[lbo-talk] Singapore II

Ismail Lagardien ilagardien at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 3 05:42:48 PDT 2012


This was written more recently, and refers to Gibson's take

"It is now nearly 20 years since William Gibson too touched down at Changi, writing his infamous article on Singapore which got Wired banned for a time. Gibson clearly found Singapore unnerving, the cleanliness, the death penalty, the lack of creativity, the totalitarianism of central planning, even the palm trees. He called us “Disneyland With The Death Penalty.” Ultimately what saddened Gibson most was that our government might have found a way to have prosperity, progress and innovation without sacrificing central control and whilst repressing freedom. In economic terms it’s been a truism since the time of Adam Smith that monopolies are notoriously slow to innovate. If I had been Gibson I might have gone out of my head at the thought that the natural order of things was being overturned. The thing is, he needn’t have worried."

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/04/opinion-jeyaretnam-disneyland-death-penalty/all/

 

Ismail Lagardien

Nihil humani a me alienum puto



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