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There was something else in Lee’s statement about getting politics right that bothered me. It reminded me of this slip of the tongue during the 2006 general election when he told voters not to vote in opposition members of parliament. If they did, he would have to spend all his time thinking up ways to “fix” them and he’d have no time to govern, he told his crowd. Given this history, one cannot help but ask what Lee really means by “getting politics right”. Does he picture a scenario of the People’s Action Party reigning with little dissent inside and outside parliament? One where his government has complete freedom to implement whatever muddled-headed policies it chooses, beguiled by its own sense of inerrant wisdom?
If one takes into account runaway housing prices, soaring healthcare costs, crowded and frequently-breaking down public transport, wide income disparity, all kinds of restrictions on liberty, and a steady destruction of the independence of many state institutions, I am not at all convinced that we have “right politics” producing right outcomes.
In fact, one can easily argue that when Brazilians took to the streets to demand accountability, and when President Dilma Rousseff acknowledged the validity of people’s dissent, promising to turn policies around, that was politics that was much more “right” and likely to produce better outcomes than Lee and the PAP’s brand of silence-all-opposition rule.
http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2...o-have-got-both-politics-and-economics-right/
If one takes into account runaway housing prices, soaring healthcare costs, crowded and frequently-breaking down public transport, wide income disparity, all kinds of restrictions on liberty, and a steady destruction of the independence of many state institutions, I am not at all convinced that we have “right politics” producing right outcomes.
In fact, one can easily argue that when Brazilians took to the streets to demand accountability, and when President Dilma Rousseff acknowledged the validity of people’s dissent, promising to turn policies around, that was politics that was much more “right” and likely to produce better outcomes than Lee and the PAP’s brand of silence-all-opposition rule.
http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2...o-have-got-both-politics-and-economics-right/