Originally posted by mistyblue:
Any thing extreme is not good. That is an extreme action. To adopt and adapt is more suitable for singapore rather than just follow.
Just as Singapore to follow some western countries to privatizing public services which resulted in huge profits for the privatized public service with a lack of competition and the country is really too small to support small operators.
As usual. Nothing change. So why gripe.
Actually, the flaw of Singapore's model is that they haven't adopted the model in its
entirety.
Look at the US or UK, public services that are privatised remain in the hands of private entities without any stakeholding and interference from their governments. It's pretty much pointless for their respective governments to possess a tangible stake in such firms anyway since governments come and go and, depending on the party in charge, different governments will adopt different stance towards tackling various aspects (broadly speaking, with few exceptions, a Liberal government certainly isn't going to advocate and advance the interests of welfare as much as a Conservative one).
In dictatorships, however, such status quos aren't maintained because the incumbents are so firmly entrenched in power that it's practically impossible for them to be ousted from power by any peaceful, democratic means. Hence, their interests in such firms could be unjustly leveraged for the benefit of their own - in essence, the model you see here isn't flawed because it's a "Western system implemented in an Asian context" (as the fascists would like to claim); it's flawed because it's designed to serve the very interests of the tyrants in the first place.