The View | Post-Regina Ip, behaving better and thoughtfully to the Hong Kong maids in our midst

I was recently arguing with someone about how the law of supply and demand changes the physiology of our brains. A strange topic, for sure, and even more strangely, Regina Ip may have helped prove my case.

Yet gall towards domestic helpers is rampant in Hong Kong. I don’t think a week passes without my hearing some petty snipe on the quality of their services. And when not hearing I’m sharing. Did I mention that my helper has a habit of clearing away the coffee pot before it’s empty – if not, keep your eyes peeled for a future column on this issue, because I make a cracking good case as to why this should be a capital offense.

I have a number of liberal friends and acquaintances who are constantly cluttering their Facebook pages with links to Guardian articles on the evils of capitalism. One week the evil capitalists are destroying the environment, the next scooping all the economic rewards for themselves, the next oppressing females.

Yet I am pretty sure that if these individuals were somehow magically transformed into titans of capital, they would be just as penny-pinching and demanding on payrolls. I believe this because I’ve seen them with their maids.

Let’s take my supposedly left-leaning husband as an example. We were recently discussing an acquaintance of ours who dismissed a helper over what appeared to be a case of unvacuumed hairballs the cat coughed up.

My husband defended the move, saying: “Giving a job to an inadequate maid just takes a job from a better one.”