With Fred Thompson having dropped out of the race, it’s time to weigh up the alternatives for the Republican nomination, from my perch on the southern end of Africa. What matters to me in an American president is foreign policy, of course, and economic policy. Bonus points for not being a bigot, a prig, a whinger or a preacher, but as I’ve written before, whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried, is really up to them.

Mitt Romney looks like a conservative Bill Clinton. He’s trying to be all things to all people, and that’s going to make him the lowest-common-denominator in office. I don’t trust the fellow. Mike Huckabee is a social conservative, not an economic conservative, and I’m looking for the exact opposite. Besides, I can’t take someone endorsed by Chuck Norris seriously.

John McCain is likeable enough, but neither his individual freedom record, nor his economic policy, appeal that much. He’s also lent his name to a heavy-handed and misguided campaign-finance law, and thinks government-enforced cap-and-trade schemes are just great. He’s great on foreign policy, perhaps, and might be able to appeal to the broad centre, but those are qualities that aren’t unique to him, and the rest of his positions are not what a classical liberal would want.

Which leaves Rudy Giuliani. He’s worked successfully with Democrats. He cleaned up New York, which used to be a poster city for crime, decadence and decay. He impressed on 9/11. He’s not going to surrender the free world to radicals and extremists and terrorists and fascists. And he doesn’t whine all the time about attacks from the vicious and vast left-wing wopist conspiracy.

But the clincher, for me, is set out in an excellent article on his tax plan by Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and one-time candidate for president famous for his radical flat-tax proposals. Read it, and then tell me why Giuliani shouldn’t be the GOP nominee.

Barack Obama mentions Ronald Reagan, and Paul Krugman has a fit. He proceeds to revise Reagan’s legacy, because Clinton failed to change the narrative and Republicans are trying to rewrite history. Seriously.

Here’s the column, by celebrated New York Times columnist, former Enron adviser, and economist extraordinaire, Paul Krugman.

Debunking the Reagan Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 21, 2008

I thought, “Well, that was a quick read”, and was just about to retire for a power nap, when someone asked me for comment. So I thought, “Well, that’ll make a nice fisking.”

And it turned out to be very much worth fisking. Writes Krugman:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

It’s not the perception that matters, it’s the economic policies and principles that matter. Whether the New Deal was or was not sound economic policy matters very much, because it is on such historical lessons that many base their decisions of today.

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Indeed. Maybe that’s because the Reagan era still matters immensely for Americans (not to mention the rest of the world).

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

And low taxes, the defeat of inflation, low oil prices, and the defeat of the Soviet Union. A Gilded Age indeed.
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The medicine-registration leaflet of herbal remedies provide unexpected amusement. Outside politics, one wonders, can less be said in more formal-sounding words?

I’m one of those people who enjoy bitters. Not just rock shandy, not just sweet Jägermeister. Not just the light aromatic aperitif-style stuff, but heavy stomach bitters, as an after-dinner or night-cap digestif. The stronger, the better. There’s nothing quite like sipping a small glass of Fernet-Branca, Unicum or Underberg along with a tall glass of ice water.

Jurgen Gothe, an upstanding member of the Canadian cognoscenti, writes a fine paean to all things bitter, in All hail Fernet-Branca, the foulest liqueur on Earth. Hail, indeed.

So it was with some pleasure that I discovered, in my local pharmacy, a concoction known as Schweden-Bitter, made by PharmaNatura, “the natural medicine company”. Despite its relatively low price (compared to, say, Fernet-Branca), it compares pretty well to digestif bitters you’d find in the better bars or liquor stores around town. It’s less smooth and rounded, perhaps, but look, this is supposed to be medicine. Forget castor oil. This is the stuff I’d feed to moaning brats complaining about mysterious stomach pains to get off the homework hook.

Still, Schweden-Bitter isn’t a scheduled drug, or anything. So it was with some surprise that I discovered a package insert, just as the law requires of real medicine. Apparently, it is classified in the pharmacopoeia as “A. 34 Other”. Seeking somewhat greater clarity, I turned to the pharmacological action, which is described thus:

This preparation is designed to correct imbalances within the unhealthy body and so enables the organism itself to overcome the disease condition. The constituents in their indicated form work accordingly.

Okiedokey, then. Glad we cleared that up. A friend, who’ll remain nameless, said: “You see, that makes perfect sense to me.” But then, I’ve long ago given up arguing with them about what does and doesn’t make sense.

There’s more. After all, this is a very official and quite formal medicine registration notice, as required by Act 101/1965.

Side-effects and special precautions:

None known.

Known symptoms of overdosage and particulars of its treatment:

None.

