Another View of Singapore

Excellent commenter Creaders writes about Singapore, begging to differ that Lee Kuan Yew is some sort of a Marxist.

Hi Robert, I am a Singaporean. I think the world needs to study this Lee Kuan Yew carefully. He is being championed by the capitalists not without good reasons. Singaporean workers are being exploited. Singapore is the only first world country without any forms of social security and government medical insurance.

Our public housing system is not due to any charity from Lee Kuan Yew. The subsidy came from the political enemies of PAP government as well as subsistence farmers. The land was expropriated from those landlords.

After PAP government took all our land, the sold to the highest bidder. The PAP government is extremely rent seeking. It jacks up property prices crazily such that our fertility rate is now about 1.1 kids per woman, the lowest in the whole world. Our property prices are one of the highest in the world now, just 20% behind Hong Kong.

Lee Kuan Yew’s greed knows no bounds. Despite of all these social ills, he has continued till this day to import foreigners massively, further pushing up our property prices and reducing our birthrate.

Lee Kuan Yew succeeded in Singapore not because he is smart but more because Singaporeans, the majority of whom are Chinese, are able to take his abuse and turn bad things into good.

Today, Lee Kuan Yew has run out of ideas. Singapore being the first to industrialize in the third world has seen all our industries hollow out due to high property prices. Lee now pursues the financialization of our economy. Singapore is now a money laundering and tax-evasion haven, that allows the rich all over the world to avoid paying taxes and hoard all their wealth in Singapore.

Tax havens like Singapore, Luxembourg, Switzerland need to be destroyed. The western countries already achieved 100% employment and utopia in 1960s. Their problem now is due to parasitic tax haven states as well as capitalists shipping jobs to India and China.

This is an excellent analysis. My view as a socialist is that we should support pro-worker states. The states that do the greatest good for the greatest number of workers are the best states on Earth. By this argument, North Korea is failing badly because they are not creating a good society for the working people of North Korea.

As a pro-workerist, I really don’t care whether a state is good for business. Who cares! Good for business tends to be in direct opposition to good for workers. The more a state is good for business, the less it is good for workers. Though many pro-worker states try to accommodate business, it is true that they do tend to limit them and hamper them in various ways, which I feel is proper.

As a pro-workerist, why should I care which nations are best for the rich? If a nation is ruled only by the rich and exists and only to benefit the rich (as is true of many nations) why should working people support this? What’s in it for them?

The ideal state is pro-worker, allows the rich to nevertheless keep a lot of their cash and puts reasonable limits on business in terms of regulation and taxation while nevertheless using the market as a tool to create wealth which can then be rationally distributed to society as a whole.

There is nothing whatsoever good about a wealthy state that won’t even provide national health care or Social Security for its people. And as the commenter points out, the state housing was created in a very sleazy way, by stealing the land of the rivals of Lee’s party. In addition, the lands of subsistence farmers were also confiscated.

I had a discussion about Singapore with a friend of mine. The Right likes to claim that the rightwing more or less neoliberal society of Singapore can be repeated elsewhere on a global scale as some sort of a model.

My friend pointed out that Singapore is a very rich country that exists simply due to the very low wages paid to the workers from surrounding lands who commute into Singapore every day to work. It’s based on exploitation of the poor. How can the whole world become “rich” like Singapore? It’s not possible, and it cannot be duplicated.

Presently the housing prices are so insanely high that most Singaporeans cannot even afford a home. This results in children living at home far into their 20′s and 30′s and not marrying and starting families. Because housing and the cost of living is so expensive, most of the young have decided that it makes no sense at all to have kids.

Lee has created a rich people’s paradise in Singapore, a nearly feudal state where the workers are so priced out of the economy that they are refusing to breed and have no roofs over their heads.

Lee has apparently adopted the traditional neoliberal model of continuous importation of cheap labor from abroad to be exploited by rich Singaporeans. Well, that is quite progressive.

Now that the productive economy is hollowing out because property prices are so high that few businesses even want to pay the rent necessary to do business there, Singapore is turning to a financialized and parasitic economy like New York City’s. Singapore will become a giant casino and tax haven for the rich. Some model!

