Don't do it!

Hong Kong has been the freest economy in the world for more than a decade (probably longer, but most surveys on the subject don't go back a long way). The Index of Economic Freedom has listed it as the freest for 14 consecutive years. A must-read piece by John C. Goodman over at NRO discusses what the Adminsitrative State is doing to kill capitalism's paradise by "death from a thousand cuts." Goodman describes a Hong Kong that few people hear about - the large government benefits, especially in health care - but most chilling for me is the institution of a minimum wage, that is coming soon. No free economy can survive wage controls on one end and collective bargaining on the other and stay free for long. 

Ironically, the biggest problem is: The people of Hong Kong are just like us! They don’t understand free enterprise any more than Americans understand it. They are no more dedicated to it than we are. They do not think of free-market capitalism as a moral and ethical ideal any more than Americans or Europeans think of it that way.

True enough, people in Hong Kong are aware that theirs has been named the freest economy in the world, and they are proud of that fact — even though capitalism was handed to them by a colonial government that no one in Hong Kong ever voted for. But from what I can tell, they would be perfectly willing to let it die a death of a thousand cuts — just as the rest of the developed world has done.

All signs point in the wrong direction. The government is about to impose Hong Kong’s first minimum-wage law. It is pushing for expansion of the public sector in health care. And when the welfare cash allowances described above were reduced recently, almost all the members of the elected Legislative Council (which acts in an advisory role) protested the move.