In this postin the other libertarian thread Sam Stone described Hong Kong as a successful experiment in laisser-faire economics. I didn’t know much about the history of Hong Kong so I decided to do some googling. It turns that the laisser-faire nature of the Hong Kong economy has been greatly exaggerated by libertarians including Milton Friedman.
This short articlemakes the main point that Hong Kong in fact saw massive government intervention in three crucial areas: housing, education and health care:
In other respects Hong Kong may have been relatively less interventionist but clear it wasn’t run on libertarian lines. This web-pagemakes the same case in greater detail.
Anyone who sees Hong Kong as a libertarian wonderland really ought to spend some time in the Chungking Mansions.
If the lawlessness and crapitude of the ghettoes of more regulated societies can be used as evidence of the failure of the boogeyman of socialism (whether real or perceived), then Chungking Mansions says a lot about libertarian Hong Kong.
Hong Kong also illustrates one of the political pitfalls of Libertarianism. It’s all nice in theory to talk about how every individual will be sovereign and will respect the rights of every other individual because the advantages of doing so will be so obvious. But as some of us have pointed out, sometimes a group of individuals will decide it’s more advantageous to band together and impose their will on others by force of numbers. We usually talk about bandit gangs robbing individual freeholders but as a metaphor, the People’s Republic of China taking over Hong Kong works.
That’s not really fair. Standard libertarian doctrine calls for a central government with a monopoly on force, used to provide for national defense, policing, and enforcement of contracts. Somalia is pretty much anarchy.
More specifically Somalia is the closest example we have of an anarcho-capitalist state.
And it’s shit, of course.
But the interesting point is whether it is less-shit than many of the other dirt poor countries with ‘functioning’ central governments that are the fair comparisons.
Could the reason they don’t spend money on defence is because the Chinese government is responsible for it? The Chinese army has been in HK ever since the handover.
hong kong government has an unholy alliance with the big property developers for tax revenue, has cartels in most sectors, and has massively intervened in the stock market (in 1998 under joseph yam). government housing sucks with living area per person the size of a breadbox.
the spin is good abount being a model but the reality far different. i lived there 5 years in the 90’s & 90’s .
Wait a doggone minute. You mean that pure idealistic theoretical philosophical textbook libertarianism does not translate to the real world with real people with real problems and real differences between them.
I am shocked!!!
Libertarianism is the biggest fraud ever put forth outside of Berni Madeof.
Can’t say much about the larger topic of this thread, but IME this comparison is completely bogus. Sure, Chungking is seedy and kind of dangerous, but it’s really not that terrible, and from what I saw in my many wanderings around Hong Kong, that’s about as bad as HK ever got – not to mention that Chungking is just one building in the whole city (most of which really is amazingly clean, prosperous, and safe). I’d choose Chungking any day over the vastly more dirty, dangerous, numerous, and spreadout slums I’ve seen throughout North America and parts of Europe (or mainland China, for that matter).
So if that’s the measure of the success of libertarianism vs. socialism, I say bring on the Milton Friedman.
Don’t get my wrong, I’m a huge fan of HK, one of the biggest.
Fan that I am, I’m not blind to its flaws. They’ve done a lot with little more than enterprise. Which incidentally is why the mainland army will will never invade: There’s nothing to conquer. Short of a direct political challenge to Beijing, that will never happen.
By comparison with the other international trading cities it lacks competition laws. There’s a body with a wide remit, the ICAC to make sure government and industry don’t get too close. In HK people talk commerce and government and inevitably the absence of competition in many sectors comes up.
As to that unpronounceable ideology, HK’s success vis a vis it’s political system, IMHO is only half due to the light touch of regulation. The other half is that the ideology of regulation is facultative: Regulation is there to facilitate and open pathways, not there to prevent things happening.
Hong Kong is not perfect. It’s not a worker’s paradise. But you have to compare it to other locations in Asia where markets weren’t allowed to flourish, and which instead relied on government planning and heavy regulation of trade and commerce. Is there any doubt that Hong Kong was vastly more successful than any other country in the region, and that the standard of living was much better in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the region?
You can take the same measuring stick and compare other countries before and after they allowed markets to work. Singapore is not heaven on earth, but compare it with the worker’s paradise of Vietnam, especially before Vietnam embarked on its own market liberalization program.
Asia is a much, much wealthier continent today than it was 30 years ago. And without exception, the various countries in the area saw their economies boom and their standards of living rise in proportion to how many regulations and central plans they dropped and how much control they gave to the market.
So even Libertarians believe that certain things (national defense, police, and contracts–presumably including property) should be socialized. Bunch of socialists wimps imposing their beliefs on everyone whether they want it or not!
Seriously, the logic escapes me of deciding, for example, that protection of the person from other persons should be socialized but iit is evil to protect them from bacteria, viruses, bodily decay, etc. Of course I live in the Socialist Republic of Canuckistan.
Yeah, but so what. No one is arguing that free markets and capitalism aren’t a good thing. We are arguing against the deification of them that libertarians engage in.