Keeping Up With the Lees
WHEN MODERN SINGAPORE’S founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, died in 2015, The Atlantic’s obituary claimed that Singapore’s transition in just half a century “from third world to first”—the title of Lee’s memoir—“leaves students and practitioners of government with a challenge.”
Singapore has combined classical liberal policies such as free trade, an open port, and low taxes with an authoritarian single-party government that centrally plans large swaths of the island’s economy and infrastructure, plays the role of censor in practically every media sector, canes petty criminals, and executes drug offenders. Because of, or despite, this seemingly incongruous combination, Singapore for most of the 21st century has reported higher annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth than the U.S., as well as lower infant mortality, greater trust in government, a comparable GDP per capita, and a longer life expectancy. The island city-state, as its proudest inhabitants love to mention, is also cleaner than the U.S. and has much less crime.
Perhaps American elites should feel challenged by such a mix of liberalism and authoritarianism, but they tend to talk about Singapore as a policy buffet from which they can take what they like and skip what they don’t. In 2006, President George W. Bush, while trying to convince Congress to pass a trade deal with Vietnam, traveled to Singapore, where he praised the country for demonstrating that “open markets are capable of lifting up an entire people.” That same year, then–Sen. Barack Obama bemoaned at a campaign event that America wasn’t “providing math instruction and science instruction for our children that matches countries like Taiwan and Singapore.”
Somewhat ironically, Singapore became what it is today by treating the American system like a buffet. Lee Kuan Yew admired America’s clean-cut corporate culture and wanted U.S. companies to set up factories in Singapore. So he reflected back to American executives what they liked (golf courses, smooth roads, comfortable hotels) while erecting significant obstacles to Western individualism. As a result of this strategy, Lee in the late 1960s was able to convince a host of major American semiconductor manufacturers to build factories in Singapore without importing any other major aspect of late 1960s American culture.
While many policy enthusiasts in the U.S. have something to say about Singapore, one group has taken an interest that borders on obsession: American libertarians and fellow travelers. From an orthodox libertarian perspective, Singapore should not be thriving, yet it is; many of us want to dismiss its success, but we can’t.
The cause of Singapore’s success, and to what extent it’s replicable, is a perennial topic of debate among American market enthusiasts, going back at least to when Milton Friedman visited the island in 1981 and tried to convince an audience of academics and civil servants that the country was thriving its interventionist government. During the Q&A period, one person asked Friedman if he really believed that Singapore’s spending on infrastructure counted as “excessive government spending.” In a winding answer, Friedman argued that “Hong Kong is an even greater success, in the sense that it had so much more difficult a problem. And yet Hong Kong did it without government involvement of the kind that you were describing.” This led to several audience members in a row challenging the fairness of the comparison, and Friedman attempting to explain that Singapore’s success did not mean its model of government could work everywhere or anywhere else in the world. The audience would not accept this. “Have you seen the slums in Hong Kong?” one questioner asked. “Can you find a slum in Singapore?” Eventually, a harried Friedman concedes, “I would much rather live in Singapore than I would in
