Tag: Chris Hattingh

According to Oxfam, a new billionaire was created every two days in 2018. What an incredible, remarkable phenomenon. Never have people created so much wealth for themselves through businesses and trading.

Industry grinds to a halt. Traffic stands gridlocked. Lights in dangerous areas go out. People sit in the dark. Whereas Christmas should usher in a time of jovial spirit, this December once again brings in load-shedding for South Africans.

Discovery CEO Adrian Gore mentioned at the recent Leadership Summit that there is an element of 'declinism' - a pessimism about the state of one’s country - in South Africa, and that it did not accurately represent the situation facing our country.

The only social responsibility of business is to use its resources and occupy its energies in the generation of wealth, so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which are to engage in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.

The Tourism Business Council of SA (TBCSA) has called on government to regulate Airbnb in South Africa. TBCSA claims that Airbnb is threatening the viability of conventional lodging providers such as hotels and could lead to job losses.

Reality can be avoided for only so long. The South African economy has slipped into its first technical recession since 2009. Cyril Ramaphosa’s confidence in growth for the economy has proven hollow. Without a change in the size and the amount of control the state has grasped over the lives of South Africans, without a change in policy from socialism to free markets, this recession was inevitable.

Ann Crotty, in the Financial Mail (The price we pay for Apple’s greed) paints Apple as a blight upon our civilization, an entity that only takes and gives nothing in return. Apart from the assumption that businesses must ‘give back’ (which goes unexamined in articles attacking capitalism and profit), the biggest problem with Mrs Crotty’s argument is that it rests on the idea that Apple held a gun to its customers’ heads and forced them to hand over their money.

Israel approved the ‘Open Skies’ agreement with the European Union in 2013. The goals were to increase the number of foreign airlines operating in the country, expand the number of routes served, lower fares and stimulate tourism. An Open Skies setup makes it easier for airlines to negotiate their own terms for operation with their intended partner/particular airport.

South African Airways (SAA) is at the point where it must be either privatised or liquidated. The latest bailout only prolongs the pain inflicted on the South African tax payer.