Singapore and its lack of Democracy
straitstimes.com
straitstimes.com
Free market regimes that happen to be authoritarian have succeeded because of extrinsic reasons (international conditions), not intrinsic ones (the authoritarian model is fundamentally a better one than the democratic model).
During the Cold War, democratic regimes that were not free market (or did not sufficiently recognize private property, specifically private property owned by former colonial powers (i.e., US and Europe)) were consistently harassed or even toppled by the dominant superpower (see Allende's Chile, Mossadegh's Iran). For the most part, those regimes that were toppled were replaced by authoritarian (but free market) regimes.
In the last half of the 21st century, being a free market regime was both a necessary and a sufficient condition for survival, whereas being a democratic regime was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for survival. These two facts strongly encourage the success of authoritarian free market regimes.
Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes during the Cold War? Well, they certainly existed in Western Europe, but the development story there is complicated by Europe's historically high levels of development (and the Marshall Plan).
Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes in developing countries? Democracy is susceptible to populist acts. Much of the private property in developing countries was owned by former colonial powers. A democratic government would be very tempted to dabble in nationalism (and nationalization), risking external regime overthrow.
If the West is puzzled by the success of Singapore and China, they should examine the history of their own foreign relations. The West gradually opened up to China as China gradually became more free market, despite the fact that China didn't (at all) open up politically. Had the conditions for Western engagement been political rather than economic, we might have seen a democratic (but perhaps not free market) China.
Will we see more democratic free market regimes now that the Cold War is over and the success of the free market approach is virtually undisputed? I think we have and are and will: in the many former Soviet republics that are eagerly embracing free markets (like Russia itself) and the EU (with its dicta of human rights and democracy).
Isn't that like saying democracy is susceptible to democracy?
Let's use the word "market supportive" to describe governments that support and enable property rights and contract law ( the essence of a free market).
How many countries became more "market supportive" as a democracy? Britain, the U.S., Germany, Austria, France, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong - these countries all either developed their market oriented legal systems as authoritarian states or they inherited their system from a colonial ruler.
I can think of numerous examples of democracies ( or failed attempts at democracy) moving in a less market supportive direction. Compare Britain 1884 ( the year of the Reform Act granting universal male suffrage ) to Britain 1950. Germany 1871 to Germany 1935. Russia under monarchy to Russia under the populist Bolshevik revolutionary government. Or Argentina in the first half of the 20th century to Argentina in the second half the century. France under any of the monarchies to France under any of the succeeding republics. India under the Raj to India post-Raj. Zimbabwe pre-universal suffrage, to Zimbabwe after universal suffrage.
The only counter examples I can think of are the former Soviet republics. However, that is not really fair, since 1) it would be impossible to be more anti-property than the Soviet system and 2) the Soviet system arose as a result of a populist revolution. Ireland might be another example, though I haven't studied its history enough.
What I got out of this article was just that democracy isn't the only way that works even today. It helps us remember that it's a means for us to eventually find better forms of government.
_"Democracy is susceptible to populist acts. Much of the private property in developing countries was owned by former colonial powers. A democratic government would be very tempted to dabble in nationalism (and nationalization), risking external regime overthrow."_
Who said that democracy can't just happen in any society, it requires a certain degree of maturity?
Bad: virtually non-existent creativity / independent thought
from the South China Morning Post: "married couples [in Singapore] turn up each year at a clinic for sexual problems with an unusual dilemma - they don't know how to have sex.
'There are probably many more who are keeping quiet because they are too embarrassed to come forward,' V. Atputharajah, the doctor who runs the centre, told the Straits Times...
While there are no official figures on unconsummated marriages in the city-state, Dr Atputharajah estimated that one couple in 200 had the problem. Chong Yap Sent, an associate consultant at the National University Hospital, said the figure was probably twice to four times as high as that."
The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities
This sounds precisely where the US is headed, with watchlists and selective enforcement of laws.
