It was an interesting photograph we carried in this newspaper yesterday of Financial Secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen scratching his socks at yet another lunch where foreigners lauded Hong Kong as being the freest economy in the world.
Of course it does us good when he goes to these sorts of events because it drives home the point that Beijing is not interfering in our economy as so many foreigners before the handover thought it would do.
But he should actually have been scratching his head. Is Hong Kong really the freest economy in the world? Does Singapore really deserve the same rating? Singapore? Let's put a little perspective on it. The accolade this time came from the Fraser Institute, which may in recent years have come a little closer to the rest of us but, when your correspondent knew this mob from its Canadian roots, represented a political spectrum several light years to the right of Attila the Hun.
Now it's not the Fraser Institute that believes Hutchison's equity stake in a Panama container port is a plot by the People's Liberation Army to deny US warships access to the Panama Canal in case of war with the mainland.
But go immediately south of Canada and you'll find plenty of similar organisations that like to pin such freedom ratings on the rest of the world and have interchangeable memberships with this Panama loony fringe or with the people who think a nuclear scientist a mainland spy because he is ethnically Chinese. This is the right-wing star-spangled view of the world you're getting even if coloured with a little tinge of Canadian maple leaf this time.
Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light because, if you can't, tough luck for you.
A dimly lit American patriots' perspective of the world is on offer when you hear this sort of freedom talk, end of story.
