Re: Ashish' post dated November 21 ---One version of free trade

[Ashish Hanwadikar <ashish_hanwadikar@yahoo.com>]

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Check out this analysis of "Asian Crises"
ASIA: THE FALL OF A SECOND BERLIN WALL
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj18n3/cj18n3-10.pdf

After reading this you will understand why I am so skeptical of Govt.
directed and regulated "free market".

Here is a brief excerpt:

The fallout from the current Asian financial crisis has led some
people to believe that there was no Asian take-off. Yet, even after the
sharp recession, GDP per capita at the end of 1998 was four times
that of 1960 in Japan and the Four Tigers (Singapore, South Korea,
Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Asia’s extraordinary economic growth was
not a miracle in the sense that something mysterious or out of this
world generated it. It was, on the contrary, the result of introducing,
in countries whose potential GDP was much higher than their actual
GDP, some degree of market freedom. The crisis should not cause
us to forget decades of very fast growth that had the Asian Tigers on
the verge of abandoning the Third World.
But there was a fatal flaw in the process, and the day of reckoning
has arrived. That was the notion that there is a ‘‘Third Way’’ between
democratic capitalism and socialist statism. That dangerous and
erro-neous
idea bred the structural problems that erupted in the current
crisis. In this case, the Third-Way notion was introduced as the
‘‘Asian
model,’’ in which a distorted version of democratic capitalism was
adopted in a geographic region of the world on the basis of what were
called ‘‘Asian values.’’ But as Chris Patten, former governor of Hong
Kong, said in his recent book, ‘‘ ‘Asian values’ has been a shorthand
for the justification of authoritarianism, bossiness and closed
collusion’’
(Patten 1998: xii). The Asian Third Way consisted of two interrelated
third ways: one between the free market and socialism, and the
other between democracy based on the rule of law and totalitarian
dictatorship.


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