Many of us, who do not have to live the daily grind of making ends meet, whine about how so many people in Malta think the Government owes them a living and free services and hand-outs and generally loads of dosh.

Those of us who think things through eventually come to the realisation that some - many - people do, actually, need and deserve the help that the country can afford to hand out, though as always the abusers, the ones who prefer to spend their cash on wide-screen tellies and mobile phones, cloud the picture for the truly deserving.

It's ironic, then, that a representative of the class that definitely does not need hand-outs, the entrepreneurial element of society, should respond to (though sometimes fail to answer) the searching questions put to him by Caroline Muscat (it is of Arthur Gauci CEO of the Seabank Group that I muse) by saying, and being headlined as saying, that the Group's [ITS] "tourism project 'not viable' at commercial rates for land."

My own take on private enterprise is that it is a sector that should, proudly, stand on its own two feet and sink or swim on the basis of its own merits.

For instance, I have a project in mind to turn the Auberge de Castille into a six-star hotel, with a 100-floor tower being built on the site. The building could be dismantled stone-by-stone and re-erected on Comino (symbolically, this bunch of clowns are doing that to so many organs of state that it should hardly be an issue) but it won't be commercially viable if I don't get a nifty little hand-out from the Government.

Now, before I'm pilloried and called all manner of names by those who have had an irony bypass, I suppose I should make it clear that I am merely being absurd for effect, but my point, I trust, is clear.

It's axiomatic, in a truly democratic society, that we should only give away our assets if this is for real public advantage

It's axiomatic, in a truly democratic society, that we should only give away our assets if this is for real public advantage. Pandering to the government's need to churn the economy by getting it to suckle on the multiplier effect of the construction industry having plenty to do is only a short-term, quick-fix result, very nicely timed to coincide with the electoral calendar and diverting attention from people wearing Panama hats and guzzling on New Zealand lamb is not a 'real public advantage'.

Nor do I necessarily classify having (yet) another high-rise carbuncle imposed on the nation's already pretty scarred body as constituting 'real public advantage', even if we're going to be given the ineffable boon of a Hard Rock Hotel starting to operate here. Mr Gauci seems to think on the lines of "if you build it, they will come", but seriously, people would come to Malta in droves, and fill his employer's boots for him, because there's a Hard Rock Hotel here? To be able to look out of their windows and see Manhattan a la Maltaise sprouting around them?

Before this latest controversy hit the news, I didn't even know that Hard Rock, whose product is more akin to a fun and noisy MacKingBurger with cool guitars on the wall than to high-end, discerning tourism, operated hotels. I've never felt the urge to travel to this sort of thing, and I'm pretty sure that many, like me, actively avoid going to places that have this sort of ethos underlying their offer.

And it's not as if we're over-run with people wanting to work in the tourism industry, from a local point of view. I don't mind the fact that most workers in the industry aren't Maltese, but should the country be in the business of giving away our assets to make it even more difficult to find workers to work in the money-mills the happy recipients of these assets build on them?

Should we, just to be going on with the point, have to tailor our infrastructure and suffer the already horrendous traffic problems being exacerbated, just because a couple of 'bloated capitalists' want to inflate their wallets even more?

Finally, just for Mr Gauci to take note once and for all, you do not get a Michelin-starred restaurant just because you want one. Michelin have to operate in the country concerned, which they do not here, and you have to have an offer that merits their seal of approval, which is not something you can buy, unlike Mick Jagger's sweaty T-shirts.