Big Gahmen

The PAP Government is a little too big. Not big in the sense of being bloated and overbureaucratic, but big in a more subtle, insidious way. It is so big it pops up everywhere, in politics and beyond; to use a mildly sinister metaphor, it is like an octopus with whose countless tentacles turn up in every nook and cranny.
Most of the Republic's home-grown corporate giants are Gahmen-linked in some way, usually through Temasek Holdings. Statutory boards and other parastatals dominate many aspects of the social and cultural arena. So much so that when NTUC FairPrice announces a textbook donation drive, some attack it as a political power-play.
It hit me too in the course of my recent reading: so many of the Singaporean works I encountered were endorsed, in some way, by the National Book Development Council, which is linked to the Government's National Arts Council. Moreover Singapore's only literary, or indeed cultural, honours, such as the Singapore Literature Prize or the Cultural Medallion, are given by the Government. Not private trusts and foundations established by or in the memory of great personnages, as happens in the West.
There is no denying that the Gahmen here does a lot of things. A lot. Is this necessarily a bad thing though?
It could be, if it competes with and/or stifles individual initiative. The Chicago school loved to remind us that government, not being subject to market forces, would be liable to slack and inefficiency, and that individuals reacting to incentive structures could often do better. They added, as a sort of corollary, that the government should therefore only be doing what individuals left to themselves could not, or would not, do -- provide public goods, regulate externalities, that sort of economic thing. So if there are actually NGOs around who were/are planning to run / actually running something similar to FairPrice's textbook donation programme, FairPrice should quit it and go back to grocering.
The Chicago school's argument does not apply entirely, because The Gahmen and its minions are actually quite efficient creatures by nature; FairPrice is probably running as decently tight a ship with its charity programmes as with its core business. But nonetheless, by continuing to duplicate what civic society could do, NTUC, and, if you wish though it is a bit of a stretch, by extension the PAP, are needlessly expending national resources and stifling civic initiative. And the Gahmen wonders how to instil a stronger sense of civic duty.
In other areas, though, perhaps indeed no one else has done much -- think culture, though I may simply be ignorant. In this case Gahmen intervention, and domination, is understandable and to some extent justifiable ... but still it should aim to nurture and eventually make way for civic involvement.
In the preceding argument "civic society" has been treated as something independent of the government. That is, unforunately, not entirely the case in Singapore, so deep and wide have the Gahmen's tentacles spread. Is NTUC part of the state, or civic society? It is a bit of both really. And to make matters worse, it is the only trade union around here. Singapore's civic society, too, is dominated by the Gahmen. Maybe this was simply the consequence of politics over the decades after Separation ... but it is certainly not a desirable state of affairs. The Government doing much, in addition to civic society, can be a good thing; the Gahmen doing much, because it has supplanted and become civic society as well as government, is definitely not.