An Endless Greek Tragedy?

Perhaps Not

A Few Quotes From Actual Greek Tragedies:

"Drive the corruption from the land" Creon (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

"Chance rules our lives" Jocasta (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

“How terrible to see the truth” – Teireisias (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

 "So much for prophecy" Jocasta (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

"Half my life is wasted away in hopeless waiting" Electra (Electra, Sophocles)

"My policy is to bow before the storm" Crysothemis (Electra, Sophocles)

"I smell the open grave" Cassandra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"What a brilliant day it is for vengeance" Clytemnestra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"Words, endless words I've said to serve the moment." Clytaemnestra (Agamemnon, Aeschylus)

"Mother, have mercy" Pentheus (The Bacchae, Euripides)

"O misery!" Electra (Electra, Sophocles)

"If you will not cease your wailing you are to be sent to some place where you'll never see the light" Chrysothemis (Electra, Sophocles)

"I'll let loose, I have such fury in me“ Oedipus (Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)

It almost sounds as if the famous Greek dramatists of the 5th century B.C. have had a glimpse of the future.

Something Happened

Black Community Responsible For Its Young People

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
 The Philadelphia Inquirer's big story Feb. 4 was about how a budget crunch at the Philadelphia School District had caused the district to lay off 91 school police officers. Over the years, there's been no discussion of what has happened to our youth that makes a school police force necessary in the first place.

The Inquirer's series, "Assault on Learning" (March 2011) reported that in the 2010 school year, "690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were."

The newspaper reported that in Philadelphia's 268 schools, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year."

I graduated from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin's students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods — such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived — but there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. There were occasional after-school fights — rumbles, we called them — but within the school, there was order. Students didn't use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

The Noble Savage

Getting back to the stone age

by David Deming

The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. "Aspiration," Campbell explained, "is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization." Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon's myth of the New Atlantis. Bacon was the first person to unambiguously and explicitly advocate the practical application of scientific knowledge to human needs. "The true and lawful goal of the sciences," he explained, "is that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers." Writing in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon predicted lasers, genetic engineering, airplanes, and submarines.

Freedom Watch Finest Hour

What Happened to America

It' Over.

'Greece Cannot Be Ruled Against the Will of its People'

By Charles Hawley, Spiegel Online

Greece may now have passed the austerity measures demanded from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, but the country's political system is showing signs of stress. Additional pressure from Europe isn't helping. German commentators warn that political radicalization cannot be ruled out.

One can perhaps understand the European Union's lack of trust when it comes to pledges emanating from Greece. Despite multiple promises of political reform and fiscal austerity, progress has been slow in some areas (privatization of government held assets, for example) and virtually non-existent in others (such as the collection of billions in back taxes).

Comments in parliament on Monday night by conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras are unlikely to foster any trust in Brussels. "I am calling on you to vote for the new loan agreement because I want to avoid falling into the abyss, to restore stability, so that we can have the possibility tomorrow to negotiate and change the policy that is being imposed upon us today," he said.

On to Tehran–or Is It Damascus?

If Assad falls, who rises?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Our War Party has been temporarily diverted from its clamor for war on Iran by the insurrection against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Estimates of the dead since the Syrian uprising began a year ago approach 6,000. And responsibility for the carnage is being laid at the feet of the president who succeeded his dictator-father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1971 until his death in 2000.

On the Dangers of Central Banking

The Other Bagehot

by George Selgin 

Free bankers like to claim Walter Bagehot, the British essayist and former (and most famous) editor-in-chief of The Economist, as one of their own. And they well ought to, for there can be no disputing the fact that Lombard Street, Bagehot's celebrated "description of the [London] money market," treats the concentration of cash reserves in the Bank of England as the Achilles heel of the British financial system, while in turn regarding that concentration as the unintended and "unnatural" consequence of the Old Lady's accumulation of monopoly privileges:

I shall have failed in my purpose if I have not proved that the system of entrusting all our reserves to a single board, like that of the Bank directors, is very anomolous; that it is very dangerous; that its bad consequences though much felt, have not been fully seen; that they have been obscured by traditional arguments and hidden in the dust of ancient controversies.

The times they are a changin

A reprieve, nothing more

by The Economist

CITI economists Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari write:

First, we raise our estimate of the likelihood of Greek exit from the eurozone (or ‘Grexit’) to 50% over the next 18 months from earlier estimates of ours which put it at 25-30%. Second, we argue that the implications of Grexit for the rest of the EA and the world would be negative, but moderate, as exit fear contagion would likely be contained by policy action, notably from the ECB.

