Nice way to end your week’s downtime. A cloudburst of major proportions just hit Johannesburg’s north-west and flooded my home. Here’s what’s left of my patio roof.

To give you an idea how violent the rain and hail were, this is right outside my office. It collapsed not two metres from where I was sitting, on the other side of a curtained window, and I didn’t hear a thing. I only saw this when I surveyed the house for damage after it got flooded.

A foot or more of hail was a little more than my drains could handle:

The water poured in at the doors. This is my workshop after I blocked the worst flooding, and the icy water had subsided from being near ankle-deep.

My pool was sparkling a couple of hours ago. It wasn’t brimming either. And it was 18 degrees, not 14 degrees, as it is now. That’s some serious chillin’ right there.

It’s half a metre deep here, at the bottom of my garden. Yes, there’s a storm drain, but it’s not the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Not that the raging torrent that passed for a road outside the wall needed any help. Maybe I should built a boathouse. At least then I can get to the garden shed for the shovel I need.

The ice dam shovelled out of the way, in case the cursed clouds open up again.

Now my back hurts, my feet are frozen, and I’m somewhat grumpy. I bet Alec “The Bolt” Erwin had something to do with this.

In the US presidential election, candidates pay millions to flight campaign spots in states where primaries or elections are to be held. Each is tailored to the region in question. Though they’re often banal, promising the undeliverable, pandering to prejudice or exploiting economic illitaracy, the idea of targeting your limited campaign funds seems sensible. It is also possible in a free and fair society.

There is, therefore, a terrible irony in the fact that candidates standing in opposition to Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator, Robert Mugabe, in tomorrow’s election there, are buying advertising in newspapers and on prime-time TV in neighbouring South Africa. Both Simba Mokoni, the outcast from Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change, have spent a lot of money here.

There are several reasons for this. One is that a large number of Zimbabweans are in South Africa, legally or otherwise, and may be inclined to return to vote tomorrow. (Expats are no longer permitted to vote abroad.) They’re here because they cannot survive with the hyperinflation, empty grocery shelves and political violence — the legacy of Mugabe’s long rule and failed policies — so one hardly needs a survey to tell you that about 100% of them would want to see political change. NGOs are urging the two million or more expatriate Zimbabweans in South Africa — many of whom will risk arrest and deportation in South Africa, or worse in Zimbabwe — to go home and vote.

The more sinister reason is restrictions on free speech and repression of opposition campaigns in Zimbabwe itself. The picture alongside, tellingly named “Policeviolenceagainstanoppo.jpg” was taken last year, and republished on This is Zimbabwe, the must-read blog if you’re following events in Zimbabwe. Its “election watch” series gives a good impression of how free and fair elections are likely to be. Voting districts have been gerrymandered, voter rolls are being tampered with, and election laws have just been amended, contrary to pre-election agreements with opposition parties, to permit police to enter polling stations to “assist illiterate voters” to vote, for example. (In South Africa’s historic 1994 election, there were dozens of parties on the ballot, most voters had never voted before, and illiteracy was a major concern. So the ballot came with pictures of party logos and photos of their leaders, and extensive voter education campaigns were run by the Independent Electoral Commission and a myriad NGOs, explaining how the ballot would work. This elegantly solved the problem. No apartheid-era police officers were needed at polling stations to “help” people vote.)

It is no surprise that Zimbabwe has banned most foreign media. Among broadcasters, the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation is one of only two networks permitted a bureau in Zimbabwe (the other is Al Jazeera). SABC rival e-tv says it will be reporting the election diligently, from the Beit Bridge border post. As I was on the Burma issue, and often am on issues of foreign policy, I’m ashamed to call myself a South African, considering the tacit and overt support my country gives to nationalist dictators, communist despots and murderous tyrants, such as that geriatric scum, Mugabe.

For tomorrow, election observers are not permitted, except for the South African Development Community delegation led by South Africa. Why them? Because they were the only bunch of reprehensible clowns to declare the previous election free and fair. The simpering idiots will do so again this year. South Africa’s highest officials have already laid the groundwork for a conclusion that panders to ogre of Harare, as has SADC itself. Human rights campaigners are not so sure.

So political parties are turning to non-traditional means of getting their messages of change out, and those means include campaign advertisements in countries other than where the election is being held.

In words that make him sound like the biggest bully on the school playground (”Just dare try it. We don’t play around while you try to please your British allies. Just try it and you will see.”), Robert Mugabe has threatened dire consequences for anyone who dares dispute the outcome of the election. After all, it’s already rigged, so the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion.

The sad fact is that Mugabe’s sham elections are unlikely to restore freedom to Zimbabweans. They’re unlikely to reverse the economic disaster that Mugabe shamelessly blames on Western sanctions and colonial plots, but are actually the result of wholesale expropriation of land and assets, price controls, cronyism and outright kleptocracy.

Perhaps nothing short of violent revolt will reverse the disaster. I can’t possibly make a case for such a revolt by the people of Zimbabwe, since South Africa’s constitution limits my freedom of speech when it comes to “propaganda for war”, but at Commentary South Africa, John makes a good case, using Tibet as a case in point, why the superficial nobility of peaceful opposition against violent repression masks the fact that it seldom, if ever, produces a free and fair outcome.

That Zimbabwean political candidates are campaigning in South Africa against an 84-year-old ogre merely underscores the limits of “quiet diplomacy” and “peaceful opposition”. While Zimbabweans try to vote themselves a better future tomorrow, I will spend the day mourning the empty breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa. I will spend tomorrow remembering why free people and free markets (to pilfer a tagline) are the “basis” of “basic human rights”. Why political and economic liberty are prerequisites for a fair, prosperous future.