Which Countries are Socialist? Which Are Not?

I don’t know if I can agree that Germany is a socialist country. Its got a government and a public sector and a welfare system but its got a large private sector. I don’t know what percentage of the workforce work in the private sector for capitalist employers but its a lot. I might look it up. The means of production aren’t socially owned, right?

(Is America a socialist country by your definition?)

My position is that social democracy is a form of socialism. The social democrats call themselves socialists and their parties are typically called socialist parties.

America surely has socialist elements, but we don’t have any big socialist parties in this country. We don’t have a social democratic party or a party calling itself socialist in power in the US. We don’t have a ruling or large party that is a member of the Socialist International, as is the case with possibly most of the countries on Earth.

America has always been a Hard Right country as far as any kind of socialism goes. It’s basically a place for neoliberal experiments. Of all of the world’s richest countries, it is generally agreed that the US is by far the least socialist.

I realize that any social spending or social welfare projects are part of the social democratic project, but I doubt if many social democrats would describe the US as a social democratic country in spite of our meager and tattered safety net.

Now most of Europe is socialist. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are socialist. Japan is socialist. Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, China, Mongolia and North Korea are socialist. 40% of the Nepalese government is held by Maoists. Most of the Arab World and Iran are more or less socialist. Most of the CIS is socialist.

Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Paraguay, Bolivia and some Caribbean countries are at the very least run by socialists. Quite a bit of Africa is run by socialist parties. You can look at the list of the Socialist International and you will see that many countries have ruling or major parties that are part of the SI.

Which places are not socialist? Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Gabon, Pakistan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong at the very least.

Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are uncertain. Singapore has a lot of social democratic elements. Much of the housing is public housing for instance. That’s a socialist project. Taiwan and South Korea both underwent huge land reforms, and Taiwan now has national health care. Further, South Korea has huge state involvement in the economy, and I believe that Taiwan traditionally did too.

Neither Taiwan nor South Korea is run by neoliberal rightwing hardline free marketeers. Both of them seem to be following the Japanese model. The Japanese model is considered to be noncapitalist mode of production. No one really knows what it is. Some call it state capitalism. Others call it national socialism along WW2 German lines.

Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan

AJ asks:

Neoliberalism works in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They are rated as the freest economies by the Heritage Foundation. No starvation or shantytowns there. 

First of all, I would never read anything that the Heritage Foundation says about anything, nor would I trust any of their scales, which are probably rigged so that rich countries mysteriously end up with the “freest economies” and poor countries somehow end up with the “least free” economies.

Anyway, capitalism can definitely create wealth. Anyone knows that.

The post asked why it can’t do stuff like feed people, educate them, give them medical care, give them decent clothes and housing, transportation and full unemployment. Obviously, neoclassical economics is a complete disaster as far as all that goes.

Hong Kong is full of the most horrible shantytowns that lack even the most basic services. It’s truly awful.

Singapore is a social democracy. Plus it has very heavy state involvement in the economy (corporatist), unless I am mistaken.

Taiwan is another state in which the state is heavily involved in working with industry to plan the development of the capitalist economy. This is the corporatist model that is typical in that region. South Korea and Japan area also corporatist states. Taiwan appears to be a social democracy. They also did a huge land reform in the early days. In addition, their economic growth was predicated on decades of protectionism as they used trade barriers to protect their nascent industry from foreign competition.

Neoliberalism is opposed to land reform, social democracy in any and all forms, protectionism and trade barriers, and in particular to corporatism.

Even if those countries were running according to the neoliberal model (and it’s not clear if they are), one must ask why it is succeeding there and failing everywhere else.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

Yes.

In my opinion, conservatism is always bad. Conservatism is always and everywhere at all times elite rule and only elite rule. Some support elite rule. I don’t. I support popular rule. I say elite rule is bad. Since elite rule is always bad, conservatism is always bad. Real simple.

