The Relevance Of The Hong Kong Protests
hskiprob
It is incomprehensible, in today’s world, there are people in positions of political power that actually still remain opposed to democratic elections. Communists, fascists and let’s not forget some of the monarchies, like United States longtime ally Saudi Arabia, still remain in tyrannical power.
The America Colonies fought a war against a monarch and his aristocratic Tories, giving up their lives, their potential liberty and many their fortunes. Yet, not only are we allies of the highly fascist nation state of Saudi Arabia with one of the worse civil rights records in the world, we supply it with huge amounts of military hardware. Their military, like in many nation states is not really meant to protect the Citizens, which are socially abused by their own leaders, it is there to protect the ruling monarchy, just as the British Army was there to enforce taxation and protect the wealthy aristocrats under King George.
Authoritarian nation states like China must all play the tough guy role, just like all fascist nation states must do when dominated by a large military industrial complex, too portray the mythological dominance and protect their centralized power, the mainstay of all forms of authoritarianism. I use the term fascism because throughout recorded history, going back to such nation states as the Persian Empire, there have been one fascist country after another supported by the conquests of their military. It is impossible for nation states to foster large militaries and their industrial complexes without various levels of oppressive taxation and regulatory policies. It inevitably put heavy social and economic burdens on the middle class.
Not being that great a fan of democracy, because it doesn’t work very well, and obviously even a worse fan of communism and the other authoritarian governments like fascism, my choice is obvious; the less government the better.
The underlying problems as a result of great centralized government power is obvious to anyone who takes the time to analysis the negative ramifications. China is attempting to apply greater taxation and regulatory powers over Hong Kong and obviously the election process is being used as a methodological tactic.
All redistribution of wealth programs create hardships for those paying while granting benefits to those on the receiving end. It may not affect the 1%, and actually they are most often the recipients of many of the programs through such methods as being a military contractor, but for the majority, they are surely negatively impacted.
The Hong Kong protests are a big deal. Hong Kong is arguable one, if not the most, significant libertarian society in the entire world, with a very healthy/wealthy middle class. It is not unusually for a middle class person to be a millionaire in Hong Kong.
It just goes to show you that people will gravitate to liberty and free markets if we can stop the authoritarians from instituting their statist policies.
In the case of Hong Kong, the Beijing government, granted jurisdiction over Hong Kong again, after some 100 years of sovereignty and high levels of liberty, low taxation and regulation, want to start extracting more money and implementing more controls over the Hong Kong people. They are trying to limit which candidates can run, much like the U.S. has done for some 80 years by limiting and obstructing 3rd Parties from participating. In the U.S. the States place difficult burdens on 3rd Parties and the main stream media demonizes and minimizes them with content logical fallacies.
The communists of course have total control over law and justice and thus just place those candidates on the ballot sympathetic to the Party excluding all others. The people are not too happy with this idea and are out in massive numbers and rightfully so. Since the Communists gained their jurisdictional controls back over Hong Kong, this is not the first changes the Communists have made or want to make. Tax rates and regulations have already started to be increased and talks of more are often discussed to test the waters for proponents and opponents; the art of politics and the concentration of power.
What the Hong Kong people must somehow understand is if they do not stand up in force, they will lose. As it is always easy to buy off the politicians, because that is what politicians do; sell out to the highest bidders.
The U.S. is the world’s best example of the failings of a democratic Republic, which is just in reality a democracy with another layer, that of elected representatives on top of the direct democratic process. If a democracy does not work, an additional layer, to so-call protect the masses from themselves, will surely not work either. To me, the political and professional classes in the US has just become the aristocracy of the ruling oligarchy. Well off under the current system and unwilling to rock the boat for fear of retaliation and/or loss of socioeconomic status; understandable yet disconcerting.
What the masses have not yet learned, is that social responsibility includes such things as mass protests and various forms of “passive resistance” as Gandhi proved during his life in both So. Africa and India. Just as strikers resort to mass work boycotts, the Citizens must resort to things that really work since voting in elections and calling your representatives, only to be ignored, except in those rare issues when politicians are forced to give the Citizens a bone of hope. A recent Purdue University study concluded that in the United States since WWII, the majority have had very little or no impact on public policy. I would suggest that other than the civil rights and war protests in the 1960s, in which the ruling class started handing out welfare to the lower socio-economic sector of society, to quell their dissention, that the study is correct. Other than the Viet Nam war protests that worked and the failed civil rights policies, though prompted by mass protest and acts of civil disobedience, they majority have continuously lost individual and civil rights to a constantly growing centralized government.
It is not the actually Honk Kong election that is of important, it is the show of the potential advocacy the people of Hong Kong can call forth to stand up against the few who will use force of arms if necessary to maintain and gain greater central authority and the resultant power. Just as the Arab spring created regime changes, the people of Honk Kong, I pray will find it in their heart and souls to fight like hell with every method of passive resistance they can contemplate.
Hong Kong is a very prosperous society, because even with almost no natural resources, it has many liberties and personal freedoms. It proves to the world that when people work in voluntary associations, the majority are better off than under the various forced redistribution of wealth programs by government bureaucrats, in their infinite wisdom, thinking that they collectively have the knowledge and wisdom to social engineer a civil society. The idea that one person or a group of people know how to socially engineer a civil society is perhaps one of the greatest falsehoods in socio-economic theory and history has proven it time and time again.
Leave it to the communists to think such an illogical premise. Go Hong Kong.