By David Simmons
Time Out Hong Kong recently published a very long article on the five multi-billionaires who own the city, and how that happened. It begins, “There was a time when few people in Hong Kong begrudged the city’s property tycoons. Most citizens respected their disproportionate share of luck and the determined way they had taken advantage of the system. Some even saw them as heroes with superlative acumen. But that was then and this is now.”
It adds: “Whatever the reasons, a new, received public wisdom came into being: Hong Kong property developers are evil, cheating, greedy devils.”
The article spells out in depressing detail how this tiny cabal, with the collusion of the city government and – more recently – Beijing control every aspect of life. Their greed is boundless, their manipulation of the system relentless, resulting in the artificial inflation of the costs of housing, food and nearly everything else, financial oppression of the most vulnerable, and stifling of the entrepreneurial spirit and genuine innovation that once brought wealth to ordinary people, and thereby holding back the economy itself. And all for no purpose but to shovel even more money into bank accounts of tycoons who already have more lucre than all the gods of Olympus (before that particular mountain became part of the euro zone).
Yes, well, we know all this; Hong Kong has always been a microcosm, the logical extreme, of unfettered capitalism. What I wanted to read about was how Hongkongers are rising up, in the spirit of Mohamed Bouazizi, against the “greedy devils”.
Alas, not much in the Time Out piece about that. For, we are reminded, “it takes a lot to get a massive crowd of Hongkongers on the streets. Marching with banners down Hennessy Road is one thing, but controlling a symbolic location with, say, 150,000 irate citizens demanding a change in government policy seems to happen only once in a blue moon.
“And yet ...” hmm, and yet ... here it comes: “And yet it could still happen again if the winds change.”
If the winds change? Do they ever?
As a matter of fact they do. Not in Hong Kong, maybe, but at nearly precisely the same time that article was published, thousands of kilometres away in little-known County Laois, Ireland, a deputy sheriff and his police escorts arrived at a home whose owner had missed some payments. Just another repossession, no different from thousands and thousands of them taking place every day across Europe and North America. Except this time, the citizens said no.
And the deputy and his escorts went away.
There’s nothing new about repossessions. When we want something for which we don’t have enough ready cash, we borrow some from the bank, and agree to pay it back over a certain period of time, plus a little extra called interest for the privilege of having the use of the bank’s cash. If we renege on that agreement, the bank repossesses whatever it was we spent its money on. It’s a pretty good system, actually, and has worked well for all involved for centuries in one form or another.
But in recent years such simple transactions weren’t good enough for the big banks, and they got mixed up in what is known as casino banking, gambling with other people’s (our) money on “complex financial instruments”, and then, when the money ran out, they stole it through subprime mortgages and other devices, and when that ran out too, they just pretended it was there, and in that rare case when a so-called regulator called in the bet, the big banks said, oh, we don’t know where that money went, hope that’s all right. And it is.
So why isn’t it OK for some little working guy to miss a few payments on his house in County Laois? That’s what he and his friends asked the deputy sheriff. In Spain right now, they’re asking very similar questions. In Athens, they’ve pretty much stopped asking questions, and they’re burning the place down. They think that’s a more promising course of action than Mohamed Bouazizi’s, who burned himself down. That jury is still out; Tunisia now has a nominal democracy instead of a dictatorship, while in Greece it’s the other way around.
Like the tycoons upon whom Hong Kong was built, bankers used to command respect. So did priests, and inventors, and composers, and judges, and even policemen, a few politicians, one or two journalists. A lot of the people in all of those categories still do deserve respect, but it seems the rotten apples are getting more plentiful, or at least more rancid. The big banks are run by felons who reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses while sabotaging the very system their institutions were built on. The Catholic Church looks the other way while its priests molest little kids, artists lobby politicians to stifle the Internet lest they lose a few royalty dollars to “intellectual property violations”, as we journalists are paid not to question authority but to bow to it, to collect our paycheques quietly while never offending an advertiser, to stand by meekly as the drumbeat for war rises in yet another cacophonic crescendo.
Meanwhile the rising ranks of unemployed youth ask, why should we listen to you? Why should we obey you? You follow no rules, you pay no penalties, so why should we? Why should we make our mortgage payments on time; you’d only lose the money and pretend you don’t know what happened to it in the rare case that anyone even asks. If someone actually hires us, why should we do their bidding? Those locomotive-plant workers in London, Ontario, lived by the adage of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, until Caterpillar, one of the most profitable multinationals on the planet, after accepting a king’s ransom in tax incentives, bulldozed them into the unemployment lines.
The people we respect are those who give more than they take, and in the past such people very often were religious leaders, employers, even bankers. The formula for this has always been clear. Two thousand years ago a wise teacher said, “For everyone to whom much is given, of him shall much be required.”
That’s the law – not one made by a court, or a legislature, or in a sermon on a mount, but a statement of fact, deduced from observation or scientific analysis, like the law of gravity.
Mess with it, and the inevitable consequence is collapse.
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