Posted on 01/08/2006 10:23:25 AM PST by Willie Green
HONG KONG National league tables make good journalistic copy, which is devoured especially avidly in nations that happen to score near the top of this or that list. But they can equally tell some very tall tales that reflect better the biases of their assessment criteria than facts on the ground.
One of the more widely disseminated is the Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation for the past 12 years. This year, as in numerous past years, it has declared Hong Kong the world's freest economy, closely followed by Singapore, with Iceland, Ireland and Luxembourg close behind. (The United States is ninth.)
It is clear is that the rankings of Hong Kong and Singapore are based to a significant degree on ignorance of their domestic economies. In its 10-point assessment, the Heritage Foundation puts a high premium on freedoms for foreigners to trade and invest and enjoy low taxes, and remarkably little on the freedoms of the local inhabitants.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
ping
Couple quotes:
"In Hong Kong, a handful of private groups operate domestic monopolies or oligopolies in power [...] The government, meanwhile, in the name of being business-friendly, resists competition or anti-trust laws that might open up these markets"
"governments control land supply and use it not just to raise money but to redistribute income in an off-the-books manner through publicly developed and managed housing provided with low-cost land, in which 83 percent of Singaporeans [...] live. [...] compulsory contributions to its Central Provident Fund take 33 percent of wages and are invested largely as the government sees fit"
"freest economies" bump!
The usual carping from the "Internationale".
The economic policies of China, Singapore, and other such places is called Merchantileism, which is not Capitalism.
Interesting.
FYI:
http://catoinstitute.com/pub_display.php?pub_id=5354
"Freedom" depends on who is paying.
Indeed. The Heritage paper's author was so manifestly an incompetent, driven by her liberal free trade agenda. I.e., an air head... the skewed results were inevitable. Garbage in, garbage out. The paper was totally devoid of balance and value and was put out as propaganda by her bosses. I have written to Steve Forbes about this, and suggested frankly that she...and her mentors...be fired for having lied and sullied the reputation of Heritage Foundation.
The foundation is clearly in favor of the fraudulently named "free trade" system. Its hard to see how the Heritage Foundation can be called conservative, or can produce a unbiased economic report, knowing this fact.
Economic freedom means the ggreatest possible amount of liberty to make your own economic decisions, domestically and internationally.
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