The Lick Scale. New Reading
April 12th, 2007Here is a flash update on ‘The Lick Scale’ posting of two days ago. The reading has now gone up to 7. 8 over the sale of fake watches to China tourists. The application of the SAR tongue to the Mainland buttock has become so repeated there are fears that public and industry officials don’t have the sit, beg and pant it takes to keep up the saliva supply.
Within 24 hours of a marathon public holiday, the government had set up a ‘response’ structure involving police, customs and consumer council. The industry, panicked as it panted. The Inland Bound Tour Operators Association imposed a compulsory $300 levy on every tourist from the Mainland-soon to go up to $1000- in the belief that handing bags of pence to its more dodgy members would distract them from the riches to be made from herding gullible sheep into wolfish bauble shops.
The Hong Kong administration has obviously been acting under political pressure. Mainlanders made sudden carefully orchestrated re-appearances in Hong Kong with stuff they had been swindled over. The media was marshaled perfectly but from where one can only guess. That Association would not have stirred itself within the six month unless a weight had come down upon it from a great height. For the government itself to take such rapid action out of the doze of Easter with its leader out of town suggests that it was reacting to a power greater than itself.
Of course, what has been done is a gross violation of free market principles. But when your increasing purpose in life is to please a dictatorship, albeit of the proletariat, in which the word ‘free’ has no place , not even , ironically, in front of health and social welfare services, you can no longer expect the market to matter for much.
Milton Friedman will be dust-storming  in his urn.
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