A Weird Set of Values By Robert Kuttner T he Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have just produced, with great fanfare, something called the 1998 Index of Economic Freedom. The world's countries are laboriously scored according to several elaborate criteria, and ranked by how free they are economically. Things like social security, universal health care, human rights, and consumer regulation count as negatives. And political freedom isn't part of the index. The ideological message is as crude as it is misleading.
Political freedom is secondary.
Political freedom, will logically follow in economic freedom's wake. Hong Kong, in case the Journal has recently closed all its Asia Bureaus, was just absorbed by Communist China. The first thing Beijing did was to shut down Hong Kong's freely elected legislature. Singapore is a place where they censor the press and jail you for littering. If the Wall Street Journal's credulity on defense policy matched its wishful faith in the economic policies of the Beijing government, we'd all be speaking Chinese.