“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.”<\/p>\n
So begins the narrative thread in [Lee Kuan Yew’s, From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom<\/em>], which approximates the lessons of Machiavelli’s The Prince<\/em>. As Lee writes, “A soft people will vote for those who prom\u00adised a soft way out,” and because there was no soft way out, Lee de\u00adtermined 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” soci\u00adety.<\/p>\n Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5351","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-leadership","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5351"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5356,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5351\/revisions\/5356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}