No one was seen popping champagne corks or dancing in the streets after the city was crowned the world's 'freest economy' by the Heritage Foundation. That's because while we may be the 'freest' of them all, we don't seem to be the happiest.
What is 'free' if we can't earn a decent living? It was only last summer that a lawmaker had the guts to advocate a HK$20 per hour minimum wage - a level that is inhumane if we consider how much things cost nowadays. Now, consider how a portion of our population has been working for less than that. We are, in fact, so 'free' that the underprivileged have been working for almost nothing - not exactly something to pat ourselves on the back for.
How truly 'free' are we if we are still arguing over a cross-sector competition law? Doesn't our experience with enforcing one on the telecommunications industry already prove such a law works?
If you are a hardcore devotee of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, you'd better stop reading now. But, for the rest of us, the realists, we know Hong Kong's 'free market' doesn't exactly belong to the common folk. The world's 'freest' market is also a centre of cross-sector oligopolies and cartels, where competitors who dare to enter their 'free market' can be snuffed out as they freely restrict supplies and refuse lease applications.
Perfect competition rarely occurs in real life and that is why laws - however imperfect - have become the second-best option used to regulate anti-competitive conduct. And in Hong Kong, where we have the luxury of having very little corruption, and a strong judiciary and institutions, there is little reason to believe that competition legislation could be a barrier to entry.
Critics - mostly representing the 'already-in-business' business interests - have unleashed their fury over the proposed competition law. We are 'competitive enough', they say, so we don't need the law. Well, we also have a phenomenally low crime rate, but we still need laws and the police.