Now I’m no doctor, and I have no clue what any of the 20 curiously-named herbs from which this “ethanolic extract” is distilled might do to a person, in great quantities. And to be fair to the makers, it is not recommended to exceed the maximum dosage of a teaspoonful four times a day.

But I do know what a concoction that contains 40% alcohol per volume could do, and I can guarantee you, this piece of paper isn’t going to get me off the hook if I have a few tots of this good stuff and get behind the wheel. I’m also fairly convinced alcohol has symptoms of overdosage (though I am, of course, entirely innocent of the particulars of its treatment).

Now, let’s assume a tot of this stuff to be equivalent to a standard drink, which is about right, given the alcohol content. Based on the information on alcohol overdose kindly published by John Brick, Ph.D., M.A., F.A.P.A., of the Rutgers University Centre for Alcohol Studies (when I grow up, that’s where I want to work), consuming a bottle (500ml) of this stuff in four hours has a 50% chance of killing a 90kg man.

I’d think death is a fairly significant symptom of overdosage, though I can see why they’d omit the particulars of its treatment.

Now, for that tot I just photographed. Your health!

A lot of South African politicians and public officials can take a lesson from Peter Hain’s resignation today. According to Sky News:

Cabinet Minister Peter Hain has resigned after the Electoral Commission announced it had referred the issue of undeclared donations to his deputy leadership campaign to the police.

Mr Hain said: “In view of the Electoral Commission decision today, I will be resigning to clear my name.”

The Prime Minister has accepted his resignation. […]

Sky News Political Editor Adam Boulton said: “Peter Hain has had to come back repeatedly and correct what he has been saying.

“At best he has not been on top of what is going on in terms of fund-raising, at worst, he has been less than frank about what is going on.

“That is what appears to have convinced Gordon Brown, or indeed, Peter Hain himself, that his position is untenable.

“This is a serious blow to the Government.”

He claims innocence, citing mere administrative oversights. He was a respected member of cabinet, in charge of a large, important ministry, and politics was his life.

Yet he didn’t wait for the police investigation to start. He didn’t wait for formal charges to be filed. He didn’t wait to be found guilty in a court of law. He didn’t wait to be fired by the prime minister. He offered to resign, on the spot. No ifs, buts, or maybes. And they still call it “incompetence, economic turmoil and political sleaze”.

Here, sleaze is the order of the day, and an honourable resignation seems to be the last thing on the minds of our gravy train passengers.

Granted, were its members to follow the example of the corrupt British captalist imperialist pigs, the ANC National Executive Committee would be sorely understaffed. The South African cabinet would be gravely depleted. On the other hand, imagine the many new job openings the government could claim credit for creating!

I’ve been wondering what the point is of blackouts during off-peak times. Nevermind that it isn’t the slot I was told to expect, but why would my power need go out between 9pm and 11pm on Monday? Surely demand can’t be that high so late at night? Why get outages between 10am and 3pm? Peak times are mornings and evenings, not so?

So to answer the question, I’ve watched the power usage charts over at Power Alert for a few days. Here’s what I see:

This represents national power usage. Brown indicates critical levels. What can one conclude from this? One shouldn’t presume that the chart is drawn to scale. But it does show that power usage is constantly at critical levels, not only during peak usage times, but all day from 7am to 11pm.

And what does that tell us? That this problem isn’t new and sudden. That it’s been brewing for a considerable time. Eskom may claim unscheduled service outages at power stations, but that’s because, by Eskom’s own admission, they’re running them as hard as possible.

And from that, we can conclude that when Thabo Mbeki told us in May 2006 that “there is no crisis”, noting that supply (37GW plus 2GW peak capacity) exceeded projected demand (35GW), he was lying. Don’t tell me he didn’t read the reports. He has apologised, yes, but for what? For being wrong? Sure, the government was wrong, but as Andrew Kenny writes at Fin24, it had no excuse for being wrong. He knew what economic growth was. He knew what Eskom’s supply and demand projections were. Anyone with grade 4 arithmetic could figure out we were headed for a crisis, even then. The idea that private sector companies would build generation plants without being able to price their product for a reasonable return on investment was self-delusion, and to sell the idea, he and his ministers simply lied to us. (Aside: Kenny makes a good point about Alec Erwin. He may believe a hammer and sickle are the tools of the economist’s trade, but he wasn’t in charge of public enterprises in the 1990s when this half-baked plan was cooked up.)

“Whatever needs to be done to make sure that the economy grows and new investors come into the economy is being done on the energy and other sides,” he said at the time. Lies.

“The Honourable Member is proceeding from the wrong assumption that our government has failed to meet South Africa’s electricity capacity needs,” he told an opposition parliamentarian. Lies.

