Tag: Temba Nolutshungu

As with the bosomy among the fairer sex, big government inevitably stimulates public interest and invites frenetic courtship and unrelenting pursuit. The pursuers are usually rent-seekers, lobbyists and representatives of all sorts of sectional interests.

The electricity crisis in South Africa is self-inflicted. This has become clear from the many costly disruptions in electricity supply over too long a period. There is something fundamentally amiss with government policy in this area. At the centre of the problem is Eskom, the leviathan which enjoys monopolistic protection shielded from potential competition.

South Africa’s economy is in a mess, to say the very least, and all this is solely and exclusively the fault of policymakers. Everything has gone horribly wrong! Yet it is not all beyond redemption.

By steadfastly sticking to the policy of a mandatory minimum wage, government seems to glorify the demonstrably provable socioeconomic destructive consequences. These will be further exacerbated by the unemployment catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes.

Free economies do not come about by chance. They are the result of the conscious creation of a business environment that is conducive to a high level of entrepreneurial activity and that has a minimum of bureaucratic red tape.

It is a reality of human nature that across all cultures all people perpetually strive to make improvements in their socioeconomic circumstances. A dream that all human beings strive to achieve. An opportunity to eradicate poverty and can come in a form of a job, education or even becoming a home-owner after an awfully long wait.

The almost simultaneous implosion of socialist and communist systems throughout the world is arguably the single most significant political event of the twentieth century. The year 1989 is particularly poignant because in that year the Berlin Wall was dismantled.  This event signalled the beginning of the end of socialism in Europe and hastened an already growing worldwide disillusionment with socialist ideology.

Promoting his seminal book, South Africa’s war against Capitalism, the economist Professor Walter Williams averred that “The solution to South Africa’s problems is not special programmes, it’s not affirmative action, it’s not handouts, and it’s not welfare. It is freedom. Because if you look around the world and you look for rich people, diverse people who have the ability to get along fairly well, you are also looking at a society where there are relatively large amounts of individual freedom”.

It is most astonishing that even as the Venezuelan crisis unfolds on TV screens across the world, the orientation of governance in the United States is in danger of degenerating into the same socialist experimentation that has brought such suffering and tragedy to the South American country.

The country’s economic junk status is a direct result of policy intransigence. Current government decisions appear to be based on a lack of consideration for the lessons of history. Economies are fragile. Persistent adverse policy-making breaks down an economy, reduces productive investment and economic activity, and causes untold harm to citizens.