-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 03:02 PM 12/4/97 -0500, J. Lasser wrote:
And Singapore survives quite well being a totalitarian capitalist society. Sure, you can pick nits and claim that Singapore's not entirely capitalist, but it's more capitalist than this country and certainly less free, too.
The fact of the matter seems to me to be that most people are perfectly satisfied to be passive consumers. While they like to be free, that means free to make purchasing decisions. They also like to be safe, and if they have to lose civil liberties to be safe, then they're all for it. Just so long as they can buy what they want. That seems to me to describe the essence of the Singapore problem, and I'd bet it holds true for the U.S. (and many other places) as well.
Forty years ago Singapore was poor and at risk of being wiped out by Malays or Commies or both. (Maylays killed 1 Meg of their own Chinese in the '60s.) I'm sure that a few decades of being rich and safe will engender in that population a liking for social freedom. They are currently more economically free than we are. We rate 5th and they are 2nd or 3rd on the two indices of economic freedom. They have many personal freedoms as well. They have speech restrictions but are quite outspoken in any case. The gum and spitting and smoking restrictions are no different than the smoking bans and such we are coming to live under. We have one-party rule too. DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBNIdmioVO4r4sgSPhAQGt+AQAuKrTJTWfuUjDSNZO7l0ZyKFJ1UViAU+v IsnmkcSoFSYok+1Etzo/x7t2z1wY9zVN5Smi2w2kzZRoymLS41LMZW7DvBEob7yw Ur18j2fLdYG2hIkcXiAkQaTY96SYfmLRnIESc107Xtmgt00OTVBfDyi3QUbwID0v 349sPDAohIs= =ceec -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----