104 karma · joined August 18, 2009
Blog: http://blog.kablamo.org
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Twitter: http://twitter.com/kablamo_Dr Shetty is planning to build a similar hospital in the Cayman Islands for Americans so I have to assume it has to do with government regulation. Is the health care system less socialized in India? I would guess it is.
But capitalism is only a part of their success. Everyone knows you should do some free trade and open up the economy. The really hard part of running a country is managing the powerful internal special interest groups and getting all the systemic incentives aligned correctly so that people work together to produce better government and a better economy. Russia and many others have tried capitalism and failed because their political systems sucked.
The triumph of the Chinese leadership is how they have adapted the Singapore model, managed their powerful internal special interest groups and an insanely diverse geography and ethnic populations that don't speak the same language, keeping the country together, while getting a growing number of people to work on improving government and the economy and moving towards creating a fair, unified, and stable environment for business and wealth and improving peoples lives.
edit: I suppose I really know nothing about the moral standing of the Chinese core leadership. I don't know what they are thinking. But I see how many they have lifted out of poverty and their dedication to improving government and the lives of those people.
1. Ireland
2. Switzerland
3. Norway
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11. Singapore
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13. US
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17. Japan
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26. Germany
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29. UK
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But Singapore has made good decisions and hasn't been abusive or corrupt. (No government is without sin or without mistakes, so I mean Singapore isn't abusive or corrupt compared to the US and Europe.) Their economy has boomed, their standard of living has risen dramatically in a short period of time. Aren't you curious about how they did it?
Political systems have evolved and improved throughout history and will continue to do so. Western democracy is not the best government that will ever exist on Earth.
The PAP sues its opponents for defamation. Has your government ever done anything worse?
You mention one small piece of the pie of justice: political free speech. What about property rights, banking law, business law, immigration law, tax law, criminal law, etc? I think you need to show a much broader pattern of abuse to say the judicial system isn't fair.
I'm actually a libertarian. Its taken some time for me to reconcile that with my support of Singapore. Basically, I believe Singapore is more free than most Western countries although sometimes in different ways.
You can quibble about minor issues, but in my experience the government delivers good service, safe streets, a growing economy, and opportunity to the vast majority of Singaporeans.
Singapore's judicial system is consistently ranked in the top 2 in Asia and usually in the top 10 globally, often ahead of places like the US and Germany. http://app.subcourts.gov.sg/Data/Files/File/Research/issue29...
I'm an American who has lived in Singapore almost 2 years. The Singapore government delivers good, fair, cost efficient government, a high standard of living, and is responsive to citizens. This is incomprehensible to Westerners who have been taught to believe that democracy is the only system that works. Western democracy is great and does a decent job. I believe Singapore's government is better in many or most cases. Here is a list of ways that Singapore's government is better than most or all Western governments:
- easier to start a business
- lower unemployment
- higher economic growth
- less corruption (private and government)
- lower, simpler taxes
- less paperwork (everything is online)
- less crime
On the bad side:
* Freaking hot. You will get used to it after about 8 months.
* Expensive apartments. Not as bad as SF or NYC, but getting up there.
* Despite being a decent size city, it often has a conservative, small town atmosphere.
* Asia loves status and brand names and leans towards Java and .Net and industrial programming and tends to look down on scripting languages
Hong kong is probably good to look at too. Bigger more interesting city but like everywhere, has its drawbacks too of course.
your programmer analogy is interesting. the problem with democracy is you are always mending a legacy system. you can never start over because of existing special interests who are benefitting. this feature provides stability. but it also means no chance for real innovation. all democracies have this problem of spaghetti code laws. places with less democracy can innovate -- places like singapore. obviously there are some draw backs to less democracy. but there can be benefits too
On the other hand, I suspect that over regulation by the US FDA has killed a large number of people by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to market.
Any choice in the prohibition/regulation debate is going result in some dead people. The goal is to find the point on the spectrum with the least number of deaths. I don't know exactly where that is, but I do feel over regulation is destroying Mexico and other parts of South America and we should move towards less regulation.
Sounds like an argument for legalizing drugs.
> legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic
Why not? Legalizing alchohol did seem to stop the flow of moonshine.
You end up with more responsive user interface but my feeling at this point is there is still a real cost of additional code complexity -- especially for larger apps.