How Hong Kong's attitude to poor mirrors the American right
Poor C.Y. Leung. His gaffe about the danger of giving full voting rights to the poor has spread far and wide. Even the great Paul Krugman devoted a column to the subject over the weekend.
Poor C.Y. Leung. His gaffe about the danger of giving full voting rights to the poor has spread far and wide. Even the great Paul Krugman, columnist and Nobel economics laureate, devoted a column to the subject over the weekend. But to be fair, Leung has been nicer to the poor than his two predecessors.
What Krugman has pointed out is the amazing affinity in the thinking between our business elite and government, and the American right and the Republican Party. In fact, they make perfect bedfellows. What they are all afraid of is populist politics, the fear that the masses would tax the rich and give it to the poor.
This can only spell economic disaster because the rich are the true job and wealth creators in an economy. Or, as Wang Zhenmin, dean of Tsinghua University Law School who acts as an adviser to the central government, explained last month when defending the political reform framework handed down by Beijing: "[The business elites] control the destiny of the economy of Hong Kong. If we ignore their interest, Hong Kong capitalism will stop."
The elites in Hong Kong and the US are worried about entitlement programmes going amok. It's really the same message whether it's failed US presidential candidate Mitt Romney who said 47 per cent of Americans don't pay taxes and don't take responsibility for themselves, or Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, who said 60 per cent of them are "takers" of public largesse, or our own finance chief John Tsang Chun-wah, who is always warning about our trillions of reserves being depleted if the government incurs more recurrent spending, presumably through excessive welfare.
The American hard right wants to cut welfare and lower taxes for the rich. We in Hong Kong already offer few welfare perks for the poor and have ultra-low taxes. Where else can rich people get billions in stock dividends without paying a cent in tax? No wonder they can afford philanthropy. The truth is that Hong Kong has always been a paradise or imaginary model of the American right, from the late Milton Friedman to the likes of the Heritage Foundation.
So much for foreign influences. Beijing, please take note. We in Hong Kong have a thing or two to teach the Americans about plutocracy.
