csillagkohó’s Reviews > Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy > Status Update

"As [tech utopians Davidson and Rees-Mogg] saw it, the internet would not erase distinctions, in a realization of the failed dream of the 1970s, but rather lead to a rightful hardening of hierarchy based on merit. Their vision would be borne out by events. By 2000, the most successful companies had turned the internet into online shopping malls ... where the parameters of your actions were set by the owners."

"After [Liechtenstein] ended the practice of selling passports, the only way to become a citizen was by a secret vote, followed by approval from the parliament and prince. ... As the number of registered corporations soared, the number of immigrants per year averaged only a couple dozen. Liechtenstein was applying its version of the Singapore Solution: maximal openness to capital and closed borders for new citizens."

"In the 1960s, [Murray Rothbard] saw promise in the New Left's opposition to the Vietnam War. ... He became frustrated by the cross-racial collaboration of white and Black radicals. Blacks should work with Blacks, he thought, just as it was 'the responsibility of whites to build the white movement'. The deviation of the New Left from his script of racial exit turned Rothbard violently against it by the early 1970s."

"Singapore seems to teach the lesson that anything is possible with enough discipline and subordination to the forces of globalization. But it is also a showcase of capitalism's intractable contradictions: endless growth in defiance of limits, social security for some based on the growing number of excluded, and the difficulty of securing the consent of the governed as economic spoils are ever more unevenly divided."

🇭🇰 "Hong Kong's financial secretary was more important than its colonial governor. The British colony was run more like a "joint stock corporation" than a nation, as an admirer put it. One of Friedman's colleagues at the Hoover Institution, Alvin Rabushka, praised Hong Kong as an "approximation to the textbook model" of neoclassical economics "made possible by the absense of an electorate"."