So why am I worried that so many officials here want to ape the British?

I find it enlightening in a sad way that it is no longer "Great Britain" but the "United Kingdom" They haven't been great in quiet a while.

More to the point, doing what the British do, indeed what the Europeans in general are doing and what Barrak Obama wants to do in the US is the single best way to create a PERMANENT underclass in Hong Kong.

LOOK at the actual average person in the UK. Look at the scum (Mr. Littlejohn's word not mine) that live there. Is the UK better off now than before their long, post WWII experiment with socialism? No. They are not.

What is really scary is that the people who live there can't see it at all for the most part. It would never occur to them that there might be a better way. They think they are smart, enlightened and humane when they are not and can't see how depraved they've become.

Hong Kong would do well actually learn from the mistakes of others rather than emulating them.

I am moved to compassion when I see the elderly here pushing carts of garbage down the street. However, when social workers actually talk to these people they often find that they do not want help and will not sign up for the CSS (Welfare) payments. I,as one of only 17 tax payers in Hong Kong would gladly have part of my tax bill go to helping these people. They don't want the help. There is a certain nobility in that. It also means that we should possibly find a way to make the recyclables they collect more valuable so that they can earn more money. This is a good way encourage recycling. It could even be self supporting by placing a "tax" on paper that is equal to the subsidy paid to the recyclers. Of course, there would still have to be a mill that wanted to recycle the materials but perhaps those could be opened here. Lots of people are going to need jobs soon. A mill on some otherwise uninhabited outlying island to make recycled paper products or that turned plastic bottles into nylon or soda-cans into aluminum billet might be feasible if the cost of land for the facility was not sky high. Notice, I am not normally considered be a "Green" many of the ideas proposed by environmentalist are at best silly. This is one that might actually make some sense.

Allow the stubborn old farts to collect garbage, if they won't take CSS but make hidden payments to them through a small price support on the materials they collect. Build some industries that work with those recycled product and sell the glass, plastic, aluminum and paper. These employ more people and the business pay taxes. Reduce the trash in the landfill and create wealth.

This going to become an issue as the economy gets worse this year. Lots more people than the construction workers in Macao are going to lose their jobs. The only thing that gives me hope is that occasionally the government has done things right. During the 1997 financial problems Hong Kong came under attack by international monetary speculators who were attempting to get us to drop the dollar peg. If that happened they would make a lot of money on exchange rates. However, the ordinary people here would have seen their buying power diminished. In a rare show of intelligence THBT, who was the financial secretary at that time simply used government reserves to buy piles of stock in Hong Kong companies. They also purchased Hong Kong dollars back to defend the peg. The government held those stocks until the market improved and then sold them for a profit.

We'll see.

Until Next Time
Fai Mao
The Blogger whose job is probably safe