re: "The Singapore model" (BP, PostBag, February 4, 2020)
Dear editor,
JC is right that Singapore has made impressive economic gains. It, nonetheless, has much to improve in its respect for the rights of Singaporean citizens. Economic gains are important, but if the gains of some are at the cost of violating others, can that be acceptable to good women and men?
More recently than Churchill's 1947 comment on the superiority of democracy over every other form of government, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin explores these issues in stark outline in her very short story from 1973, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", which is well worth the few minutes it takes to read.
Is it really OK to keep an innocent child locked up alone in the dark of a filthy basement to ensure prosperity and joy for the rest of us that we may delight in the "clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea"?
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on February 5, 2020, under the title "Joy at cost of others?" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1850784/prevention-better
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