Do you know that Winston Churchill line about how democracy is a very bad system but all the others are much worse? Really? We have some evidence here to prove democracy has some mighty big failings indeed.
It comes courtesy of Hong Kong Progressive Alliance legislator Choy So-yuk who wants to slap a 20 per cent salaries tax on domestic helpers.
She complains that they get free meals, accommodation and medical services, that the public purse carries the cost of cleaning up their meeting places on Sundays and that they take nearly all their salaries back home.
So why not raise an extra $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year in difficult times by hitting them with a tax, she says? We shall leave aside the facts that her revenue estimate would hardly wet the bottom of the Government's revenue bucket and that she would never get that much anyway when the stories you hear say that the number of employers who pay their maids even the minimum wage could be a minority.
The brutal silliness of this idea is most clearly apparent when you ask yourself a simple question.
Why should Philippine or other Asian maids pay salaries tax when so few of the rest of us do? Look at the first accompanying table. Last financial year, only 1.35 million people, less than a quarter of our adult population, paid any salaries tax at all.