All Good No Bad Thomas Frank
Markets may have made their peace with activism, rebellion, radicalism, revolution, change-agenting, hierarchy-questioning, sacred-cow-killing, power-seizing, apple-cart-overturning and everything else on the exciting menu of New Economy upheaval, but markets still have trouble reconciling themselves to democracy proper. Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that the vote-counting has been halted. Markets punish the bond prices of countries where left parties still attract a substantial vote. Markets reward countries where left parties have been induced to wind up their operations. To you Bill Clinton's rightward triangulations may have seemed like rank hypocrisy or worse, since they deprived Americans of meaningful political choice, but in the view of markets the man who managed to kill off the New Deal is a statesman for the ages.
Above all markets love the country of Singapore. There was a time a few years ago when one heard this repeated so frequently that it became one of the great media clichés of the age. Singapore was an economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of decades. Singapore was showing the world the way forward. Singapore had resolved it all: ethnic hatred, crime, social decay, good government. Singapore was the country with the most economic freedom in the world. Singapore was the best place to do business in all the earth. Singapore was more comprehensively wired than anywhere else. "Asian values," as described by Lee Kuan Yew, the man who has effectively ruled Singapore ever since 1959, would inevitably prevail. And as proof you needed look no farther than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the spanking new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the market's approval.
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