Tag: Mpiyakhe Dhlamini

Taxes are never pleasant, but they can do a lot of good if used in the right way, such as providing access to education and healthcare for the poor through vouchers. Taxes can also do a lot of harm by dissuading savings and investments, which ultimately leads to less jobs and a reduced ability for people to take care of their own needs. This is especially the case when it comes to dividend withholding tax and personal income tax.

According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, just over 40 million South Africans were of working age (15-64 years old) in the first quarter of 2022. Of these, 14,914,000 had a job. This means that almost 15 million adults in this country were wage slaves; people who have no choice but to give up what they produce to someone ese just to survive.

As South Africans continue to suffer from numerous government failures, there is a small ray of hope emerging. The private sector is stepping up to do the job where they are allowed to do so. This is exemplified in three stories that came out in the first two weeks of June.

Any society that restricts the economic participation of half of its members is doomed to failure, and women make up roughly half of the population in any society. Regression studies reveal that equality before the law is second only to inflation in terms of its contribution to GDP per capita growth.

Finance minister Tito Mboweni favours zero-based budgeting, an approach that would weigh each expenditure item, each departmental budget, against government goals. The Minister has said that this would entail focusing on ‘infrastructure development and other growth-enhancing measures’ and come at the expense of those programmes considered wasteful in relative terms.

Government intervention in the economy simply does not work. It is a mystery, then, why so many otherwise intelligent people keep calling for more of the same. After years of low growth (12 years now) concurrent with government fiscal deficits and various stimulus packages, we are now faced with retrenchments across the economy. The latest of which is Massmart announcing that it is considering retrenching 1,400 people.

An essential component of the rule of law is the existence of impartial courts where disputes are resolved fairly without favouritism to one of the parties. This is important for the economic welfare of individuals in a country because no modern economy can survive without individual property rights or contracts.

Following the discussions about the NHI (National Health Insurance), I am struck by how little regard is given to self-ownership. To preclude the possibility of ownership by someone else, self-ownership is a necessity. Black Africans were enslaved in the Americas because their self-ownership was not recognised.

Labour unions are undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to any positive reform, not because this particular group of individuals is somehow more evil than the rest of us. It is simply a rational response to the particular set of incentives that union bosses are faced with.

The people of Africa have been subjected to multiple injustices, slights, and violence. The list of things inflicted on Africans is endless and has no modern equivalent, except for Asia in geographical terms and the Jews in ethnic terms.