Erwin and President Thabo Mbeki have played down the impact of the blackouts (reported Fin24 in August 2006), saying the outages would not affect
investment and would not derail efforts to lift economic growth to 6% from below 5% now. Lies.

In May 2006, after the first blackouts hit Cape Town, Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu told Donovan Jackson, writing for Mining and Manufacturing Systems Magazine: “Your assertion that planning did not anticipate the demand is not correct. … The recent events in the Cape is not (and should not be seen as) an indication that South Africa has run out of capacity and therefore cannot meet the demand.” He added that the problem was impossible to foresee. Lies.

“I don’t think we are facing a crisis, we firmly believe the long term plans make it very comfortable for us to meet our needs,” said the deputy director-general in the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs, Nelisiwe Magubane, in February 2006. Lies.

In January 2007, the office of Public Enterprises minister Alec Erwin told Reuters in a statement that he was “confident that South Africa as a whole will not be plunged into darkness”. Lies.

“You don’t have permission to access /energy_in_africa/975198.htm on this server.” Lies.

“We don’t believe there is a crisis in the energy sector in South Africa. There are challenges that don’t amount to a crisis,” said Sandile Nogxina, director general of the Department of Minerals and Energy in June 2007. Lies.

So what about the other promises? Health care? As a surgeon in Nelspruit pointed out in a blog post to which he linked in a comment on this site, that’s lies too.

Gautrain? Well, we’ll see about that. The tunnel boring machines hired at huge expense don’t work too well without power either.

Without any shame, without any loyalty to the people that elected them, the ANC government, from Thabo Mbeki on down, simply lied to us to cover up their own failures.

So where is the truth in all this? Well, Thabo Mbeki did tell an election rally (reports Reuters) that providing these basic services was “central” to maintaining freedom. And that much is true.

But isn’t that anti-campaigning? “Failure is not an option. We failed. Vote for us.” Huh?

Why on earth would anyone still believe that the ANC can deliver basic services? Why would they think, as Richard Catto apparently does, that merely electing a more populist leader for the same party of central planning, national socialism and crony-capitalism will make all the difference? At best that leader, Jacob Zuma, has shown a singular inability to manage just his personal affairs. What would make him any better at planning government service delivery?

Has anyone been held responsible? Has anyone been fired for incompetence, for lying, for failure to deliver? Is that really what happened to Thabo Mbeki in Polokwane last month? I don’t think so. Do you think anyone will be fired? I don’t think so. Will the ANC, which is the source, as ruling party, for the policies the president implements, take responsibility? I don’t think so. And even if they say they do, can we believe them? I don’t think so.

Isn’t it time to fire the liars, for a start, and then revisit the notion that government is capable of delivering services? Isn’t it time we rely on the energy, innovation and hard work of ordinary South Africans to make a better life for themselves? Ordinary South Africans earned their own liberation. They got together, across party lines, to overthrow Apartheid. Isn’t it time to look beyond struggle credentials and loyalty to the ANC, and look to a future in which South Africans can reasonably expect to prosper? We may already have missed a window of opportunity, in terms of global economic health. Now we can’t even afford the economic growth we need, lest we run out of energy to fuel it. Isn’t it time we, ordinary South Africans, do something about the government that, since liberation, not only failed us, but lied about it to our faces?

The ANC’s slogan of “a better life for all” is clearly an empty promise. What is a democracy to do other than turf the useless liars out?

Updated: Added Gautrain paragraph after first publication.

A very welcome addition to the South African internet landscape is a new satire site that calls itself Hayibo. I have no idea who runs it, or who writes it, but it’s generally pretty funny stuff. Witness its take on the South African blackouts, for example:

Eskom vows to keep lights on, will burn Zim banknotes

Embattled power distributor Eskom has won the praise of government after vowing to keep rolling blackouts to a minimum by burning Zimbabwean banknotes in some of its coal-fired power stations. […]

If you’re casting about for ways to spend a dreary (and intermittently dark) Monday afternoon, you could do worse than idly browsing your way over there.

This column was first published in Maverick magazine of 1 November 2007, lightly edited and heavily hyperlinked for your convenience. Maverick is an old-fashioned print-media business publication in South Africa that does old-fashioned things like pay writers, so if you’d consider subscribing you’d be doing me (and the magazine) an old-fashioned favour.

The nice thing about idiots and their fellow travellers is how easy they are to spot. A brilliant example is Canadian superstar, Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein just wrote a shocking new book. It is bound to make her a fortune.

She gained a good measure of fame at age 30 by writing a sort of little red book for the Battle of Seattle anti-globalisation movement. No Logo was a bold, broad tirade against brands and their owners.

