8/19/2007

Feeling tired?

How many of you out there have been working for 30 or 40 years and feeling tired? Or how many of you are looking at your ageing parents, still working, and looking tired? An average Singaporean will spend about 15 to 20 years of his life in the confines of a school, from nursery onwards, cramming life sustaining information. And then he is expected to keep working for the next 50 years or so. Is that what our life should be? Why is it that our poor parents and grandparents were able to retire and slow down, and still live on and why, we are much better educated, and richer, cannot afford to retire? It is a strange development indeed? The richer we get, the worst we become and the more we need to slog to keep ourselves alive. There used to be a pension scheme that is life sustaining. There used to be a CPF scheme that worked. What happens? Now the pension scheme is as good as gone or eaten up by inflation. And the CPF is never enough. So we need to work and work and work. When I say 'we' I mean those who need to work to keep themselves alive. Not those who do not need to work but who work for fun and pleasure, for ego or some personal reasons, or a very profitable way of passing time, but really do not need to work. When a person has to work to live, and seeing that his work is getting more meaningless, his income is dwindling, and he cannot stop work, it can be very tiring and depressing. It is no fun to work in this way. Anyone looking forward to live to a ripe old age? It is a tiring thought. It is a new rat race, a never ending rat race. Like walking in the middle of a conveying belt and going no where. Have we screw up our life?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

> There used to be a CPF scheme that worked. What happens?

Govt interference with natural systems will in the short to medium term render results which give and ILLUSION of the thing working.

The PROBLEM with govt systems which interrupt natural systems in a non-market way is that govt systems of interference are UNSUSTAINABLE in the long run.

The PAP ministers in their "better moments" (when they are not bullshitting the citizens) have mentioned this time and again. They say "Govt cannot solve every problem" and they are RIGHT.

The CPF is a TAX used to fund an ongoing pyramid scheme.

redbean is either to stubborn or to blind to accept this and he keeps asking dog-silly questions on why CPF doesn't work.

CPF doesn't work because it was not designed to work long term. It was designed to fail. It was sold to the citizen as a system which could work, to allay their fears about home ownership, retirement etc.

If you are a betting person, bet on the fact that CPF will fail its "true believers".

Now to introduce some Hayek. Hayek said that if you want to know why things fail, you must first make sure that they are perfectly capable of working in the first place.

Can you show HOW CPF can work perfectly in the first place?

Of course not. No one can.

Therefore the system is behaving EXACTLY in the way it was designed—i.e. according to its nature.

In case you forget redbean, everything in the universe is behaving EXACTLY as it should, and is in EXACTLY the correct state—whether any of us like it, or not.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

everything in the universe is behaving correctly. i agree.