And of course those who are financially successful can spend their wealth to mitigate the lack of personal freedoms if they so desire. I'm sure Singaporeans can buy chewing gum at a premium just like Americans can buy marijuana.
https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=82856
This is incredible stuff: "Murder cases reported for the first half of the year declined to six in this city-state of 4.5 million people, compared to twelve cases reported for the same period in 2006. The Regional Security Officer (RSO) estimates the current number of murders at the end of 2007 to be approximately eight. All murder cases for the period have been solved. Reported incidents of rape increased for this period to 70 cases, compared to 53 cases during the same period in 2006. Motor vehicle theft and snatch theft incidents increased 25 percent during the first half of 2007. Housebreaking incidents for the first half of 2007 declined ten percent. The “outraging of Modesty,” a Singaporean crime pertaining to unwanted sexual touching, is reported to have increased a negligible amount."
Twelve murders per year, in a city of 4.5 million people! New York City, a little over twice as big, is bragging that their murder rate is under 500 for the first time in decades. They are bragging that you are only 2000% more likely to get stabbed, strangled, shot or beaten to death in NYC than in Singapore.
The fairest analogy is that Singapore is run the way a private business would run a nation-state. Private property maximizes the rent they can collect from their residents, but political freedom is pretty worthless. Google doesn't let users determine their search algorithm, and won't even bow down when they accidentally link to something reprehensible (Google "Jew", for example). If someone wants to switch, they can switch to Yahoo!
It's instructive that it is so much cheaper to leave Singapore than to leave the US -- Singapore is a pretty small city, and there are plenty of other small, English-speaker-friendly places in the area. If the cost of switching governments got as low as the cost of switching search engines, you'd expect the quality of government to approach that of online search -- Singapore is a great example of what you get when you move along that continuum.
Side note: Díaz probably did some expropriations but at least not the biggest ones. Those where done during Lazaro Cardenas´s presidency.
Well-run dictatorships can be prosperous in the short run, but the inexorable decay into rule by a corrupt elite will bankrupt a society. Once a madman or idiot gets into power, decades or centuries of progress will be erased. One benefit of liberal democracy is that it's much more robust, relying on laws and traditions rather than the people running it. Look at how much damage the Bush Administration has done to the US. Were it not for our liberal, democratic political traditions, they'd have caused 100 times more ruin by this point, and we wouldn't have a very good chance of being rid of them in Jan. 2009.
The normal trajectory is Louis i through xvi -> "Democracy" -> Napoleon. The kings that precede democracy are sometimes more stable that it itself...
There are no large countries that are democracies that I'm aware of. If there were, they would get their Bonapartes or Bolsheviks as they always do.
And that doesn't even touch upon the other issue, that of the corrupt elite being put in place by the democratic system itself, as happened with basically all the fascist dictators in the 30s. Who's to say that won't happen again?
I don't think the jury's out, so to speak. It can definitely happen, and I think US plutocracy is definitely corroding the democracy. Democracy is a complex system and needs a lot of safeguards; a constitution and an electoral process are only two of many necessary ingredients.
Is that, historically, true? The monarchies of Europe lasted for generations, and in many cases overthrown in bloody coups causing more destruction than the regimes they sought to replace.
It seems weird to me that government would be the only business that isn't run better through private ownership. If Bush owned the US's future tax revenues, and could pass them on to future generations of Bushes, you'd expect him to run things pretty consistently, and with an eye to maximizing property values to keep the tax-generating people happy. If you compare how well-run your government is at its best to how well-run Google or Goldman Sachs is at their worst, you can see the advantages to treating institutions as transferable and valuable private property, rather than giving managers temporary license to extract what benefit they can, after which the consequences are passed on to someone else.
Would FDR have designed Social Security the way he did if the future cash flows cut into the dividend checks of future Roosevelts? Would Reagan have allowed Congress to spend so heavily if it were his money? I seriously doubt it.
