Heritage types ignore Singapore's socialism

What immediately comes to mind is a group of middle-aged stalwarts of the Republican Party dressed up in Revolutionary War costume, prancing about as Paul Revere to warn the rest that "the British are coming".

Lurking among them are the last diehards of the better-dead-than-red brigade who are still out to make apple pie safe from communism and whose idea of foreign policy not too many years ago was "let's nuke 'em afore they nuke us".

So now we have the Heritage Foundation, a known ultra-right-wing bunch if there ever was one, threatening to revoke its accolade of "world's freest economy" from Hong Kong and award it to Singapore because its members feel that the Hong Kong government "violated a sacred rule" by purchasing stock on the local market in August.

Yes, shudder. Financial Secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen did and who can blame him? The American right wing in full flight is an awesome creature to behold.

But Singapore? The world's freest economy?

If it were possible to go back in time, pluck Karl Marx out of his corner in the British Library, and plant him in the middle of Raffles Place, there is one obvious comment he would make.

"You see," he would say. "I told you it could be done."

Of course it wasn't done through the ways Mr Marx proposed or for his reasons or in his name, but in many ways Singapore is about as close as you can get to a socialist economy in the classic Marxist sense.

The Soviet Union never achieved the levels of public housing that Singapore has achieved, nor its public sector's control of economic growth nor the standards of public behaviour that its citizens accept.

We shall call these good things. They probably are. But they certainly do not represent free-market economics in the classic American sense. They were the result of mixing a measure of market direction with more traditional Asian feudal arrangements of government and then putting everyone's noses to the grindstone.

This, in fact, characterises most Asian economies. Hong Kong, with the tradition of benign neglect inherited from past colonialists, can perhaps claim to have freer markets than the others but the plutocratic arrangements which govern its property market and influence its labour policies cast some doubt on this.

It does no good to look at Asia from the American perspective of the Heritage Foundation's members. They equate economic success with free markets because their creed demands it. They may very well be right - for wealthy economies and perhaps the Asian financial crisis points us this way.

But what economic success Asia has had so far has resulted from a heavy dose of command economy and crony capitalism. Their concept of the free market may fit Hong Kong best within Asia but it does not really fit any Asian economy well.

This may not be the point at issue, however. These Heritage types are patriots long before they are capitalists. One of their favourite patriotic totems, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, for instance, was a commercial success only because Ronald Reagan was pressured into slapping huge tariffs on competing motorcycles from Japan.

That sets the tone. The star spangled banner waves higher than the free market. Are you friend or foe of the US? Where do you stand on a scale of one to ten where Saddam Hussein is zero offered and Maggie Thatcher is ten bid?

Singapore is well up there. It has done nothing overt to offend American sensibilities for a long time while the Hong Kong government's intervention in August was directly aimed at a notion held dear in some quarters in the US that freedom to buy and sell means freedom to plunder.

Get ready to shudder some more, Mr Tsang. In Dogdung, Oklahoma, some people think the Heritage Foundation is too liberal.

Email: jakeva@scmp.com