“We had to make a living, to persuade investors to put their money into manufacturing plants and other businesses in Singapore. We had to learn to survive, without the British military umbrella and without a hinterland.”

So begins the narrative thread in [Lee Kuan Yew’s, From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom], which approximates the lessons of Machiavelli’s The Prince. As Lee writes, “A soft people will vote for those who prom­ised a soft way out,” and because there was no soft way out, Lee de­termined to forge a hard island race of overseas Chinese with Malay and Indian minorities. Only a hard people could build the “throbbing and humming” industrial, commercial, and communications center he envisioned. He would make a fair society, not a “welfare” soci­ety.

Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron

With 12% of the land mass of Elbert County, a population of millions, virtually no natural resources per capita, on an island with a requirement to import everything, in the space of a few decades Singapore rose to become the premier example of human achievement in the world.

With its comparative natural gifts, Elbert County could make a much more commensurate contribution to the world than it has. The noisy minority seems to think Elbert County’s destiny is to be a place where people come to watch grass grow. Isn’t it time for Elbert County to grow up and become something more useful?