Milton Friedman on Hong Kong (1998)

"According to the latest figures I have, per capita income in Hong Kong is almost identical with that in the United States.

That is close to incredible. Here we are—a country of 260 million people that stretches from sea to shining sea, with enormous resources, and a two-hundred-year background of more or less steady growth, supposedly the strongest and richest country in the world, and yet six million people living on a tiny spit of land with negligible resources manage to produce as high a per capita income. How come?"

The above is written by M.F. for the Hoover Digest back in 1998. Read the whole thing here.

With the HK government playing with the idea of introducing minimum wage, competition law and a host of other hand-out schemes, and formal abrogation of its long-held "positive non-intervention" economic philosophy, Friedman must be very upset and heart-broken when he wrote this shortly before his death.