Not "Grout"? Exposure to Greece among European financial institutions was always relatively small given the relatively small size of the country. Banks have been working furiously to reduce even that, and with the European Central Bank now directing a flood of money toward euro-area banks it looks, to these fellows at least, as if the economic and financial risks of a Greek departure are mostly contained. As this paper acknowledged recently, the cost of a Greek exit to the broader euro zone is falling:

In Memorial of a human loving human

Julian Simon

By David R. Henderson

On February 8, just four days before what would have been his 66th birthday, the economist Julian Simon died. He was one of a kind. He believed that having more people on earth was good. People--their skills, spirits, and hopes--are the ultimate resource, Simon claimed. He came to these beliefs after years of research, and his writings are filled with the evidence that convinced him.

How could population growth not reduce resources? It is true that in the short run, population increases drive up demand for natural resources and thus their prices. But then the high prices prompt entrepreneurs and innovators to find new resources, or new ways of getting existing resources more cheaply. The net result: resources are more plentiful and cheaper than they were before the population grew. In The Population Bomb, Mr. Ehrlich generalized from animal behavior--he had studied butterflies--to human behavior. But Simon saw humans as fundamentally different from animals. He liked to quote the 19th-century American economist Henry George: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."

What Price for Socialism?

Billionaire Peter Thiel Is Worried About America's Future

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has made a fortune as an investor. Why is he so worried about the future?

by Niall Ferguson  

Damn. Peter Thiel is smarter than I am.

It’s not just that, as the founder of PayPal, president of the hedge fund Clarium Capital, managing partner of the venture-capital firm Founders Fund, and one of the early angel investors in Facebook, he’s vastly and maddeningly wealthier than I am. I have met some people even richer than Thiel who turned out to be intellectually vacuous.

It’s the fact that Thiel is also one of the most interesting and original thinkers in America today—something you’ll already know if you’ve read the darkly powerful article he published in National Review last year titled “The End of the Future.”

Thiel is not the only dotcom billionaire to have views on history and politics. Google’s Eric Schmidt is writing what promises to be a fascinating book on the impact of the Internet on democracy. Also impressive is Yuri Milner’s vision of the whole of humanity connected to form a single megabrain. But most Silicon Valley sages tend to be incorrigible optimists. And the fact that technology has made them so rich as individuals makes you wonder—just a little—when they proclaim that technology will save us all. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Interest Rates and Real Goods

Cyclical Changes in Business Conditions

An artificially stimulated boom must inevitably lead to crisis and depression.

by Ludwig von Mises

The Role of Interest Rates
In our economic system, times of good business commonly alternate more or less regularly with times of bad business. Decline follows economic upswing, upswing follows decline, and so on. The attention of economic theory has quite understandably been greatly stimulated by this problem of cyclical changes in business conditions. In the beginning, several hypotheses were set forth, which could not stand up under critical examination. However, a theory of cyclical fluctuations was finally developed which fulfilled the demands legitimately expected from a scientific solution to the problem. This is the circulation-credit theory, usually called the monetary theory of the trade cycle. This theory is generally recognized by science. All cyclical policy measures, which are taken seriously, proceed from the reasoning which lies at the root of this theory.

Germany Speaks

Not So Fast On The Greek "Deal"

by Tyler Durden

Europe's now painfully transparent policy of demanding that Greece decide to default on its own is becoming so glaringly obvious, we truly fear for the intellectual capacity of everyone who ramps the EURUSD on any incremental "europe is saved" rumor. As a reminder, yesterday we said, in parallel with the Greek irrelevant MoU vote: 

We are running behind schedule

Friedrich Hayek on the sanctity of the Rule of Law

by SIMON BLACK 

One of the greatest thinkers of all time was Austrian economic Friedrich Hayek, and his work The Road to Serfdom is an absolute must-read.

Hayek’s writings are incredibly powerful in these times. In light of the countless recent examples of governments changing the rules whenever/wherever it suits them (from the Troika nonsense in Europe to the Fraudclosure settlement in the US), I’d like to share a few key passages with you today.

The Dream and the Nightmare

Europe in the Rearview Mirror

By Victor Davis Hanson 

The European Union was always a paradox. Its existence was predicated entirely on the notion of German guilt, translating into massive cash transfers east and south. Just as Versailles was supposed to have restrained Germany, then a divided, postwar Germany, then NATO integration and the common Soviet enemy, and then the EU — and now what next?

