tim's experiment

A really surprising and unexpected thing happened the other day. I read a piece about the Lion Rock Institute and thoroughly agreed with it. The Lion Rockers are a bunch of free market fundamentalists usually found defending the rights of employers and landlords to grind the faces of the poor if that is the way the economic forces waft them. However their line on the baby-milk problem seemed to me entirely correct. They pointed out that it was perfectly legal for people who wished to do so to buy baby formula in Hong Kong, take it to Shenzhen and sell it there. This is, indeed, a version of an activity commonly found in Hong Kong business circles. It’s called trade. If this particular trade was causing problems – congestion, local shortages, whatever – the job of the government was to solve the problems, not to ban the activity or try to hamper it with regulations.

As it happened a newspaper letter-writer had made a rather similar point a few days before. It would make more sense, he said, for the government to set up a depot where a copious supply of milk powder in the demanded brands could be collected, and then tell the traders to confine themselves to the first carriage of the train, so that other passengers would not be disturbed by them. This would solve the congestion and supply problems, while allowing the trade to continue.

But this, of course, is not the way our government works. Whether this is a colonial tradition or the result of the new prominence of DAB stalwarts I do not know, but the government’s first instinct on facing a problem is to find someone it can bully. Consider the matter of mainland mothers. There is nothing wrong with mainland mothers coming to Hong Kong to give birth. A territory which seriously wished to become a “hub” for medical services would welcome the development. Instead we banish the customers. This was not inevitable. The government could have rented an empty hotel and turned into a maternity home, to increase the supply of beds. More entertainingly it could have chartered an ocean liner for the same purpose. The ocean liner could work like a casino ship. Every evening it would sail out of Hong Kong waters, thereby ensuring that the babies born in it would not have the right of abode, and the doctors working in it could be recruited without the consent of the local closed medical shop. I do not suggest that these solutions would have been easy or infallible. But I do not believe they were even considered. Much easier to bully some pregnant peasants.

Faced with jams in the Cross-Harbour Tunnel we find a similar lack of enterprise. The government will manipulate the charges and bribe the Eastern tunnel company to behave itself this time. Last time they put the Causeway Bay charge up the Eastern people promptly raised their fess to get us back to stage one. Now I realise this is a tricky problem and not the government’s fault. For a long time I was puzzled by the refusal to try to make the Western tunnel more usable. I understand there is only one lane connecting the tunnel to Central but some people might wish to go the other way, to Aberdeen. But I tried that the other day and it’s even worse than going to Central. You are guided by the signs through an intricate web of Kennedy Town streets with several traffic lights before you emerge blinking on Pokfulam Road. So what it comes to is that the Colonial government built a three-lane tunnel which connects with one-and-a-half lanes of  road on Hong Kong side. Clearly this was a planning cock-up on the grand scale, worthy of comparison with the efforts of the nameless mandarin who decided in the 70s that the KCR did not need a station in Tsimshatsui. Still, the tunnel problem is not insoluble. What we need is for the tunnel companies to copy the system surreptitiously used by the airlines and pool their income. This would mean that whichever tunnel you went through the money would be put in a big pot and divided three ways between the tunnel companies. Charges could then be set in a way which reflected the public interest and ensured that all tunnels made the best contribution they could. The tunnels could then save a lot of money by collecting tolls in one direction only. And drivers could choose their tunnel in the light of the length of the detour involved in an alternative and the likelihood of delays on the shortest route.

The puzzling thing is that some people are bullied while others are cossetted. In most countries the idea of paying the owners of antiquated diesel vehicles to get new ones would be greeted with bewilderment. People are not entitled to pollute. London had diesel taxis for years and they did not contribute to pollution because they had serious annual inspections and a compulsory retirement age, which was five years.  Someone who is driving a 15-year-old truck is killing us. Poisonous antiques should be banned.  There is a place for market forces and there is a place for compulsion. It is not clear that our government knows where those places are.