I love this quote, that came out of a burgeoning thread on libertarianism:
Singapore is relatively more free than the vast majority of nations. I’d much rather live in Singapore than … Australia.
Really? Death-penalty-for-drug-crimes and caning-for-chewing-gum and no-free-press Singapore is more free than Australia?
Oh, wait … no … you’re one of those “Liberty=maximizing wealth for the wealthy” Libertarians.
You don’t actually giving a flying f*ck about a strong central authoritarian government or greater personal liberty. You just care about “sky’s the limit” wealth generation, and f*ck everyone else. The most odious of all the different flavors of “Libertarians.”…
Wait, wait, wait … you honestly think Singapore doesn’t have a strong centralized political authority? Or that it values liberty over it’s authority?
Please try going to Singapore and publishing an article criticizing Lee Kuan Yew and see what happens to your liberty.
Although the elections are clean, there is no independent electoral authority and the government has strong influence on the media. Freedom House ranks Singapore as “partly free” in its Freedom in the World report, and The Economist ranks Singapore as a “flawed democracy”,
That’s libertarian in your book?
Robustly put. The point is really good. Libertarians who claim they are properly thus so often actually merely argue for the outcome of what they perceive as libertarianism: wealth generation. Singapore is so often held up as a bastion of libertarianism and a great success story thereof, but the reality is that there is so much about Singapore that is authoritarian – the exact opposite of libertarian.
There is so often a cherry-picking of the criteria for libertarianism that it beggars belief.