Someone Unknown
Singapore is a state with severely curtailed personal freedoms and a very significant level of economic freedom. In effect, it is a state organized like a commercial company, where all of life is regulated within the logic of business processes. Naturally, this model cannot imply any political competition. For appearances’ sake, besides the ruling People’s Action Party, there is also an opposition Workers’ Party in Singapore. Even from the name, one can assume that its role is something like a pampered trade union, which certainly cannot claim to manage the enterprise, but theoretically can provide management with some feedback if they start messing up the administrative measures.
If something like the Soviet Union could be conditionally called a dictatorship of the proletariat, then Singapore, within Marxist terminology, is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Everything for business, everything for economic growth! A slogan roughly of the same vein as “everything for the front, everything for victory.”
Could a city with anarcho-capitalist orders have emerged instead of the Singapore we see now? Generally speaking, yes. If those same investors, whom Lee Kuan Yew chased with exhortations, had come on their own and established their own order—first buying out the extremely cheap local officials root and branch, and then abolishing state power altogether for lack of need—would we now have in this place a self-governing city with a very compact administration existing on an endowment fund, where the share of small and medium-sized businesses in its extremely dynamic economy would be about four-fifths, it would be slightly poorer, slightly dirtier, there would be three times as many poor people, and ten times as many happy people? Where do I get my estimates? I mostly base them on Hong Kong, taking into account local specifics and the fact that in Hong Kong there is still some form of state.
The main problem with such cities with a free economy is that there are too few of them, they are damn attractive, and therefore overcrowded with crowds of people wishing to settle in this wonderful place. Meanwhile, in order to non-violently replicate a successful model, a free land market is needed. Then there are no problems: investors from a conditional Singapore organize a consortium, buy a convenient territory from some state—and develop it. But for states, territory too often turns out to be some kind of sacred value for which they are ready to sacrifice millions of people, and to hell with these crazies and their hang-ups. And so, people thirsting for freedom and prosperity crowd onto tiny territories, vastly overpaying for such a rare opportunity.
But all economic history tells us that this is perfectly normal: a certain product is first premium, gradually becomes replicated, and its cost drops to an acceptable level, and then it becomes a mere mass-market commodity. Freedom in this case is an example of such a product. There is a demand for it, it is growing, and therefore the supply will expand.
