The measure of notes and coins in circulation has soared to record high levels. Usually this parameter tops out each year around Christmas time and last festive season, before our planet fell ill, it was exploring the mid R160 billions. Currently it is about R10bn larger than that record, so clearly injecting liquidity to get people through the hard times is working for someone. This would include the wholly cash-based contraband cigarette business that appears to be thriving because of the continuing smoking ban. Also boosting demand for extra notes and coins must be those parts of the relief packages being (rather haphazardly) distributed by government to the needy. On average – clearly a very inappropriate statistic in this case – this means that every soul in this country could have around R3000 each stowed under the mattress. Obviously, the actual distribution if quite different from this and the implication for massive informal unrecorded economic activity and of course diminished tax collection will one day be wonderful material for academic theses. In the meantime, it oils the criminal sector and it will be quite difficult to get this Genii back in the bottle.
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators.” This quote from the American political satirist and journalist P J O’Rourke feels like it was coined to describe exactly the current South Africa. This is precisely what has happened since legislation with names like BEE and worse was introduced to control the price of labour. And now, if the leaked Top Secret “Economic Recovery Plan for Municipalities in Response to Covid-19” is to be believed, much more regulation and control is on the way. This plan, seemingly the work of NDZ’s ministry of Cooperative Governance & Traditional Affairs, will shove SA even closer to becoming a Marxist centrally planned state. President Cyril has yet to dismiss The Plan as fake news so one has to believe that he likes the idea. Discomforting. Oh, and what exactly is Cooperative Governance?
Not wanting to be left behind in using the crisis to launch a plan, Tidemarks would like to offer a far more certain and undeniably simpler method for getting this country back to work and shaking off the economic shackles inherited both from the lockdown debacle and several decades of political interference in everyday commerce and industry. To be known as Zero Based Government it proposes immediately to suspend legislation that does not deal specifically with crimes against people and property. All laws and regulation prescribing who must do what with whom and at what price must be abolished indefinitely.
At a stroke, thousands of civil servants will have nothing to do, nor a salary to expect and would need to pour into the labour market to see what their skills are worth. Within a period far shorter than anyone would predict, human ingenuity and enterprise will blossom. The now very mature and ubiquitous internet will quickly become a marketplace where among the most successful products will be those that best enable this new regulation-lite civic model. The demand for bandwidth will bulldozer the foot-dragging protected networks and their chums in government out of the way where they squat malevolently. The next tech dollar billionaires will be hungry and bright young South Africans. This proposal is strongly supportive of economic freedom in the sense that it grants freedom to anybody to participate in the economy without the dead hand of bureaucracy setting quotas, terms and prices. Watch this nation fly. If and when in a few years, there is a yearning for the old days of cadres and corruption, well then, the old statute books will still be on a shelf somewhere. But no one will remember where.
A plague at least as life threatening as Covid-19 is raging through parts of East Africa. There, massive swarms of locusts are devouring as much “…(food) in a day as the entire population of Germany”. Without detracting from the severity of the problem it is odd to see the Economist magazine using such a meaningless unit. Does their legendary style guide now have tables of the daily food consumption of different nations? And might such a unit not have the potential to be construed as racist?
James Greener
Friday 10th July 2020
