Again, more rubbish aiming at making people run faster in a pointless rat race.

The Dear Leader:

They’ve got to decide whether the country is going to go up or down. If the country is going to go down, then economy will go down, people’s incomes will be down, unemployment will be up, then property values will go down.

Message: if you don’t help the country to ‘go up’, your property is going to lose value. So buck up!

Next:

If the people have confidence in the Republic and the Government, flat prices and values will rise “as it has been going up every year” historically, said Mr Lee, who as Prime Minister had in 1964 pushed the HDB to launch the home ownership scheme.

Wait. Before that, we were told that if the economy of Singapore “goes up”, then our flat prices will rise. Now instead it’s if the people have confidence in the Government, property prices will rise. The first version made some sense — property prices do tend to rise when the economy is doing well. But what has confidence in the Government got to do with property prices? Confidence in anything could be mistaken. If people have confidence in the Government but the economy takes a dive nonetheless, why should flat prices rise?

Note the subtle shift — first it’s ‘if you work harder, your property will gain in value’. Alright, that makes sense, I’ll work harder. Then shift the frame — ‘if you believe in us, your property will gain in value’. Wow, faith can move mountains after all!

Moving on, the Dear Leader’s hidden agenda is blurted out in the next paragraph:

Noting that home ownership “motivates Singaporeans to work hard and upgrade to better flats for a better quality of living”, Mr Lee said: “More important, Singaporeans know that the HDB flat gives them a tangible stake in worth. If Singapore prospers … they share in the growth … The HDB story reflects the social mobility in Singapore.”

Really, it’s all about motivating you to work harder and contribute to GDP! And as a reward your property values increase. Never mind the fact that the prices of the properties you’d like to upgrade to increase in tandem, so they still remain out of your reach. As long as your properties enjoy a nominal increase in value, it doesn’t matter if your purchasing power continues to decline!

It gets better:

Pointing out that owning of a HDB flat was “a store of value that can be monetised when needs be”, he said home ownership had been critical for a fledgling nation with “an immigrant community with no common history”.

Oh, that old trick again, reminding us of those Bad Times when people said that Singapore wouldn’t make it. Where, pray, is one supposed to stay after “monetising” one’s abode? Move in with your children, of course! If you have no children, serves you right for not doing your duty for the nation! You’ll just have to downgrade to a lousier abode and pocket the difference. That’s progress for you.

“If all of the 900,000 HDB flats built over the past 50 years were rental flats, Singapore would be a very different society today. We would not have the stability, progress and prosperity that the stake in home ownership of a growing asset has made possible,” said the Minister Mentor, reiterating the assurance that young couples would get sufficient help from the Government to own their first flat.

Straw man. Who ever proposed making all public housing rental flats? Also, the hidden agenda revealed again. People need to be made to think that they possess assets that are growing in value, so that they will be motivated to work harder and contribute to the prosperity of their overlords. It doesn’t matter if the only way to “monetise” that asset is to downgrade their living conditions.

Also, I think we are all very interested in hearing how the Government will provide “sufficient help” to young couples to own their first flat, but for whatever reason, the nature of this help is not revealed. Instead, the reporter chooses to emphasise the exhortation to be grateful for the Government’s brilliant idea to continuously inflate housing prices.