muddle-butt companies that can’t make it on their own. The corporate tax in Hong Kong is 16.5 percent of profits. The individual tax rate is 15 percent of gross income. Hong Kong’s government runs a permanent budget surplus and consumes only 6.9 percent of gross domestic product (compared with the 20.8 percent of GDP spent just by the federal government in the U.S.). The people of Hong Kong have not been paylings of the state. They’ve owned their own. They’ve been able to blow it, Dow Jones it, start a sweater factory, hire, fire, sell, retire, or buy the farm. (And there actually are some little- bitty farms in the New Territories.) Hong Kong has never had democracy, but its wallet-size liberties, its Rights- of-Man-in- a-purse, have been so important to individualism and self- governance that in 1995 an international group of libertarian think tanks was moved to perhaps overstate the case and claim, “Hong Kong is the freest nation in the world.” Free because there’s been freedom to screw up, too. Hong Kong has no minimum wage, no unemployment benefits, no union-boosting legislation, no Social Security, no national health program, and hardly enough welfare to keep one U.S. trailer park in satellite dishes and Marlboro Lights. Just 1.2 percent of GDP goes in transfers to the helplessly poor or subsidies to the hopelessly profitless. Living without a safety net, people in Hong Kong have kept a grip on the trapeze. The unemployment rate is below 3 percent. In America, a shooting war is usually needed to get unemployment that low. The “natural rate” of unemployment is considered to be about 5 percent in the U.S., which rate would cause natural death from starvation in Hong Kong. But they aren’t dying. Although smoking is the city’s principal indoor athletic activity, life expectancy in Hong Kong is about seventy-nine years, compared with seventy-six in the States. And the infant-mortality rate is comparable to our own. This from people who consider crushed pearls, dried sea horses, and horns from the dead rhinos of Tanzania to be efficacious medicine. Even the babies are too busy to die. Economic growth in Hong Kong has averaged 7.5 percent per year for the past twenty years, causing gross domestic product to quadruple since 1975. With barely one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s population, Hong Kong is the world’s eighth-largest international trader and tenth-largest exporter of services. I’m not exactly sure what “exporter of services” means, unless it’s fly-by dim sum, but, anyway, it’s a fine statistic and helped make dinky, terrifying Kai Tak
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