Are we letting our ugly side define us more and more as a community? A former governor, the late Lord MacLehose, once spoke about the 'ugly face' of capitalism getting the better of us. He wasn't against capitalism as such, but just noting that we should not always let its harsher side dominate its compassionate side. But we've always done that. It's no secret that we're a community that worships cutthroat capitalism.
Our mantra remains that market forces must rule, that we must always be servants of non-interventionism. This ugly side of capitalism has produced tycoons who get to dictate the rules, holding a de facto veto over anything they claim could be 'bad for business', which has become a code against any move towards a fairer society.
We are told it is bad for business, and for Hong Kong's overall good, to have a minimum wage. We are lectured that market forces frown on having a poverty line or more generous welfare. Tycoons who fly around in multimillion-dollar private jets but refuse to pay a minimum wage to our lowest-paid workers even warn it's 'bad for business' to have more democracy.
We're now seeing the circling of wagons by our business elite against a pay rise of roughly 5 per cent for civil servants. I'll be the first to admit our civil servants remain overpaid. But does the business lobby have a hidden motive? Do executives really see a rise as being unfair to those in the private sector who make far less money, or are they simply afraid that it would lead to private-sector workers agitating for a fairer wage? Instead of only trying to suppress civil service pay, shouldn't our business elite also be asking why there is such a big gap between the public and private sector? Are civil servants being paid too much, or are bosses paying workers too little? We need to make this part of the debate.
Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's Poverty Commission has, unsurprisingly, produced a draft action plan so lacking in real substance that it has got the group's grass-roots members howling. Bear in mind that the man in charge of the commission is Financial Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen, a tycoon. Look no further than the recent TV interview by Lu Ping, the mainland official who played a key role during the Hong Kong handover, to understand why we care so little about the compassionate side of capitalism. Mr Lu admitted that the tycoons demanded such an iron-clad guarantee for the protection of their interests under Chinese rule that it took precedence over the interests of the middle class and grass roots.
Ten years after the handover, little has changed. The rich-poor gap has widened, even though our economic recovery has pumped billions more into the pockets of our wealthy class and the government's purse. But we still hear the tired old argument that a minimum wage would interfere with market forces.