In addition, conservatism is almost always dishonest. As an elite philosophy, you can either be honest about your goals and say you are working to better the elite and harm everyone else – say, the top 20% will benefit and the bottom 80% will be harmed, or you can lie and say you are out for everyone when you are not. It usually doesn’t work for conservatives to tell the truth, but now and then they do. Most people are not so stupid as to vote for an elite party when they are members of the non-elite group who will be harmed by the elite party. So conservatives, always and everywhere at all times, lie. They lie about their project. They have to, because often that’s the only way to get in.

But this continuous lying results in a destruction of Politics. There’s not much of a democracy left when almost the entire media is lying their fool heads off day and night. The population is bewildered at best or brainwashed at worst. This is the sort of “democracy” we have here in America. It’s hardly a democracy at all!

Erranter asks if we should not be bashing conservatives.

Doesn’t a conservative just mean someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo? There are places where the status quo is democracy and none of those above things. I don’t think it’s fair to attach “bad” to the very definition of conservative and “good” to progressive. That’s changing the definitions which people use to communicate and permanently attaching a moral judgment. It’s also unequivocal that conservatives are bad, because a part of this new definition is that they are bad.

Someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo – No, that is not what conservatism means.

Conservatism is elite rule. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Some things never change. Elites hate democracy. The Republican Party hates democracy. Notice how they are always trying to repress voter turnout. Heavy turnout is always bad for the elite Republicans. Given half a chance, sane electorates generally vote for popular rule (the Left) and against elite rule (the Right). Why would any electorate voluntarily vote against popular rule and for elite rule? They would have to be out of their minds (like the US electorate).

It’s hard to vote in elite rule. People don’t like it too much. So conservatives usually need to rule by dictatorship in one form or another. Once Latin America got rid of the dictatorships, the first thing the people did was vote in the Left.

There are only a few places on Earth where US style hard rightwing conservatives are actually voted into power, and those elections are problematic because the popular, anti-elite candidates of the Left are typically murdered.

The US
Guatemala
El Salvador (though the Left is starting to win now)
Colombia
Chile
Turkey
The Philippines

That’s about it.

The conservatives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey and the Philippines all rule by terror. They all run death squads and slaughter the Left.

In the Philippines, conservatives run as populists who will fight and get rid of poverty, so that’s not really US conservatism.

In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, conservatives usually run on a platform of “kill the Communists (the Left).”

Everywhere else on Earth, people generally vote in some sort of a liberal to socialist type government.

All of Africa has generally been run by popular Leftwing parties, with a few exceptions in Zaire and Kenya. They haven’t done a very good job of popular rule, but US style conservatism simply does not exist there.

In North Africa, most of the governments are socialist. Morocco was always the outlier, as it was ruled by a rightwing king, but he’s a dictator.

All of the Arab World is generally run by some type of socialist party or other. US style conservatism never takes power there.

All of the former Soviet Republics are now run by some type of socialist government or other.

All of Europe is being run by some type of socialist government or other, with the possible exception of Great Britain. The UK was always the outlier. US style conservatism ruled under Thatcher, but she was probably the most hated ruler in the 20th Century UK, and she couldn’t get much done.

Russia is run by a socialist regime under Putin.

The Iranian religious government has always been socialist in nature.

It’s hard to characterize the Karzai regime, but it is not US conservatism.

The Pakistani government is very hard to characterize, but it is not US style conservatism. The recently assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, was a socialist. The President, her widower, is also a socialist.

Since Independence, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have generally been run by socialist regimes of one type or another.

Myanmar is run by a regime that calls itself socialist.

Singapore has a social democracy.

SE Asia has been run by socialists since 1975. Thailand typically had rightwing military government. Recently, a progressive, Thaksin, was elected. He was extremely popular, but the conservative elite threw him out in a coup like they often do. At any rate, US style conservatism does not exist in Thailand.

China is run by a socialist party.

Mongolia is run by socialists.

Japan has been a social democracy since 1945.

True, South Korea was always a rightwing regime, but recently they elected a leftwinger.

Taiwan was always ruled by a rightwing dictatorship, but I am not sure who is in power since independence. They have had a social democracy for a while now.

Indonesia was always run by a rightwing dictatorship, but they recently went to democracy. The present leader has begun a number of socialist programs.