Bahrain – Freedom Score 12, p/c GDP $49,057 UAE – Freedom Score 17, p/c GDP $58,466 Qatar – Freedom Score 25, p/c GDP $91,897
And there’s the outright anomaly of Singapore, with a sorry Freedom Score of 48, a rating of “Partly Free,” and a whooping per capita GDP of $95,603. But how can you be even “Partly Free” when you’re a speck on the map with big, nasty neighbors and the only way you can defend yourself is with the canes you use on litterbugs? Nonetheless, in most of the world . . . Freedom = Wealth For those of us who care about freedom (and everyone cares about his or her own), freedom is an end in itself. But it’s nice knowing that freedom provides us with not just the ends but the means. That’s what I wanted to add to this book. But there’s also something I want to subtract. Which is money, or, rather, the loss in value of the money we have now compared to the money we had when I wrote this book. All the U.S. dollar amounts cited in the following chapters are, unless otherwise specified, given in late 1990s dollars. One U.S. dollar circa 1996 equals about $1.69 in 2021 currency. Or, to put it the other way around, if you were so unfortunate as to have a 2021 dollar in 1996 it would have bought you only 59 cents worth of stuff. The cumulative rate of inflation over the past quarter century has been 63 percent. We may live in an “era of low inflation,” but inflation is an unhurried predator, an attack snail. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the 2021 rate of inflation will be 2.4 percent. Trim your nails at a rate of 2.4 percent a year and twenty-five years from now you’ll be up past your elbow with your nail clippers. What remains to be done, introducing (or re-introducing) the reader to this book, is to give a sort of “Where are they now?” section. I went to a number of places to make my inquiries. How have those places fared? Are their economic situations better or worse? Have the betterments or worsenings occurred in the way I’d expected? Did I perceive these places
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