There was quite a EU veneer placed over the politically incorrect “German Problem.” Most of us listened in disbelief as we were lectured that veritable disarmament, subsidized windmills, reach outs to a Syria or Libya, easy anti-Americanism, and sermons about cradle-to-grave socialism were the way of the new Europe. And always came the grating condescension, that a self-appointed bureaucratic class in Brussels might lecture Neanderthals what was good for them, without worry over democratic checks and balances.

The White Man's Burden

The boycottistas didn’t end Apartheid

At long last, a TV documentary on how South Africans, not PC Western shoppers, ended Apartheid.

by David Bowden 

Allegedly, when, in 1972, Richard Nixon asked Zhou Enlai about the impact of the French Revolution, the then Chinese premier quipped: ‘It’s too early to tell.’ He was referring to the 1968 unrest, rather than the 1789 one. Whether or not the attribution is accurate, it was a good line and it particularly came to mind this week as BBC4’s monumental, five-hour documentary The World Against  Apartheid: Have You Heard From Johannesburg? Quietly passed its mid-point.

Three hours into its total running time, it’s still too early to tell just how comprehensive the series will be. And, nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, it’s still perhaps ‘too early’ to judge how significant its global impact has been. But it’s certainly good to see the topic being given the serious and lengthy treatment it deserves. From economic sanctions to sporting boycotts, so many of the tactics pioneered in the international campaign against the apartheid regime have become touchstones for other political movements in the past few years – from Palestinian solidarity and Chinese human rights campaigning, to environmentalism and the Occupy protests. It was helpful to return to them in their appropriate context.

No more solutions, just ugly choices

The Answer We Don’t Want to Know

By John Mauldin

2012 will be the 11th time in my short life that I will be able to participate in the choosing of a president of the United States. While it may just be me, it seems like each and every election is cast as the most important election of our time and a defining moment for the American Experiment. The future of the Republic was being weighed in the balance, and only the proper outcome (which would of course be the election of the candidate you supported) would assure its survival. This week we will continue our meditations on the economic choices that confront the world, this time focusing on the US.

We will start with a thought experiment, in which I invite you to think about alternate histories. Just how important are presidents (or leaders in general) to the success or failure of the economy? And then how critical is the coming election this fall? We will assault a few of our most cherished beliefs, both from the left and from the right. If I do not offend you in the first few pages, I invite you to keep reading; I will get to you somewhere.

The Rule of Men

Farewell to the Free Market?

Western governments have compounded the economic crisis by rejecting the one force that can end it.

By NICOLE GELINAS

In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day. Through their actions, which have lately involved everything from European debt to the American financial system to house prices in Britain, government officials around the world have revealed a disturbing assumption: that they can decide how to allocate resources better than markets can. No longer, it seems, do Western governments use investor signals as valuable feedback in devising effective policies; instead, they ignore those signals and plow ahead with their policymaking, leaving chaos in their wake. Often, in fact, public officials actively mute market signals in a vain but destructive attempt to impose their own will on struggling economies.

Last installments on the Greek Drama

Merkel's Official Denial "I will have no part in forcing Greece out of the euro"; Schäuble Starts Salami Tactics on German Participation, Calls for Vote

Germany's "Official Denial"

If you seek confirmation that Germany is actively trying to force Greece out of the Eurozone, strong evidence appears in the form of an "Official Denial"

Please consider Merkel Says Won't Force Greece Out of Euro

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday she did not want to see Greece being forced out of the euro, warning that this would have "unforeseeable consequences."

Tooth-level surveillance

The Church of Obama

By Mark Steyn

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’s edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

I Scream, You Scream…

 Paranormal Activity

By Mark Steyn

The other day, The New York Times offered the story of Juliet Pries, who attempted to open an ice cream parlor in San Francisco:

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

“It’s just a huge risk,” she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. “At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss.”

We're All State Capitalists Now

It's called fascism

The debate about whether America or China will ultimately triumph is a red herring that distracts us from the real contest of our time.

BY NIALL FERGUSON

If there is one issue on which the rival candidates for the U.S. presidency agree, it's that America's global leadership will endure. Mitt Romney insists it is not a "post-American century," while Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union address that "anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about."

They must enjoy this kind of chest-beating in Beijing.

Did Germany Just Walk Out?

