HK workers rubbishing Li Ka Shing

Link to WSJ article:

Surely KS Li must know that it would come to this? Now what do I don't care? I am quite focused here. They are paying 15% rate for income taxes, we are billing our rich 20%. The difference? If you are a tycoon, you would not suffer this in Singapore. I think many will bite the 5% premium.

This is a relative world. We need others to be worse than us because we are getting less attractive relative to investors relative to the past.

Sure it is unfortunate that we are all losers if the pie is shrinking but neither could we fall over pursuing growth as before. We need that break to retool. Many competing countries are offering us that as I had hoped and blogged about several times before.

Update: 10:15pm

I didn't know that Li Xueying has also written a story on the dock workers' strike too. It is interesting to compare hers with the one by the WSJ. Li Xueying put more focus on the big picture and in this instance I agree with her. Not that the human interest angle isn't important but clearly HK port cannot go with business as usual. They are literally losing their lunch to other ports.

This has also shown how we out competed against HK. For many years we lagged them but the moment we turned more business focused with all the unpleasant socio-economic consequences we went ahead of them. Our government is clearly better than theirs but both aren't good enough because they can't keep Hong Kong or Singapore going when society is clearly fracturing. Sometimes there is no solutions but to buy time till the environment changes. For us we can forget about calvary riding to our rescue. We are on our own.