qui tacet consentire videtur

Although my op-ed has finally been published in the Straits Times review section as a joint submission, I can’t help but feel a little upset that they rejected my original piece but took this one when the only differences are that 1) it is less critical of the state, 2) more conversational and most importantly, 3) has a nominated member of parliament’s name in front - same ideas, same structure, his prose. That, and I like my punchy policy-wonk prose better, even though his is probably more accessible.

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When Atlas Shrugs

On my way to sit in Parliament with David, I took the bus past a local university and saw this billboard, and realized how tragic it is that one of the most fundamental and most precious of civil liberties has been reduced to a marketing gimmick for mobile phones, most ironically, by a telecom firm owned by those who deny it. Perhaps it was most tragic that none of the students there would appreciate the horrible irony.

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And what a day.

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My initial response to reading Mark Eleven’s post on his experience as an ASEAN pre-university scholar was to dismiss it as the rant of someone who doesn’t have the talent, initiative, or willpower to benefit from being given such a great opportunity - the next best alternative would have been to pursue his studies in M’sia and fight through ethnic quotas on local university placement and primary Bahasa language instruction. I question his competence, and most of all, his ridiculous sense of entitlement that demands that the world owes him a living. They do not, and that should have been the first lesson he learned in this country - because it is the most important one in life.

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Honey and Clover, my favorite anime series, employs plenty of wheel imagery - the circularity much like the endless back and forth of its love triangles that seem never to come to a conclusion.

Reading Geoffrey’s retrospective on 2006, I felt it necessary to write my own, as if I must articulate to myself the lessons it taught me in order to truly internalize them, now that the wheel of time has come full circle.

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Apparently I am one of the three runners-up for the World Youth Movement for Democracy essay contest, though as far as I can tell there is no prize. I wrote the essay late last year just after returning from Seoul, when I had plenty of free time and low opportunity cost for writing, and I had just read the Zakaria book which had come into the military library.

What really bothers me is that the first place went to another person from SG, one Charles Tan affiliated with the Singapore Democratic Party. Not simply because I wrote a much better essay but because our political positions are completely at odds, which makes me wonder whether the YMD had fully understood my essay… One could interpret their inconsistency as neutrality but I doubt that is the case. As far as I know, the SDP platform is a contradictory mix of civil liberties and far-left socialism, and I’m sure you can tell what my position is from the books in the header graphic above. It is very disturbing to be named on the same page as an organization for which I feel at best pity (they have admittedly been treated quite terribly) and at worst contempt (for bad populist policy positions).

The essay is not particularly original, the ideas are mostly classical liberal, though as far as I know the critique of modern youth/democracy movements is mine, which makes my winning particularly odd since the criticism applies largely to the one that sponsored the essay contest itself. I am writing this off as a result of low competition due to poor outreach. However, I hope my friends will enjoy the essay, which I will reproduce here below the cut.

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Eric Crampton on Bryan Caplan’s EconLog writes (Hat tip MR):

A grad school colleague once hit me up for a donation for his participation in a Habitat for Humanity project in the Philippines. While he agreed that comparative advantage would dictate that he instead work more in the States and donate the money to hire folks in the Philippines more competent than him to do the construction work, he also noted that that alternative wouldn’t get him a trip to the Philippines. And, of course, I then declined to subsidise his vacation. In that case, it was pretty clear that the charity was bundling large benefits for solicitor/participants with its fundraising mechanism: the charity that bundles private benefits for participants with its activities will attract more participants.

We have similar vacation subsidies in SG except that taxpayers here do not get to decline (I may be wrong on this, but I do think overseas expeditions are partly subsidized by the state even if most of the costs are borne by the participants). I wonder if the resources foregone (ie the opportunity cost of the taxes, participants time, SIF’s administrative costs etc) might have done more for the economic development of these societies in private hands…

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After escaping the office on Friday I made my way down to the airport to pick up Nara-noona (from my APEC YP team) from Terminal 1. We walked around a bit at Bugis, where I took her on a short detour to the Central Library and got myself a yellowed copy of The Book of the New Sun: Sword and Citadel. Yes, I’m terrible at being a tour guide.

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Tonight I attended the dinner at the annual CAP seminar. My initial reason to go was to see someone I hadn’t seen for a long time, but the person wasn’t there. Not all was lost: It was a reminder of everything that went wrong with my misspent youth, all the wasted opportunities and failures. I really wanted to be part of that happy family, but somehow it just didn’t happen. It reminded me why I have to work harder at making sure that never happens again.

The good (?) news is that Geoffrey and I won third place in the university category for the MAS competition for our paper on currency liberalization. The first and second places went to an MAS local scholar and a pair of postgrads (NUS MSc and NTU doctoral), so I think we did fairly well considering we’re both prefrosh. However, the relevant benchmark is Judith who did the same thing, except she won second place and did it at 19 - we should have done so much better. I feel like I’ve let both of us down.

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