The presumptions of several of Hong Kong's most prominent businessmen never cease to astonish. The high-profile 'business' critics of more democracy, those who insist that Hong Kong people are insufficiently educated, that it would lead to a welfare state and a 'free lunch' for the indigent, are people whose own contributions to wealth creation require examination.
They have three characteristics. First, they are mainly from the property sector.
Second, they mostly inherited their wealth. Starting life with a few billion from daddy is not the best qualification for making sweeping statements about welfare and its recipients.
Third, their public companies mostly have a habit of shuffling assets around between each other, and between themselves and the private ones.
In short, their wealth-creation abilities are suspect.
Take Ronnie Chan Chi-chung, chairman of Hang Lung, the lead figure in the Hong Kong Development Forum, the new anti-democrat business and professional group. Mr Chan used to boast of his American citizenship. He is chairman of the local branch of the Asia Society, but the US constitution, 200 years of 'one man, one vote', now gets in the way of Chinese patriotism. Under his father, Hang Lung was more prominent commercially than today. Mr Chan's most recent prominent contribution to business was not in Hong Kong but in the US, where hundreds of thousands of Enron shareholders lost billions of dollars as a result of the fraudulent activities by some senior management of the company.
There is no suggestion that Mr Chan was in any way aware of, or responsible for, manipulations of the accounts and creation of phony profits, nor that he was himself involved in, or had any knowledge of, the frauds. But as a non-executive director on the board of Enron, he did have oversight responsibilities on behalf of the shareholders. This was especially so as he was on the board's audit and finance committees.