty in fulfilling our obligations. If we are an experiment in the definition of nationhood, so should we uphold future standards for nations like us.

/portion deleted/

Bye.
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