Singapore had a homicide rate of 0.39 per 100,000 in 2006 (that’s more than one or two), Japan had a homicide rate of 0.44 per 100,000 in the same year. European nations like Germany (0.98) or the Netherlands (0.78) are not far off. The USA have the highest homicide rate of all highly developed nations with 5.7 per 100,000 in 2006. (I’m too lazy to look at the statistics right now but I have the strong suspicion that you can dodge most of that in the US by just living in the right kind of place and having the right kind of job.)

Highly developed nations in general seem to have very low homicide rates and very low crime rates. The gap between the Netherlands and Singapore is much smaller than the gap between the Netherlands and Russia (20 homicides per 100,000 in 2006).

Sure, low crime rates are one (of many) factors that make for a nice place but they are not the only one. I will take my freedom of speech and the one in two million chance of being mugged and killed in one year in Germany over probably something like a one in four million chance of the same happening to me in Singapore any day.

(We also don’t know whether something like Singapore can scale up to 100 million or 300 million people or whether you can turn a highly developed nation with a population of, say, 100 million in twenty Singapores without unwanted side-effects.)

Thanks for those numbers. Singapore's (official) homicide rate has gone down even further in recent years, but maybe the others have too. (edit: never mind; my memory/googlefu is failing me)

A nitpick: Germany (and many other countries) don't really have free speech because of Holocaust denials laws; the laws are written rather broadly [1]. But sure, it's less onerous than in Singapore.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

I am from Germany and I know the law as well as all the other laws that make freedom of speech in Germany not quite as free as freedom of speech in, say, the USA. I would personally much prefer US-style freedom of speech but I also think that freedom of speech is not a binary property and that Germany as a whole is doing quite well.

No country, the US included, has free speech, because slander and threats are punishable everywhere, even though they are only speech. Countries just disagree on what constitutes slander, a threat and similar universally outlawed acts of speech.

  > Freedom includes bad things not happening to you.

Huh? So you're not really 'free' unless your government can guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to you?

I don't think that is the point being made at all. I think the writer is pointing out that there are multiple ways of experiencing "Freedom". My experience has been that in the US freedom is often viewed as the sum of permitted personal decisions that can occur without (Or with minimal) government restraint or influence, so typically we focus on things like freedom of speech, the freedom to ride motorcycles without a helmet, the freedom to own guns, the freedom to start a business, the freedom to vote, etc.(And these are just kind of randomly selected from various examples that popped to mind and not meant to be exhaustive). A "rugged individualist" approach to freedom if you will.

Singapore seems to take a "pragmatic collectivist" approach to freedom. Meaning that anti-social behaviour is strongly limited, and those limits are enforced by the power of the government, but the resulting society has a substantial "Freedom from fear" both from a personal safety perspective, and from a "social security" perspective. Now admittedly these tradeoffs are very different from the tradeoffs in the US, but there is certainly a certain freedom from worry that comes along with it.

It's not possible to guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to someone. But I am definitely more free if the government actually prevents (ex-?)criminals from harming me. A sovereign is responsible when criminals harm people; they have the ability to institute high- and low-tech measures to vastly reduce crime. The government I'm familiar with (USG) does very little, because of structural problems.

Hmm... I guess I don't see any part of the original sentence that implies what you just wrote.