March 26, 2015

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A couple of our favorites comment on the passing of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. Max Boot is first. 

There are many reasons to judge Lee Kuan Yew a genius. Not the least of them is the fact that he attended CambridgeUniversity—the alma mater of Stanley Baldwin (the do-nothing British prime minister of the 1920s-1930s), the Cambridge 5 spy ring (Kim Philby et al.), and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others—and managed to emerge not only a sensible person but also one of distinctly free-market views. He had the advantage, of course, of having been raised in the Crown Colony of Singapore, which, like Hong Kong, continued to practice unfettered capitalism long after it had become unfashionable in the HomeIslands. Thus Lee fashioned in Singapore, the city state he ruled from 1959 to 1990, one of the most dynamic free-market societies on earth—one that has remarkably enough gone from per capita GDP of $512 a head in the 1965 to over $56,000 a head today, making it richer than Japan or Germany.

He was seemingly immune to the Fabian Socialist nostrums taught at Cambridge and other British universities in the first half of the twentieth century—misguided ideas which did so much to mess up developing countries in Africa and Asia where they were dutifully imported by credulous Oxbridge and London School of Economics graduates. Lee harked back to earlier British ideas—the ideas associated with free market apostles of the 19th century such as Richard Cobden and John Bright of Anti-Corn Law League fame—and his tiny state greatly benefitted from his iconoclasm. …

… Neither a democracy nor a dictatorship is likely to produce a leader of Lee Kuan Yew’s caliber very often. But the saving grace in democracy is that there are limits on what the chief executive can do. Indeed the genius of America’s Constitution is that it has allowed the United States to survive presidents such as James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter. Singapore and its many imitators would be well advised to stop trying to replicate Lee Kuan Yew and instead institutionalize systems that are robust enough to flourish under leaders of lesser caliber.

 

 

Thomas Sowell also had thoughts.

… Today Singapore has a per capita Gross Domestic Product more than 50 percent higher than that of the United Kingdom and a crime rate a small fraction of that in England. A 2010 study showed more patents and patent applications from the small city-state of Singapore than from Russia. Few places in the world can match Singapore for cleanliness and orderliness.

This remarkable transformation of Singapore took place under the authoritarian rule of Lee Kuan Yew for two decades as prime minister. And it happened despite some very serious handicaps that led to chaos and self-destruction in other countries.

Singapore had little in the way of natural resources. It even had to import drinking water from neighboring Malaysia. Its population consisted of people of different races, languages and religions — the Chinese majority and the sizable Malay and Indian minorities.

At a time when other Third World countries were setting up government-controlled economies and blaming their poverty on “exploitation” by more advanced industrial nations, Lee Kuan Yew promoted a market economy, welcomed foreign investments, and made Singapore’s children learn English, to maximize the benefits from Singapore’s position as a major port for international commerce.

Singapore’s schools also taught the separate native languages of its Chinese, Malay and Indian Tamil peoples. But everyone had to learn English, because it was the language of international commerce, on which the country’s economic prosperity depended.

In short, Lee Kuan Yew was pragmatic, rather than ideological. …

 

 

And this appeared in a piece by Henry Kissinger.

… The great tragedy of Lee’s life was that his beloved wife was felled by a stroke that left her a prisoner in her body, unable to communicate or receive communication. Through all that time, Lee sat by her bedside in the evening reading to her. He had faith that she understood despite the evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps this was Lee Kuan Yew’s role in his era. He had the same hope for our world. He fought for its better instincts even when the evidence was ambiguous. ….

 

 

We return to Mr. Sowell who after writing about the accomplishments of Lee Kuan Yew turns his attention to someone who has been a nothingburger. He writes on Hillary Clinton’s lackluster record. 

… For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a Senator and then a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years — no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as Secretary of State.

Before Barack Obama entered the White House and appointed Mrs. Clinton Secretary of State, Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq had notified their higher ups, stationed in Pakistan, that their cause was lost in Iraq and that there was no point sending more men there.

Hosni Mubarak was in charge in Egypt. He posed no threat to American or Western interests in the Middle East or to Christians within Egypt or to Israel. But the Obama administration threw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over and began terrorizing Christians in Egypt and promoting hostility to Israel.

In Libya next door, the Qaddafi regime had already given up its weapons of mass destruction, after they saw what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But President Obama’s foreign policy, carried out by Secretary of State Clinton, got Qaddafi removed, after which Libya became a terrorist haven where an American ambassador was killed, for the first time in decades.

The rationale for getting rid of Middle East leaders who posed no threat to American interests was that they were undemocratic and their people were restless. But there are no democracies in the Middle East, except for Israel. …

 

 

Joel Kotkin posts on the tension arising between tech companies and some of their allies on the left.

The rise of today’s progressive-dominated Democratic Party stemmed from a brilliant melding of minorities, the poor, the intelligentsia and, quite surprising, the new ultrarich of Silicon Valley. For the past decade, this alliance has worked for both sides, giving the tech titans politically correct cover while suggesting their support for the progressives’ message can work with business.

Not only did tech overwhelmingly favor President Obama with campaign contributions but Obama also overwhelming won the Silicon Valley electorate, taking the once GOP-leaning Santa Clara County with 70 percent of the vote. After the 2012 election, a host of former top Obama aides – including former campaign manager David Plouffe (Uber) and press spokesman Jay Carney (Amazon) – have signed up to work for tech giants. Perhaps even more revealing was the politically inspired firing last year of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for contributing to California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.

Yet, despite these ties and PC eruptions, this alliance between the ideologically and the technically advanced shows signs of unraveling. This reflects, over time, what Marxists might have referred to as “contradictions” between two very different worldviews: the disruptive, acquisitive, aggressive spirit inherent in entrepreneurial capitalism and the increasingly egalitarian, property-controlling instincts of the progressive Left. To many progressives, the Silicon Valley elite are no longer scrappy up-and-comers, but increasingly resemble a new oligarchy.

Like the nobles of the Middle Ages or the corporate hegemons of the industrial era, Silicon Valley billionaires are increasingly asked to take responsibility for many of society’s ills. These include a wide range of issues, from feminism and race to privacy and, most critically, class inequality. Supporting gay marriage or measures to fight climate change may no longer be enough to win over progressives.

Arguably the most widely acknowledged conflict – at least the raciest – involves sex discrimination. From its inception as a cradle of technology, the Valley’s culture has been highly masculine. Indeed, roughly 26 percent of tech industry workers are women, well below their 47 percent share of the total workforce. …

 

 

John Steele Gordon says Cruz, with his lack of experience is a right-wing version of you know who.

Barack Obama was spectacularly unprepared to be president and, except for the true believers, his presidency has been a disaster because of it. He had no executive experience whatever but was supposed to be the chief executive officer of the largest organization on earth, the federal government. He had no political leadership experience, having been a backbencher in both the Illinois Senate and the United States Senate, with no legislative accomplishments to his credit. He had no foreign affairs experience. He has proved to be a terrible negotiator, ideologically rigid and contemptuous of any opinion but his own, although negotiating—getting to yes—is the very essence of politics. Today Senator Ted Cruz is announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Is he qualified? …

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