He is just being rational.

Lee Kuan Yew in his 2009 interview with Charlie Rose said the lasting advantage of the US over China is the continual exodus of migrants — and not just some migrants, but rather the high quality, cream of the crop migrants. The US is open, and China, closed in many ways.

That same interview, they talked about how a Chinese minister then visited the US to invite Chinese Americans back to China because “the homeland is calling.”

“That won’t work,” LKY chuckled. What might work, he said, is for them to say, “You come and take a look, keep your green cards, and go back to the US whenever you want.” Once you know the quality of life you can get in a free market like the US, it is hard to look back.

China, the dragon awakened, cannot and should not expect to compel its brightest of minds to come back through the rhetoric of homecoming, in as much as the Philippines should not expect people like Wesley So to trade in their gifts in the name of patriotism.

The US has a lasting system that works. Brilliant people are just responding as rational people should — go to where they can be optimally used and rewarded most, to a place where the market pays for them to hone their craft.

It is more than just corruption in Philippine sports politics. It is our nation failing to find the system that works for us.

Instead of asking why people flee from the Philippines, we should ask what the country could have done to make brilliant and driven people stay and thrive!

“It has to be a place that’s useful to the world,” LKY, the greatest nation builder of all time, reflected, when Charlie Rose asked him how Singapore could cope with a rising China in another interview in 2000. “Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.” Companies and migrants come to and stay in Singapore for all the benefits the country offers. Once it loses those benefits, the companies, the migrants, they will leave Singapore.

The founding father recounted the genesis of Singapore’s usefulness to the world: “[We thought of] getting these big American multinationals to manufacture in Singapore, and [we’d export the products] back to America and the world. As luck would have it, the [Chinese] Cultural Revolution made [these companies] bypass Taiwan and Hong Kong and come to Singapore — Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, you name it — and we became the biggest manufacturer of disk drives and computer peripherals for 20 years. We never looked back.

“I came up with an idea. People are going to come here and explore the [Southeast Asian] region. It is a dangerous region — pestilence, malaria, typhoid. Here in Singapore, we will create a first-world oasis out of this third-world condition, so that they will break camp here and then venture out. And when they are sick they will come back. So we had first-world standards of infrastructure, roads, airports, seaports, communication, health, schooling, and public security. Later on we added concerts, theaters.”

Wesley’s chess should not be far down the line, following the wise man’s drift.

“The hardest part is getting a population behaving like a third world to behaving like a first world. You can’t do silly things like you did before because you want to be a host to first-world guests,” LKY added.

Was the Philippines useful for the likes of Wesley? Adam Smith’s maxim can provide a yardstick we can use to answer that ourselves: “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” (1755). Without these, commerce and productivities that will support the crafts of people like Wesley cannot materialize, and as we have seen, when we fail to deliver, somebody else will.

Do we have peace and are we capable of maintaining it? Do we have easy taxes? Is justice served in our country? Did we behave well?

As with Singapore, for as long as brilliant people keep on migrating to the US, the US will stay formidable and become even more inventive and creative. Individuals gifted with the drive, talent, and skill to pursue their enlightened self-interest will keep on gravitating towards its utilities, like a snowball down a hill.

If someone is endowed with a talent so special that it is a gift to the world, it is counterproductive, a shame even, to shackle it to a system that pays no attention to it, in the name of patriotism. The talents we recognize losing in the country’s long history of brain drain is indicative that we have the raw materials, only that we haven’t figured out how to process them into the product all these years. – Rappler.com

Waldo Alcantara is an IT consultant. He also sells gardening materials at “It’s Homegrown,” and buys Philippine securities which are selling below their intrinsic values. He is husband to a virtuous wife, father to an adorable daughter, and servant to his Lord Jesus.