The Milton Friedman set is enamoured by freedom of the market in places like Hong Kong and Singapore: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/fall97/hongkong.html. They paper over the fact that this comes at the cost of democracy: the government uses its monopoly on violence to protect the wealthy (property rights, etc), but the people are not free to vote for protections for themselves (labor laws, etc).
We've had our share of problems, and continue to have them (genocide of Native Indians, slavery, persisting racism, rampant classism at many stages, corrupt for-profit prisons, the list goes on). HK, Singapore and others are developing fast, they've improved markedly in the last few decades, and I think they will continue to. I'm not saying they should get a free pass on whatever current wrong they're doing now, I'm just saying they seem to be reaching stabilization a little later and maybe a little slower than us. To totally put these places aside so strongly is a short-sighted thing to do (Pakistan, Congo, etc. are places truly deserving of this sort of criticism and outrage).
I'm not putting aside these places, I'm asserting that progress will be them becoming more like us,[1] not the other way around. And I don't mean to whitewash our own problems, but at least they are largely the problems endemic to democracy (the majority oppressing the minority), rather than authoritarianism (the minority oppressing the majority).
[1] And us continuing to resolve our own injustices.
> I'm asserting that progress will be them becoming more like us,
You know, having been thinking about this very extensively over the past few months, I disagree. The American populace, with its great freedoms, is now becoming a prisoner to the corporate worlds -- interestingly , the corporate and governmental parts so often increasingly seem intertwined that it would be fine calling them one (certainly at least in the limitations of this context). The subjugation of large amounts of people in a BNW-fasion I think should be just as actively recognized as a very bad thing as classical authoritarian oppression is. Make no mistakes, that we are being screwed in a massively pernicious way -- when Facebook exploits the cognitive weaknesses of a fat woman by showing her an ad for a fat-loss pill which will probably hurt her more than help her, that's very bad. It's not action being performed by the US gov't, but so far as I'm concerned it certainly is being enabled and arguably abetted by it. Progress for HK, Singapore, etc. should not be them becoming more like us -- the thought of that is terrifying. Since spending a lot of time with my Chinese co-workers, I've come to deeply respect their diligence in work and in being committed to providing for their family in a wholesome manner -- I think Facebook et al. has the potential to bring this to ruin, I hope that never happens.
Sorry, all of this is a very weak and sloppy defense of what I'm arguing and thinking right now -- I'll write more when I get done with work. Basically, I'm very concerned with eroding values in America - as this erosion is permitted and encouraged by the US gov't, but I don't know how to express this without being relegated as some "think of the children" Helen Lovejoy personality.
