Re: Singapore

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 01:43 PM 12/05/1997 -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>I don't think that Singapore is a fabulous place to live but its total 
>freedom is probably greater than Germany or France.  
>Our total freedom in the US is greater than Singapore's.

Depends on what you're measuring, and how you add non-commensurate
quantities together.  Singapore, for instance, kills drug dealers,
and informs you about that on the papers they hand you when you
enter the country.  I'd consider that a fairly blatant limitation on freedom.
The US occasionally kills drug dealers, and only very rarely if they
haven't committed other crimes, and in general seldom kills other criminals
in spite of the number of politicians who are Tough On Crime.
As far as I know, neither France nor Germany currently has the death penalty,
and they probably have fewer extrajudicial executions than the US.

The US currently won't arrest you for belonging to a political party,
now that the Anti-Communist laws have been trashed in the courts.
France and Germany will only arrest you for belonging to a few
political parties, and allow a lot of political parties that they
don't arrest you for membership in.  Singapore, if I remember,
held one of the leaders of a major opposition party in jail for
a couple of decades under Lee Kwan Yew, and makes it hard for 
opposition parties to organize and grow.

Singapore lets you work when you want to work, as long as you're
not doing a politically incorrect job like selling chewing gum or dope.
Germany doesn't really mind you selling dope, as long as your
shop is closed by 18:30 weekdays and earlier on Saturday :-)
(Don't think your customers are allowed to order pizza late, either...)

You can feel safe walking down the streets of Singapore at night.
A nice letter to the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out that the
author also felt very safe walking down the streets of Amsterdam.
Safety doesn't require a tyrannical police state or closed value system.

Without economic freedoms, it's difficult to preserve political and
lifestyle freedoms, especially if the economic limitations go beyond
stealing a lot of your money and into micromanaging how you spend it,
e.g. forbidding unlicensed purchases of printing presses or radio stations.

Without political freedoms, it's difficult to preserve economic freedoms;
if you can't organize and vote out a corrupt or big-spending government,
you're stuck between being constantly ripped off, violent revolution
(which is an expensive activity, especially if guns are hard to get),
or evading government officials (whether it's the Mexican system of
usually small bribes to avoid bigger problems, or the Italian system of
rampant cheating on high income taxes, or the Cypherpunks system
of keeping your income invisible and out of reach.)

Usually, tyrannical governments also want to rip off your money,
and corrupt governments want to keep you in your place politically
so they can continue receiving graft.  Occasionally some society
will be stuck with a tyrannical government that realizes it'll have
more power by letting its people make money, or a greedy do-gooder
society that doesn't mind what you do in your spare time as long
as you pay your taxes.  These situations may happen on the way down
(the greedy do-gooder government officials can't paying themselves
high salaries while collapsing the economy so they go for bribery),
or on the way up (tyrannical but honest leader kicks out corrupt 
small-timers and mafiosi and the people get more economic freedom
and more predictable if still limited personal freedom.)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639