Of course, she could only “take aim” at them (in her rather aggressive term) because she could identify them. They are big-brand organisations in the first place, and their reputations make big targets for the likes of Klein. Hers was no denunciation of Maxi’s Mini Meat Market, Randy’s Rural Rod & Reel, or Sam’s Suburban Suburban Sales. She was bullying the “brand bullies”: Nike and McDonalds, Microsoft and Pepsi, companies whose very brand profile give consumers immense power over them.

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On one level, I love the American election process. It’s long. It’s ruthless. It exposes every potential flaw in every candidate, be it character or policy, present or past. It forces them to take or explain positions on issues that matter to voters.

On another, I abhor the shallowness of much of the what we see. With “we”, I mean those of us who are separated from America by an ocean or more, away from the barrage of posters everywhere, town hall meetings every day and television adverts every hour. Where we should, in theory, be able to watch with some detachment, some time for analysis, some depth of coverage.

It may be true that when voters care more about superficial style and sound-bite glibness, this suggests their real-life concerns can’t be all that grave. After all, who in Africa really believes that Americans have the faintest idea what poverty or hunger is? What political violence does to people and families? The shallowness of their electoral rhetoric is a measure of their contentment. I don’t mean to condescend; I salute them for that achievement. I don’t mean to oversimplify; there are substantial issues in play, but they don’t always resonate deeply with the figurative man on the street.

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It’s not funny. It’s actually pretty scary. But all the white racists who voted “no” in the 1992 referendum, which asked white voters whether they’d be okay with “power sharing” with the ANC, are vindicated. Turns out there’s not enough power to share.

All the doomsayers who predicted infrastructure decay and economic collapse, all those who fled South Africa to make a home in Australia or elsewhere, now appear to have been right. They may have been right for the wrong reasons, and may have expressed it in distasteful terms, but right they were.

“There is no power crisis,” said president Thabo Mbeki in May 2006. Yeah right, dear leader. Amandla aWethu¹, right? Sorry, Mr President, but a belated apology 18 months later doesn’t keep the lights on. (It’s worth noting that judging by the Google results this is just about the only significant apology Mbeki has ever offered for anything.)

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1. ”Power to the people!” [↩]

The 14th edition of The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom has been released. Though its methodology is slightly different, it confirms the results of a similar project run by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute.

There’s a good first-dip commentary on it by Mary Anastasia O-Grady over at the Wall Street Journal, which includes this table:

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This story is laugh-out-loud funny, if you don’t buy the deception that the Democrats have gotten fiscal religion and are now more pious than a congregation of Republican pigs at the trough.

In November, I wrote:

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

As it turns out, the voting on specific anti-spending measures reveals the Dems to be consistently in favour of spending.

But it’s getting worse. Lacking a disaster in Iraq to pound the Republicans with, the Democratic candidates have turned their rhetoric to the economy. This means they get to bid each other into the stratosphere with spending proposals.

Everyone whose vote they can possibly buy is being offered large wads of tax money. Par for the course, you may think. After all, they’re big-government spendthrifts, and even self-proclaimed economic conservatives find it hard to resist the temptation to promise princely payouts to political plebs.

But won’t spending billions make the deficit worse? That’s what the Democrats have been saying for ages now, hasn’t it? For what it was worth, their complaint was partially valid, even though it was motivated more by opposition than by principle. The US can easily afford modest deficits when necessary, and there’s no real link between deficits and economic performance (or, for that matter, between the “twin” deficits of budget and trade). However, a profligate government can’t be in the interest of taxpaying citizens. Whenever possible, individuals, not the state, are in a better position to determine how their own money is best used. Anyway, the biggest deficit culprits besides war spending are the bloated and bankrupt entitlement programmes the Democrats keep threatening to expand.

“Stimulus shouldn’t be paid for,” said Hillary Clinton now. Eh? That sounds nice. Can I have me some stimulus that doesn’t need to be paid for too? With this sort of conjuring, she’s going to make people think she’s a witch, and it’s only a tap of the heels from there to “wicked”.

The entire piece is instructive, but this is worth quoting:

But wait, what about those evil Bush deficits? Only weeks ago, Democrats claimed those were the road to perdition, even if the deficit had shrunk to 1.2% of GDP last year thanks to booming revenue growth. […] Yes, many will fret that these tax cuts would only increase the deficit. But now we have even Robert Rubin and Hillary Clinton instructing us that deficits don’t matter. Somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling.

Ouch!

Some people have way too much time on their hands. But we love ‘em for it. Here’s the secret history of the defeat of HD-DVD:

Only days later, he shot himself.