Hong-Kong-style corporatism?

[Machjo]

Quite often we think of promoting private enterprise and helping the poor as being incompatible. But are they really?

Hong Kong has one of the lowest tax rates in the world yet one of the best social safety nets in the world and still maintains a policy of fiscal conservatism. How does it do it? What we might call Confucius is corporatism, which actually has similarities with Swedish social corporatism and German libéral corporatism.

In Hong Kong, the poor pay no taxes. The rich do pay moderate taxes but practically all of that money goes towards the poor (public education, social housing, social assistance, trades and professional education for the unemployed, etc. What we might call bread and butter socialism.

Beyond that, the Hong Kong public transit system is a privately owned public-private partnership, media is all privatelyrics owned, and the rich don't get to benefit much from public spending. They generally pay to send their children to private schools while the poor benefit from quality public education.

The irony in all of this is that Hong Kong is simultaneously more capitalist and more socialist than Canada. The rich pay less tax and the poor get more help.

How is it that Hong Kong can get both capitalism and socialism right while Canada can get neither right?

 

[HarperCons]

Hong Kong is a capitalist hellhole with no socialist qualities, this is a nonsense post.

 

[Machjo]

Hong Kong is a capitalist hellhole with no socialist qualities, this is a nonsense post.

Have you ever been to Hong Kong?

I've seen way more homeless people in Canadian cities than in Hong Kong in spite of Hong Kong having Ontario's population!

I think the reasons are as follows:

1. Canadian public funding goes towards helping the middle class, not the poor. This essentially means that money the middle class pay in taxes just boomerang back to the middle class minus the overhead costs of bureaucracy.

2. Canadian public spending is less concerned with the money going towards social assistance and educational and other social services and more towards empire building through asset acquisition by either establishing new state-owned companies or buying stocks in industries as a form of bail out.

In short, while Hong Kong focuses on practical bread and butter socialism, Canada focuses on bell-and-whistle socialism while forgetting about the bread-and-butter needs of the poor.

 

[HarperCons]

Yes, ignoring the poor and demonizing them is a key factor in capitalist societies.
Your anecdotes aren't entirely convincingly as anecdotes often aren't... but research yields these type of results

1,400 homeless sleeping on Hong Kong's streets, double government estimates | South China Morning Post
1,400 homeless sleeping on Hong Kong's streets, double government estimates



Pictured: Desperate homeless people in Hong Kong forced to live in stacked up CAGES - Mirror Online

Homeless woman lay dead in Hong Kong McDonald's for hours | World news | The Guardian

...there are many more examples.. It doesn't appear at all in the slightest that the homeless situation in Hong Kong is any better than in Canada, and in fact may be even worse. Even less convincing are any type of socialist ideals in either nation.

 

[Machjo]

To be fair, Hong Kong's economy is neither capitalist nor socialist. It could more accurately be described as corporatist. By that I mean that the government promotes cooperation across economic sectors for the greater good.