4:15 p.m. (c)
Question:
Uh, my question is in regards to Lee Kuan Yew.
You on several occasions spoken about the economic miracle that is Singapore and then how it was transferred on by Deng Xiaoping to China.
What are your thoughts about India that's going through a similar change with the Prime Minister who also (umm) idolizes these people and wants to create a similar sort of situation?
I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.
Charlie Munger (CHARLIE):
Well, it's a very intelligent question, and I'm not saying all the other questions weren't also. And, I regard Lee Kuan Yew, may have been the best nation-builder that ever lived.
LEHAN: I want to try to beat this.
CHARLIE: He took over a malarial swamp with no assets. No natural resources, no nothing, surrounded by a bunch of Muslims who hated, they hate him.
LEHAN: 735 square kilometers or less. But he had a Double First Cambridge University law degree, when he was able to be PM at 35.
CHARLIE: In fact, he was being spat out by the Muslim country. They didn't want a bunch of damn Chinese in their country. That's how -- that's how Singapore was formed as a country.
The Muslims (Malaysians) spat it out, and so here he is, no assets, no money, no nothing. People were dying of malaria, lots of corruption, and he creates in a very short time, by historical standards, modern Singapore.
It was a huge, huge, huge success. It was such a success. There's no other president in the history of the world who's any stronger.
LEHAN: For now. But just you wait..
CHARLIE: Now China's more important because they're more Chinese, but you can give Lee Kuan Yew a lot of the credit for creating modern China because those pragmatic communist leaders, they saw a bunch of Chinese that were rich when they were poor, and they said, "to hell with this!"
Remember, the old communist said, "I don't care whether the cat is black or white. I care whether it catches mice." And he wanted some of the success that Singapore got. He copied the playbook.
So I think that the communist leadership, that copied Lee Kuan Yew was right. I think Lee Kuan Yew was right.
LEHAN: I also saw fox news, were unhappy with 'state capitalism', which is what Xi Jinping did evolve CCP into, in my opinion. This is what Lee masterminded. No longer, a feud over left or right, but a marriage, where you have free market efficiency, then you pay for socialist objectives. You pay for the populist goals you like, but with the seriousness of cents on the dollar business; so you don't later forget and complain about how you got to pay for those. He was able to go big on communitarianism -- as much as communism was unacceptable.
CHARLIE: And, of course, I have two busts of somebody else in my house. One was Benjamin Franklin, and the other is Lee Kuan Yew. So that's what I think of him.
LEHAN: You got space for one more? I have a bust of, let's see here. Myself! And I think this Major Tom skull with jewel gems which umm.. I dunno how it got here. It's a fake. A replica. I dunno. Let's switch the subject back to... go to a new topic please.
CHARLIE: So I think now you turn to India, and I would say I'd rather work with a bunch of Chinese than I would Indian civilization, mired down caste system, overpopulation, assimilating the worst stupidities of the democratic system, which, by the way, Lee Kuan Yew avoided.
LEHAN: I totally agree.
CHARLIE: It's hard to get anything done in India, and the bribes are just awful. So all I can say is it's not going to be easy for India to follow the example of Lee Kuan Yew.
I think India will move ahead, but it is so defective as they get-ahead. The Indians I know are fabulous, they're just as talented as the Chinese, I'm speaking about the the Indian populace.
But the system, and the poverty and the corruption and the crazy democratic thing where you let anybody who screams stop all progress. It mires India with problems that Lee Kuan Yew didn't have.
LEHAN: Absolutely.
CHARLIE: No, I don't think those Indian problems are all easy to fix. Let me give you an example.
LEHAN: What's the example?
CHARLIE: The Korean steel company, Posco, invented a new way of creating steel on a lousy iron ore and lousy coal. There's some province in India that has lots of lousy iron ore and lots of lousy coal, which it has not much use for.
LEHAN: Okay?
CHARLIE: And this one process would take their lousy iron ore and coal and make a lot of steel, I think, with a lot of cheap labor. So Posco and India were made for each other, and they made a deal with this province to get together and use the Posco know-how.
LEHAN: So what happened?
CHARLIE: In the end, while I was there, iron ore, lousy coal, and eight years later, with everybody screaming and objecting and farmers lying down on the road or whatever was going on, they canceled the whole thing.
LEHAN: No?!
CHARLIE: In China, they just would have done it. Lee Kuan Yew would have done it. Malaysia did it.
India is grossly defective because they've taken the worst aspects of our culture, allowing a bunch of idiots to scream and stop everything, and they've copied it.
And so they have they've taken the worst aspects of democracy, and then they've forged their own chains and put them on themselves.
So, no, I don't like that.
LEHAN: Me neither!
CHARLIE: I do not like the prospects of India compared to the prospects of it, and I don't think that India is going to do as well as Lee Kuan Yew.
