It doesn’t take a John Maynard Keynes or even a Paul Krugman to reach the above conclusion. All one has to do is to exercise his common sense. But these days Hong Kong people seem to have no use for common sense. Winston Churchill famously said that the first casualty of war is truth. In today’s Hong Kong, it seems that the first casualty of political infighting is common sense. Any attempt to significantly increase land supply amounts to a serious challenge of the status quo and its deeply entrenched vested interests. You can guarantee that this will be met with stiff resistance from different quarters of society.

Holding on to a status quo which has lost its status may defy common sense. But it is entirely in line with what people do in a political struggle. The first rule of power politics, which can be traced all the way back to a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft dating to around the 4th century BC, is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So when the status quo gets in the way of government-sponsored reforms, it immediately presents itself as the best friend of anti-government forces.

To understand how this strategy actually works, one has to make a distinction between authority and power. While authority is the legitimate and officially approved use of power, power is simply the ability to influence the outcome of events.

In Hong Kong, opposition forces, who are outnumbered in the legislature and have no hope of being elected as chief executive, may not have much authority. But they hold immense power to make things not happen. And the more willing and indiscriminately they exercise this power, the more ungovernable Hong Kong becomes. To have an idea of how much damage the use of this negative power has done to our city, one needs to look no further than the Legislative Council, which has been effectively paralysed from the waist up.

For this, the government is at least partly to blame. C.Y. Leung’s administration saw the need for reforms from the outset. What it lacks is the political will to stay the course and push through the reforms when the going gets tough. Relentless attacks from the opposition have forced the government onto the defensive and a defeatist attitude hangs over the administration. Every now and then, the permanent secretaries and heads of government departments come up with initiatives to deal with particular problems. But you have the feeling that they are just going through the motions, instead of being motivated by deep moral or political convictions. And the battle is lost before it is fought.