What has the Green frog who speaks with a forked tongue taught us all? – The Way of the Farmer

Any bloody fool can run an enterprise by just getting the cheapest unit cost of labor to foot the profit margin. But have you asked yourself a really fundamental question – what is the cost ultimately to the community?

It seems very strange to me that as humans we seem to venerate the metric of GDP and GNP above ALL else. At times we are even prepared to elevate the idea of PROFIT to the upper reaches mindlessly without even bothering to ask HOW all this may impact our communities. 

My point is simply this. Can the free market philosophy be a left to run on auto pilot? Let me put it another way. What happens when the COMMUNITY is placed second to PROFIT at every turn and opportunity? What happens when this one goal obliterates all others? What would happen to the idea that work is supposed to be edifying for the ordinary man in the street. What happens when work can longer make ends met and instead scissors throughout the community of the middle class leaving it completely demoralized and in tatters. What happens when the idea of work can no longer nourish and reaffirm our steadfast belief in the idea of dignity of labor. What happens when work can no longer palliate our fears that there still remains one reliable way to create a better future for our kids – if we are hard working?

Maybe, one solution to this intractable problem is to simply buy into the belief – that the metric we should be ideally adopting if we are really genuinely abt creating a better tomorrow for most Singaporeans and residents is for firms to put people first instead of chasing profit mindlessly. What we need is a new order. A new mercantile benchmark where firms that are terminally addicted to the opium of cheap labor and are unwilling to create a better tomorrow for Singaporeans for whatever reason should go elsewhere to turn the wheel of life. Maybe, the green frog should take his sweat kitchens to Africa. I think the green frog will be very colorful there – as it will no longer be green and instead look blue, black and quite dead. As I doubt even Africans will put up with such nonsense – we would do well to ask ourselves during our quiet time – how wise and sustainable is for govts to bend head over heels to accommodate firms where the CEO can’t turn a profit unless they marginalize the broader interest of natives. Coming to think of it, WHY should even such firms be allowed to use cheap labor IF all it seems to do is produce widespread misery to so many people who are simply asking for the basic right to turn the wheel of life with dignity and to even feel good about putting in a hard days work. Why is govt even supporting lousy businessmen who do not even have the basic business acumen to be able to turn a profit UNLESS they have access to cheap labor. Are you telling me that in countries where the influx of cheap labor is strictly regulated everyone eats on paper plates and banana leaf, that there are no dishwashers. Now you all see how that good for nothing, poor excuse of a businessman continues to insult my intelligence.

This leads me to only one conclusion. If we have serious men running the Chinese chamber of commerce – then I think the green frog will not be allowed to see the light of day. The serious men would stop him. As it is, no stopped him. Even the politicians agreed with him it seems since none of them rebuked him there and then to set the pathologically lying green frog straight. And this is where we have to ask WHY did no one stop him? WHY were they so quick to run with what the green frog said?

It gives me very little pleasure to say this, but in all honesty. I really don’t believe businesses should get too close to politicians. This incident shows WHY. When they get together all they seem to do is produce evil characters like that green frog. Today I threw my application to join the CCC into the dustbin. I was seriously considering it. But after long and deep reflection. I think it is best that we go our own way. And they go their own way. Otherwise we too may end up like talking nonsense like the Green frog – who started a joke only for the whole world to laugh at him. And once you do this – the serious men of this world will just consider you an inconsequential light weight. This is simply no good. No bloody good at all.

Darkness 2012

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“The free market enterprise to me is just a license to reincarnate the idea of the survival of the fittest – that is to say, we are going back to the good olde days of Tarzan and the jungle. That is all it really is when you strip it right down to its bare chassis. 

To me as a farmer this idea doesn’t make one molecule of common sense at all – as how is it possible for mankind to have gone through so many mellinia of wars in the name of peace, brotherhood and freedom. Only for us to return back to the point from which we all started from. 

Are you telling me that mankind has progressed through the chastening passage of time just so he can impersonate an ape that hits another ape with a femur to gain a competitive advantage to win the grand banana prize? Is that what you are telling me?

One day, maybe when we next have another comatose inducing conversation. The voices that we will hear will be from another new generation. These people somewhere down the future will laugh at us – in the way we laugh at people who smoke and drink a quart just because they think it makes them look manly. Some will smack their head and wonder to themselves – why did they put PROFIT before PEOPLE? Why did they not think about the COMMUNITY? Why did they not ask themselves – whether the free market can even be trusted to deliver the good life. 

This new generation somewhere in the future will think that man has gone insane. As the picture that is conjured up here is not so different from a man who is putting everything that is most precious to his himself and children into a giant furnace. And poof. It goes up in smoke. And all for what?

If you ask me – this is all that we should be having a conversation about. As if you think about it, this is really the crux of the matter. The rest are just merely side dishes in the greater scheme of things.”