Lee Kuan Yew

One of my heroes passed away earlier this week.

Lee Kuan Yew became Prime Minister of Singapore when the little island was asked to leave the Malaysian Union on August 9, 1965. He steered the course of the young country taking it from a swampy fishing village with per capita income of $ 450 to one of the richest countries in the world today with a per capita income of $ 56,000, ahead of Switzerland and the United States and behind only Qatar, UAE, Norway and Luxembourg. Three of these top four countries have oil income and the fourth was until recently a place where people kept their money at zero interest.

Singapore has been a story of how one man with a clear vision and an iron will can take his people to the heights of glory. He worked hard to keep the government small and profitable. He realized that a country, like a household should not, cannot, spend more than it earns. The Singapore government has run a surplus budget for decades. They run the country with the financial prudence and discipline that many corporations of today would do well to emulate.

He was also wary of well-intentioned but poorly managed social security programs in many nations that have devolved into Ponzi schemes, with the government collecting money from one set of people today to pay another set of people and hoping that this will run in perpetuity.

He built a nation that is exceptionally safe with a fair and efficient judicial system. The administration is corruption free. The legal framework is enforced. Some foreigners thought they could get away in Singapore with the nonsense that would have worked in their own country. Michael Fay comes to mind.

One of the chapters in the second volume of his autobiography, 'The Singapore Story', is 'Fair state - not welfare state'.  This seemingly simple phrase, all of five words, says a lot. Those of us in India can see the irony. If anyone could have delivered on that laudable target, it would be Lee Kuan Yew. And he did.

His passing marks, truly, the end of an era.