Was slavery legitimate because it was approved by a "liberal democracy"? Or was pre-Civil War (or even pre-Civil Rights) US not a liberal democracy? If it wasn't a liberal democracy back then, were the then-government's actions still legitimate? These questions get at many thorny issues (like reparations, etc).
Also, is it legitimate for liberal democratic states to mandate the teaching of intelligent design, prohibit same-sex marriages, etc? Would a constitutional amendment (duly passing the democratic process) banning interracial marriages (or gay marriages) be legitimate?
I guess my point is: Do legitimate (i.e., democratic) means justify any ends? The rhetoric of "liberal democracy" is so powerful that it can be (and sometimes is) used to justify very questionable practices.
In the last couple of years, I've encountered well-reasoned opposing views for the first time.
Is democracy a means to an end (good government), or an end in itself? If it's an end in itself, the argument is over. How tragic that good governance - a life-and-death-issue - is trumped by an ideal.
If democracy is the means to good government, then it might be worth reconsidering our assumptions. Growing up good Catholics, oops I mean democratic citizens, we all know that opposing ideas such as despotism have irreparable problems and are the cause of most of the death and destruction in the world. Instead of giving up, let's try fixing those problems. Perhaps the situation has changed since people first started telling each other about the succession problems of despotism. Maybe technology can change the government industry, just as it has revolutionized so many other industries.
So let's back up, and consider how to get an effective x, where x is a cup of coffee or a laptop or anything else. One way might be to get everyone to vote on what kind of x they like, and then give that to everyone. This is of course a terrible system, and not Starbucks nor Apple have that kind of system.
Much better to have competition. I'd be terrible at making coffee or a laptop, and it's best that I'm not trusted to make those things, or to choose who would be good at making them. Nor ought I to be trusted with running a country or choosing who to run it.
So, I think an ideal world might be a world of many smaller governments, each competing for consumers/citizens. Apply the creativity and efficiency of startups to the governing industry. I want a world of Singapores and Hong Kongs and Liechtensteins, where I can pick my government provider approximately the same way I pick my ISP or my employer.
Of course there are problems. So solve them! What better decrepit, corrupt, monopolizing old industry to fix than the governing industry? A Peter Thiel-funded startup is trying (http://seasteading.org).
That would make more sense, but then you would not be talking about democracy, you'd be talking about your own opinion (which you're very well entitled to do)
Democracy is just a closer representation of the natural legislature of the body politic than many other forms of government. In fact, true democracies are so close that Hobbesian Law usually takes place, which is why a representative republic is much more tasty than true democracy.
BTW, there are no true democracies in the world today as far as I know. Thank goodness.
So what's the difference between a representative republic and a democracy? Are you actually actually saying that for a country to be democratic all government decisions would have to be made by everyone?
The last true democracy was Athens, I believe. At least well-known true democracy.
In a representative republic, we elect people who then make decisions for us. Much better system for a lot of reasons. One reason is that crowds have a tendency to be very emotional and fickle.
As in this thread, most people don't know the difference between a democracy and a representative republic, or why a bicameral legislature has certain values over a unicameral one.
As you point out, even in a representative republic, it becomes easily possible for representatives to compete to form voting blocks in an effort to get more resources than other voting blocks. It doesn't take very long for the system to begin eating itself.
"funadmentally incompatible" seems a little extreme to me, but I'll agree there are worrying tendencies.
You didn't happen to run into one Mencius Moldbug, did you? ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ) I've been going through a similar crisis of faith.
The book that put me over the edge was "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig. He lived through the transition of Austria from monarchy to democracy. Zweig pines for the days of monarchy, when taxes were a mere 2%, inflation non existent, there was complete freedom of speech, you did not need a passport to travel between countries, and warmongering politicians were far fewer in number. People need to learn that the ability to put a piece of paper in a box once every four years is totally unrelated to personal freedom.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll look into it.