Transcription
Uh, my question is in regards to Lee Kuan Yew. You've, 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 idolizes these people and wants to create a similar sort of situation? I'd like your thoughts on that.
Well, it's a very intelligent question, and I'm not saying all the other questions aren't. I regard Lee Kuan Yew as maybe the best national leader that ever lived. He took over a malarial swamp with no assets, no natural resources, no nothing, surrounded by a bunch of Muslims who hated him. 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 Singapore was formed as a country; the Muslims spat him out. And so here he is, no assets, no money, no nothing; people die of malaria, lots of corruption, and he creates, in a very short time by historical standards, a modern civil war. 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. 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, "The 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 Singapore got. He copied the playbook. So I think the the the communist leadership, the coming Lee Kuan Yew, was right. I think Lee Kuan Yew was right. And, of course, I have two busts of somebody else in my house; one was Benjamin Franklin and the other's Lee Kuan Yew. So that's what I think of him.
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 is mired down: caste system, overpopulation, assimilating the worst stupidities of the democratic system, which, by the way, Lee Kuan Yew avoided. It's hard to get anything done in India, and the breads 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 a get-ahead place. The Indians I know are fabulous people; they're just as talented as the Chinese, 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 admires India with problems Lee Kuan Yew didn't have. No, I don't think those Indian problems are all easy to fix.
Let me give you an example: the Korean steel company, Posco, invented a new way of creating steel on lousy iron ore, lousy coal. There's some province in India that has lots of lousy iron ore and lots of lousy coal, which is not much use for, and this one process would take their lousy iron ore and the coal and make a lot of steel, I think 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 and the Indian while I was entire iron ore, lousy coal. And eight to ten years later, with everybody screaming and objecting and farmers lying down on the road or whatever was going on, they canceled the whole thing. In China, they just would have done it; Lee Kuan Yew would have done it. Malaysia, 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 copied it, and and so it they have they've taken the worst aspects of democracy, and then they've they forged their own chains and put them on on themselves. So no, I don't like that. 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. [Music]