Cato’s Marian Tupy has praise.
In 1970, the first year for which data is available, Singapore had the third freest economy in the world (behind Hong Kong and Canada). Singapore maintained a high degree of economic freedom over the next 45 years and ranks as the second freest economy in the world today (behind Hong Kong). As late as 1970, per person income in Singapore was 54 percent of the global average. Today it is 321 percent of the global average.
And yet, I once met (At long-time Cato chairman Ed Crane’s annual Salmon fest) an ex-Singaporean who had very negative things to say about the military service requirement and other coercive policies there.
Freedom indexes are one of many ways we attempt to render quantitative what is inherently qualitative. Nevertheless, they can be useful, and shed some light (if used to supplement a more complete, qualitative account, and if the weighting involved in the index is transparent). Odds are that no matter who was in the top five, you could find hundreds of thousands, even millions of citizens of those countries that would balk at such a characterization.
Maybe it keeps a few kids away from campus.
A citizen army may be the price of freedom.
When you’re a small country with much larger and powerful neighbors, anyway, yes.
A citizen army, yes.
A slave army, no.
There’s a difference.
When you set the metrics, you can get the results you want.
Steve
These particular policies don’t fall into the category of Economic Freedom, as the indices define it, but rather would fall into the category of political freedom or civil liberties.
I mean, yeah, Singapore is highly overrated, but you gotta read the fine print on these measures. These indices are not meant to measure how close something is to a libertarian utopia.
I would like to see an experiment where a clone of Singapore was created right next door. Being a hub of networks, I doubt anyone who opened a new Singapore would get the same results. But if everyone did it the world average would obviously go up.
“Economic” Freedom !
How does that differ from individual freedom (Liberty)?
Let us count the ways !!
Can you walk and chew gum at the same time there?
I don’t see any conflict between the two observations: it is entirely possible for the country to offer economic freedoms while being strongly restrictive of non-economic rights (although, conscription involves both economic and non-economic rights). As another example of mixed values, in the US we have a civil rights organization, the ACLU, that is strongly supportive of non-economic civil rights and often actively opposed to economic civil rights. The former is why I have respect for it. The latter is why I don’t contribute to it. We also have a major political party with very similarly mixed values.
Cato’s Human Freedom Index measures personal, civil and economic freedoms.
There, http://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index, Singapore is ranked 43rd over all with the U.S. at #20 (2012 being the latest data).