Mike B

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1965 Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the Malaysian federation, and Tunku Abdul Rahman thought he had won. He had dumped a port city with no oil, no farmland, no fresh water, and two and a half million people crammed onto an island smaller than Lake Tahoe. Sixty years later Singapore's GDP per capita runs past $84,000 while Malaysia limps along under $12,000. The man who got expelled built the richest patch of dirt in Asia. The man who did the expelling built the New Economic Policy.

Let's study what happened.

Start with what Singapore lacked. No resources. No hinterland. No domestic market worth the name. By every theory that says a nation needs raw materials to prosper, Singapore should have starved. Instead Lee Kuan Yew made his country a place where capital felt safe. Low tariffs. Easy entry for foreign firms. Courts that enforced contracts instead of shaking down the parties. Corporate tax dropped to 17 percent, personal rates capped at 22, no tax on most capital gains. Money flowed in because money is not stupid.

Malaysia chose the opposite. The New Economic Policy was racial central planning dressed up as fairness. Bumiputera quotas demanded that ethnic Malays hold 30 percent of corporate equity, that government contracts favor Malay-owned firms, that universities admit by race rather than ability. The state picked winners by bloodline. Predictably, the productive Chinese and Indian minorities took their capital and brains elsewhere, much of it to (where else) Singapore. You distort prices and incentives long enough, the talented people leave. They always leave.

Lee Kuan Yew was not perfect. The man jailed opponents, sued journalists into poverty, and ran a soft authoritarian state with a fondness for caning. He banned chewing gum, which is the kind of thing a control freak does when he runs out of real problems. Singapore is no libertarian paradise. The government owns Temasek and GIC, sovereign wealth funds sitting on close to a trillion dollars combined, and public housing covers 80 percent of the population. Plenty there for a free market thinker to dislike.

But here is the lesson Malaysia missed. Lee understood the difference between an interventionist government and a parasitic one. Singapore's state stayed mostly out of the price system. It kept inflation low, the currency credible, the bureaucracy clean, and trade open. Transparency International ranks it the fifth least corrupt country on earth. Malaysia sits at 57th, with a former prime minister, Najib Razak, currently serving time for looting 1MDB to the tune of billions. One country treated public office as a trust. The other treated it as a buffet.

Capital responds to incentives, not slogans. When Singapore guaranteed property rights and kept the rules predictable, Exxon and Shell built refineries, banks set up regional headquarters, and the port became the busiest transshipment hub in the world. When Malaysia told investors that race would override merit and that the rules could change whenever a minister felt like it, the smart money discounted everything by a risk premium. Over fifty years that premium compounds into a $70,000 gap in living standards.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Complete silence from the BBC on our rape gang inquiry report.

A truly despicable organisation.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@abriNotMe77 @TheCinesthetic "Well that's what I heard !"

[Restore Britain @RestoreBritain]

The almost total media blackout of Rupert’s rape gang inquiry is a national disgrace.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The establishment meltdown is reaching new heights.

[Restore Britain @RestoreBritain]

For holding his rape gang inquiry, Rupert Lowe has received endless abuse and countless death threats.

He did it because nobody else would.

Whatever you think of Rupert's politics, that takes balls.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@gemsinernest @Variety This post is irritating because of the "I'm above it all" tone, like a kindergarten teacher. Just pablum that adds nothing.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@DrunkRepub They didn't hide Biden's mental state. They pretended and attacked anyone for noticing.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Schools typically teach that the New Deal saved America. They don't teach that it extended the Great Depression by several years and that even FDR's own Treasury Secretary admitted it had failed.

(The omission is not accidental…)

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Rape gangs are not some kind of aberration. Ask any combat veteran what they saw in Afghanistan. The sexual torture and slavery of children is utterly commonplace in Muslim countries. It’s part of their “culture.” Which is why it’s suicidal to import that culture into the west.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@TokyoOnTheRocks @VigilantFox You're not pretending then.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@TokyoOnTheRocks @VigilantFox

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@ReviewsPossum When the predictable and predicted results occur, we call that "unintended" consequences.

[Mollie @MZHemingway]

Just spotted in midtown Manhattan…

[Disaffected @DisaffectedPod]

For sane people, conservatives, moderates, non-extremists, my unasked for advice.

All the time you spend trying to "correct" the left's "misunderstandings" is wasted.

There is no misunderstanding on their part. They don't "not know the truth about Trump/this particular piece of legislation."

They do NOT have "mistaken" "facts."

You cannot reason with them. You cannot "educate" them. You cannot persuade them.

This is 100 percent, always, a complete waste of your time.

Worse, you're unknowingly *helping them stay in power* because you're taking them at face value instead of doing something effective.

Your time is better spent working to control their actions, get them out of office, and rally other sane people to draw a line and say "no."

You are in a FIGHT, not a "debate."

-J

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@RealMattCouch He thinks only blacks have to measured and cautious when pulled over....

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@greg_price11 Notice she simply could not stay silent and listen to his answer.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@crazyclips_ Lesson: don't deliver ultimatums if you aren't prepared to accept the answer

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

It's OK to love America.

[Mike B @Mainer999]

@sircharlesohio @Noahpinion I don't trust any report that claims Finns are happy people, let alone the happiest.