Govt keeping close eye on ECs

[specuvestor]

A world class government paid extremely high salaries, I expect them to do proactive managemen, NOT fire fighting. Do they wait for congestion at airport or airport terminals and runways like today's roads?

If they can plan for airport and seaports to that level of detail, such EC policies regulations cannot be too hard. It's just that they do not want to do such things... not revenue focus simply.

The topics of over regulation or no regulation - this area of grey, they can always speak to the developers and the buyers to get balanced views.

> It was not too long ago when the complain was that Singapore is over-regulated. Personally I would prefer gahmen not to over-
> regulate. Set the guidelines and if things do not work, fine-tune.

Nothing wrong with being fire fighters, it is a noble profession. There will always be fire to fight. There are governments that fiddle while the country burns, so I am thankful that our gahmen is still fighting fire.

If ruling party is paid so much to do fire fighting, I rather let the others have a go. I don't think it is too difficult. Any of the investors here will know how to think and pre-empt developers creativity...

I humbly disagree. Governments are not prophetic. They can only cater to the knowns, not the unknowns. Look at the various side effects of the CDO crisis. Is the US government stupid? Would you have foreseen it? There are unintended consequences especially when dynamics are chaos theory driven. We can only look at the big impact and tweak it as we go along. And I am very sure Khaw is going to tweak the EC because it is way out of line from the principles of HDB.

I used to think that paying ministers high salary is wrong. I now see that the PRINCIPLE is actually pragmatically right but the execution sucks. I would have less an issue if they use the mode of the mean, rather than the mean of the mode of the professions.

Like Munger always say... look at the incentive system. This incentive system is driving Singapore to be a rich man's playground. I don't think this is that surprising. Conversely if the minister's pay is pegged to say bottom 20th quartile of the population, then things will change.

EDIT: I mean MULTIPLE of 20th quartile.