The Key Metric of a Healthy Nation

I got to meet a schoolmate from high school. He is an aspiring founder who is starting a business in agriculture and the management of organic waste. He is using black soldier flies to consume organic waste and process the flies to become high-protein feed for the poultry industry. It is a great idea, and I like how he is thinking. I also like that he has taken time to think about the market, how big it is, and how his solution benefits that market over existing solutions and sources of protein feeds. It is good to see some people from high school taking up entrepreneurship. It is something of a shock that most guys from high school are not entrepreneurs. They have either decided to go abroad and work for the white man, or they work in corporate jobs that pay well and stagnate at some point. A lot of Strath guys have gone the safe route—the one that makes sense. However, I believe that this is a disservice to themselves and to society. I believe that the middle class should be the ones to take the most risks and do things that other classes don't have the privilege of doing. Entrepreneurship and innovation are the best merger of all things high risk and high potential reward. It is the place that most people do not have the luxury of working in. The poor don't have the resources or the skill set to work on innovation. The rich are too hell-bent on maintaining the status quo that benefits them and their existing industries. Therefore, it is the job of the middle class and the entrepreneur to fill the gap of making a difference and reinventing how things are done. Ultimately, the middle class, led by the brilliant and bold entrepreneur, will benefit from providing this valuable service to society.

When I become a leader of this country, I will have one metric: to grow the middle class. My success will be achieved by allowing more people to move from poverty to middle income. I will increase the number of jobs, revive old industries, create new industries, incentivise entrepreneurs to build and grow their businesses, increase exports and reduce imports, reduce taxes, encourage foreign investment, and so much more. There is so much to be done, but there are people who have done it before. Lee Kuan Yew is one of those people. He turned Singapore from a backwater third-world country into a bustling metropolis with worldwide recognition. He is the epitome of progress that all emerging and developing countries must strive toward. He showed what is possible when discipline and intentional progress are applied over a period of time.

It can lead to wealth, prosperity, and flourishing for people who had none of that—turning dreams into reality. Turning a Desert into an Oasis. This is the job of people who have plenty.

The function of the middle class is to provide a buffer for society to think up new ideas that can take it to the next level. If the middle class are not doing that, then they are lost. They have become decadent, and their destruction is around the corner. Many forces conspire to milk the middle class of this power. The middle class is the most taxed, most distracted, most highlighted class out there. When people talk about the rich, they don't refer to the wealthy landowners or business magnates. The poor are too far away to even see and recognise these people. What the poor and the majority see are the guys with bigger houses than them, better cars, luxury clothes, and better schools. To illiterate people, they don't see assets as something that makes people rich; they see what makes people look rich. The people who look rich are not the owners of assets—it is the middle class that works for the people who own the assets. The middle class are the ones who buy the houses, nice cars, fancy clothes, and so on. The wealthy are too few to point out per se. They don't even make up a considerable market. It is like saying that Sarit Centre was built for the wealthy. This is dumb. The wealthy built malls for the middle class to buy things from them. The wealthy sell them clothes they don't need, TVs they don't watch often, and cars that look nice but function like any other car. The majority of people don't know what wealth is, even if it stared them in the face. That's why it goes under the radar.

If the poor were to revolt right now, the wealthy would not be as affected since they own land, property, stocks, etc. The people who would get attacked the most are the middle class with their nice cars on loan and properties on mortgage, etc.

My idea is that we should grow and protect the middle class. It is the crown jewel of our country. Without the middle class, there is nothing that the country has. It will just be a serfdom that has no democracy, no innovation, no freedom of speech, and ultimately no progress. The agenda of all presidents and leaders should be to grow the purchasing power of their people—turning them into middle-class people who feel like they have economic mobility as long as they put in the work. Meritocracy is important if we want to build a land of prosperity. The wealthy also have a responsibility to create more jobs, expand to new markets, and innovate further to solve more problems. This is their mandate as the wealthy. As Adam Smith says, the job of the wealthy is to build more factories and employ more workers. It is not to line their pockets with grand profits and build luxury items and unnecessary experiences. They have a duty to the society that gave them that wealth in the first place. Doing otherwise is shitting where you eat. A lot of bullshit indeed.