What they deserve

Of the responses I’ve read to the entire salary debate in Singapore one argument keeps leaping to the forefront. ‘Why should Singaporean civil servants salary rise when so many people live off a salary one thousandth of what the ministers get?’

Let’s start with the simple answer, they deserve it.

Now for the long answer: Singapore is a capitalist society. The capitalist model has turned Singapore from a third world country into a first world country in 50 years. Not only is that an amazing feat, but anybody that would argue that it could have been achieved without capitalism is either dangerously idealistic or an idiot.

There have been few or no parallels in history to this small island model and other societies are now modelling themselves on Singapore, in order to achieve the same sort of growth. The Singaporean government didn’t model itself, however; instead they experimented, using economic concepts in practice that had only been theory up to that time. It worked beautifully.

No, I’m not arguing that they should therefore reap the benefits of what they’ve sown, though I certainly could, no my argument is a little more refined than that (I hope). Though the Singaporean government should certainly be proud of what they’ve achieved, this alone does not give them the right to ask the salaries they are asking.

The reason they are allowed to do that is because if Singapore is capitalist, than that capitalist model should be extended to the government. In other words, people should get paid according to what their services are worth to the population as a whole. A bloke working in a chicken rice stand in the heartlands gets paid $1,200 because he’s running a food stall and people believe his services are worth $1,200. Ministers should be paid $1.2 million because they are running an entire country and people believe (or should believe) that they deserve to be paid that much.

Under capitalism, you get people the most intelligent and educated people to do the most important work. In order to pull these intelligent and educated people away from other sectors you pay them a large amount of money.

The Singaporean government is in direct competition with the private sector. If they don’t pay an adequate salary they won’t attract candidates of an adequate skill level. Those people that they do draw deserve the salaries they are paid.

If you don’t agree with that, then you don’t agree with the entire Singapore model. That’s your choice, of course, but in that case you shouldn’t be attacking the Ministers for their salaries, but instead be attacking the model as a whole. You should try to turn Singapore socialist or, better yet, Marxist. Only then will people draw more average salaries.

Of course, if you do that there’s a good chance those salaries will be a great deal lower than they are now.

Pay them what they deserve, or you'll get what you deserve, namely a bad government.