The Athens crew keeps digging deeper

By Tero Kuittinen

After a prolonged week of drama, Athens finally seemed to accept the terms of the new bail-out package.

Too bad the groom may have walked off from the altar. Germany’s response to the Greek “Yes” has been fairly brutal.

According to Reuters sources, Finance minister Schäuble has told German cabinet colleagues that Greece is still on track to 128% debt-to-GDP ratio in 2020 – a clearly unacceptable level. According to WSJ, Schäuble rejected the Greek deal already yesterday, basically immediately.

Sound money as a pillar of civilization

Hazlitt's Battle with Bretton Woods

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

"The Austrians were right" is a phrase we hear often now, and for good reason. The housing bubble and bust were called by the Austrians and, essentially, no one else. The Austrians were right about the dot com bubble and bust. The Austrians were right about the 1970s stagflation and the explosion in the price of gold after the gold window was closed.

You can tick through the issues and see that the Austrians have been right again and again throughout history: on price controls, on protectionism, on bailouts, on wars, on regulation, on prohibitions and civil liberties, and so on.

But issues concerning fiat money and the business cycle stand out because the Austrians possess unique insight. Only the Austrians have consistently warned that fiat money creates the wrong incentives for the banking industry, that central-bank manipulation of interest rates distorts the structure of production, that the combination of paper money and central banking leads to economic calamity.

The non market force behind rating agencies

Is S&P a Weapon of Mass Destruction ?

By Anthony de Jasay

Is Standard & Poor, the venerable debt rating agency, a weapon of mass destruction reminiscent of the pre-Iraq war of George W. Bush and, like that phantom WMD, perhaps a merely imagined one? The answer is not easy to call, and has some relevance to how we should evaluate the strident demands for more and more regulation to correct alleged market failures.

Self-Interest and the Pathology of Power

Social Fractals and the Corruption of America

Social fractals and social control myths help explain the complete corruption of America.

By Charles Hugh Smith

Part I

Kathy K. recently elucidated a powerful concept: social fractals. We typically think of fractals--structures that are scale-invariant--as features of Nature or finance. For example, a coastline has the same characteristically ragged appearance from 100 feet, 1,000 feet and 10,000 feet in altitude. It is scale-invariant, i.e. its characteristics remain constant whether it is viewed on a small, medium or large scale.

The windmills of our collective minds

Dutch Pull the Plug on Offshore Wind Subsidies

By D. BRADY NELSON

The nation known for its iconic windmills is throwing in the towel on offshore wind power, as Dutch officials have determined the Netherlands can no longer afford large-scale subsidies for expensive wind turbines that cannot produce electricity at economically competitive prices.

The decision is a powerful blow against renewable power advocates who have long asserted Holland proves renewable power can be practical and economical.

Offshore Wind ‘Very Uncompetitive’

“Offshore wind remains a very uncompetitive option,” Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Maxime Verhagen told Wind Directions: The European Wind Industry Magazine.

In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues.

There will be no end to ‘quantitative easing’

Money

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

The Bank of England is expected today to announce another round of debt monetization, called ‘quantitative easing’. A majority of economists polled by Dow Jones Newswire earlier this week expect the central bank’s policy committee to agree “to £50 billion ($79 billion) of additional bond purchases using freshly created money to underpin demand and ensure its 2% inflation target is met. Some expect it to go for £75 billion.”

Deadly Games

Energy policy based on renewables will win hearts but won't protect their owners from frostbite and death due to exposure

By Kevin Myers

Russia's main gas-company, Gazprom, was unable to meet demand last weekend as blizzards swept across Europe, and over three hundred people died. Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?

Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure, and the EU would have suffered an economic body blow to match that of Japan's tsunami a year ago. No electricity means no water, no trams, no trains, no airports, no traffic lights, no phone systems, no sewerage, no factories, no service stations, no office lifts, no central heating and even no hospitals, once their generators run out of fuel.

Alas. Politicians are also Human. Really.

How Kennedy bought 1,200 hand rolled Cuban cigars just hours before he ordered blockade of communist state 50 years ago
By LEE MORAN

President John F Kennedy ordered an aide to buy him as many Cuban cigars as he could just hours before he authorised the U.S. trade embargo - which subsequently made them illegal.

Kennedy asked his head of press and fellow cigar smoker Pierre Salinger to obtain '1,000 Petit Upmanns' on February 6, 1962, so he could have them in his hands before they were deemed contraband.

