Real democracies enjoy highest levels of economic success

Your correspondent 'Name and Address Supplied' (South China Morning Post, August 12) in supporting Elsie Tu's views (expressed in a number of letters) on modern 'Western' democracy used the word 'shamocracy'.

It is a vivid coinage. But why does 'Name and Address Supplied' say democracy is 'twisted' and that Hong Kong's system is better? After all, functional constituencies grant the corporate and professional sectors far greater voting power than the average citizen. This must reinforce the strength of 'multinational lobbyists' to which both correspondents object. And if the masses have no power under real democracy, how is it that Margaret Thatcher and numerous other politicians get voted out of office? Surely shamocracy applies more to Hong Kong, where Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa stays in office, despite what is universally recognised as a miserable (if sincere) performance?

If 'Western' democracy is so terrible, why do the countries which have applied it for longest have the highest levels of absolute economic success and the lowest levels of absolute poverty, and those which are furthest away from applying it in any honest sense have the highest levels of absolute poverty?

Mrs Tu also alleges the 'media usually hide the facts from the American people'. This is breathtakingly blinkered.

The US has, through its Freedom of Information Act, granted its citizens access to official information to a degree unparalleled in the world.

To criticise capitalists outside Hong Kong for 'seizing power' and corrupting 'true' democracy, while at the same time upholding the functional constituencies which formalise the power of capitalists in Hong Kong as a 'better balanced democratic system', is both simplistic and self-contradictory.