Muscatonomics: Tony Zahra and Joseph Muscat need reminding that Singapore is a dictatorship

Some people might be perfectly happy to trade freedom for money and ‘efficiency’, especially if they are the ones in power. The rest of us might have other views.

Singapore has been able to do what it did with a market economy only because basic human rights are ignored. Those who champion Singapore go through all kinds of mental contortions to justify the abnegation of human rights.

I have read a fair amount of views on the subject (not Maltese views, incidentally), and I can’t help but notice that none of them ever says “We can do this in a democracy. It’s possible.” On the contrary, they all say, “OK, so it’s a dictatorship, and there is no freedom of the press or freedom of assembly, and there are third-class citizens and anti-gay laws. But it works so well that it might actually be worth it.”

The thing is, it never is worth giving up your freedom and basic human rights for money, as I suspect even Melania Trump has discovered, and all other wives who are prisoners in a golden cage.

Unfortunately for Tony Zahra and Joseph Muscat, Malta is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights besides being a member state of the European Union, so cloning Singapore is not going to be possible. And trying to clone Singapore outside of a dictatorship will only serve to give you what we are seeing now: its complete opposite in the breakdown of the rule of law.