I accept your postulate about free market or laissez faire
capitalism but what you have missed out is : laissez faire of the
kind you mentioned can hardly take place in our case because of the
predominance of GLCs in our economy. According to your postulate as
privateer, you do not wait for government to change but just decide
and do it.
The GLCs of the kind we are producing especially when we are a
small economy without hinterland have big impact of overall
economic viability of private sector businesses. They are using
government funds to go into businesses. They take away the bigger
pieces of economic goodies leaving only crumbs for the SMEs. So by
and by one after another all the private sector businesses will be
shrinking.
Just look at the latest, NTUC, and Keppel are not going to scale
down their local operations. They are going into all the services
which our local SMEs are doing which deprive businesses of their
fair competitions.
I thought sometime ago government was talking about fair trading
and has passed a fair trading act of some kind. May be it is time
to look into this problem by extending fair trading act to prevent
unfair competitions by GLCs against their own local businesses.