Then, seconds after he was told the next morning that 1,200 of Cuba's finest export had been bought for him, he signed the decree to ban all of the communist state's products from the U.S.

Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098064/John-F-Kennedy-bought-1-200-Cuban-cigars-hours-ordered-US-trade-embargo.html#ixzz1lu1jnctG

Trade and Prosperity

The quest for African Trade Liberalization

by Marian L. Tupy

A wonderful short video explaining the benefits of trade liberalization among African countries:

Why Jews Don’t Farm

Literacy and Farming

by Steve Landsbur

In the 1890s, my Eastern European Jewish ancestors emigrated to an American Jewish farming community in Woodbine, N.J., where the millionaire philanthropist Baron de Hirsch provided land, tools, and training at one of the nation’s first agricultural colleges. But within a generation, the family had settled in Philadelphia where they became accountants, tailors, merchants, and eventually, lawyers and college professors.

De Hirsch had a vision of American Jews achieving economic liberation by working the land. If he’d had a better sense of history, he would have built not an agricultural college but a medical school, because for well over a millennium prior to the settlement of Woodbine, Jews had not been farmers—not in Palestine, not in the Muslim empire, not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe, not anywhere in the world.

Have you reached your breaking point yet?

INTRODUCING THE GOVERNMENT’S NEWEST UNPAID SPY: YOU

by SIMON BLACK 

One of the most terrifying aspects of George Orwell’s seminal work 1984 was his description of how society had turned into one giant police agency. People were encouraged to rat each other out, groomed since childhood to be unpaid government spies:

“[Children] adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”

You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore

Japan is dying

By Al Fin

Japan is dying, and it has nothing to do with the Fukushima nuclear plant that was demolished by a massive earthquake and tsunami. Japan's death is due to debt and demographics -- the two twin demons of destruction sweeping through many of the world's most advanced nations, from Asia to Europe to North America.

Japan's Demographic and Debt Crisis

As many as 1/3 of Japan's population will disappear by the year 2060, due to low birthrates.

In year 2060, Japan will have 87 million people. The number of people 65 or older will nearly double to 40 percent, while the national work force of people between ages 15 and 65 will shrink to about half of the total population, according to the estimate, made by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The total fertility rate, or the expected number of children born per woman during

An orderly EMU break-up, à la Française

Salut souverainistes

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

For those wanting more details on the euro break-up plan drafted by French economists, here is the link to the L’Observatoire de L’Europe website.

A few extracts, loosely translated: "The obstinate determination of governments to take us by forced march deeper into the euro impasse can only lead to the general aggravation of the economic situation in Europe."

"Even though our American and Chinese competitors have an interest in the survival of the single currency, the euro is condemned to an uncontrollable explosion sooner or late". (A nice twist that one, inverting the false and widely believed conspiracy theory that the US is trying to destroy the euro.)

If you are not on the table, you are on the menu

Why Our Currency Will Fail

By Chris Martenson

The idea that the very same economic forces that are currently plaguing Greece, et al., are somehow not relevant to the United States' circumstances does not hold water.  As goes the rest of the world, so goes the US. 

When we back up far enough, it is clear that money and debt are there to reflect and be in service to the production of real things by real people, not the other way around. With too much debt relative to production, it is the debt that will suffer. The same is true of money. Neither are magical substances; they are merely markers for real things. When they get out of balance with reality, they lose value, and sometimes even their entire meaning.

America Before The Entitlement State

Mutual Aid Vs The Ponzi Gang

By Yaron Brook and Don Watkins,

Reacting to calls for cuts in entitlement programs, House Democrat Henry Waxman fumed: “The Republicans want us to repeal the twentieth century.” Sound bites don’t get much better than that. After all, the world before the twentieth century–before the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society–was a dark, dangerous, heartless place where hordes of Americans starved in the streets.

Except it wasn’t and they didn’t. The actual history of America shows something else entirely: picking your neighbors’ pockets is not a necessity of survival. Before America’s entitlement state, free individuals planned for and coped with tough times, taking responsibility for their own lives.

Getting stuck paying the bill

The case of Hong Kong in brief

By Tim Staermose

Hong Kong’s total population is around 7 million. The workforce is 3.75 million.  So generous are the tax breaks and allowances, only about 1.5 million people pay any tax at all.

A single person can earn HK$108,000 a year (about US$14,000) before owing any tax.  And a married person with a dependent spouse can earn HK$216,000 (US$28,000) tax-free.