I wish you well, Zimbabwe. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Joseph Stiglitz says the Iraq war is a central cause of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. From which we can conclude that the Iraq war is not a central cause of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The press never tires of describing Stiglitz as a Nobel Prize winner. This is true. He shared a prize in economics in 2001 with George Akerlof and Michael Spence, for work on the asymmetric availability of information in markets. One application, on which Stiglitz in particular focused, involved credit markets, in which lenders know less about the likely repayment of a loan than borrowers.

So one would think he knows something about the credit crunch. And perhaps he does. But if so, he’s not telling. He’s got a war to fight, and a book to flog to the economically illiterate antiwar left. The former economic adviser to US president Bill Clinton teamed up with Linda Bilmes, another Clinton-era economist (not that I’d for a moment suggest partisan bias, you understand), to publish The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Stiglitz’s explanation for the credit crunch? When in doubt, blame Bush. According to him, the Iraq war is a primary cause:

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

“The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system,” he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

He’s partly right: inflationary monetary policy was a central cause of the housing bubble. Low interest rates made money cheaper, which not only boosted investment in fixed assets such as houses, but also led to great offers on home loans at rates that could never last, squeezing those who bought houses they couldn’t really afford.

He’s also right to note that expanding the money supply by keeping interest rates low is a favourite technique of governments to “inflate away” debt. In essence, monetary inflation debases a currency, imposing an invisible tax on income earners that has the effect of reducing public debt: your dollar becomes worth less, and you can buy less with it, but the government’s dollar-denominated debt is also worth less as a result.

But here’s the rub: the US debt has not been inflated away. It may be lower as a percentage of GDP than it was during the height of the Clinton years, but despite the economic growth of the Bush years, it isn’t exactly heading down.

That’s not Stiglitz’s biggest error, however. He attributes this inflation in money supply to the Iraq war. So I got some data from the Federal Reserve, and drew a chart of the monthly federal funds rate since 2000, with the Iraq war period highlighted.

You’ll notice that for most of the duration of the war, the fed rate has risen sharply. It hasn’t been kept low, or been lowered, as Stiglitz’s theory would have it. The cause of the credit crunch predates the Iraq war, and contrary to Stiglitz’s claim, the fed’s policy during the war was to make credit more expensive.

I cannot imagine that a Nobel Prize-winning economist didn’t spot this, so I can only conclude that Stiglitz is simply lying when he attributes the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates to the Iraq war. Must be something he learnt from Bill Clinton.

A year ago, when presenting his paper, “The True Costs of the Iraq War,” he estimated that the war would cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on how much longer troops stay.

Just a year later, he says the war will cost $3 trillion, and that’s a conservative estimate. Then his margin of error, at a conservative estimate, is between 100% and 200%. This seems rather higher than an economist should be comfortable with. Granted, such an estimate does indeed depend on how long the troops stay. Just like the price of an acid trip depends on how much acid you take.

Another way he arrives at this staggering figure is that Stiglitz uses a terrifically broad definition of war costs, including, for example, welfare costs for veterans. This leads to rather interesting conclusions.

One of the greatest discrepancies is that the official figures do not include the long-term healthcare and social benefits for injured servicemen, who are surviving previously fatal attacks because of improved body armour.

So let me get this straight: It’s a bad thing when soldiers don’t die, because then you have to keep paying them? Nice sentiments, Mr Stiglitz. At least we know now why you didn’t win the Peace Prize.

I have one item planned for Sunday morning, but I intend taking most of the next week off to spend on projects and family. I asked my boss, and he says it’s fine, but don’t expect to get paid, you lazy sod. I’d argue, but since I work for myself that just serves to attract funny stares. If you’re going away, be safe. If not, enjoy the long weekend.

The police in South Africa today reminds me of the “kitskonstabels” (instant constables) the old National Party inducted into the police. Ill-trained and brutal, they were used for the dirty work of quelling unrest in the townships. Today, the government is throwing money at the crime problem, but while the police may be getting more bodies and more gear, but from what I’ve seen recently, they’re pretty pathetic, as a rule. Shouldn’t we be spending more money on training?

A comment on a previous post about the police noted that many of our cops — especially in the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Force — are overweight. Many do indeed appear too unfit to do much more than shoot a fleeing suspect in the back. That they don’t do so more often is probably a function of lack of firearm training, extraordinary facility in issuing “spot fines” (as bribes are known around here), or simply being unable to extract a weapon from the flab.

The lack of training goes way beyond fitness, though. Eye-popping CCTV evidence has been doing the rounds of a “drug raid” on Bohemia, a bar in Stellenbosch. Wouter Jonker, a student at Stellenbosch University, has a good collection.

What cop thinks firing a weapon into the ceiling of a two-floor establishment is a reasonable tactic during a raid? What cop believes throwing glasses at innocent patrons is an effective tactic? What sort of impotent cop needs to spray mace in the face of a girl sitting on the floor with her hands up? Would that be the same cop who committed sexual assault on an innocent bystander? What commanding officer can pull “evidence” from his breast pocket and wave it in the bar manager’s face? What sorry excuse for a cop is authorised to punch random people, men and women, in the face? What cop is permitted to flat-hand people so their ear drums pop? What cop is authorised to confiscate cameras on the scene? What incompetent cop raids three bars, and manages to find just six pieces of hashish, 150g dagga and some cocaine? Mothers find more in the pockets of students’ dirty laundry! What braindead cop leaves what meagre evidence they could find behind? And what cop with any shred of self-respect does all this, but makes not a single arrest?

The cops are largely denying what the CCTV footage clearly shows. The bullets in the ceiling, they say, might have been put there by “hostile owners”. Presumably they also put the muzzle-flashes in the video, the joints in the CO’s pocket, and the hand in the poor girl’s panties.

Another post on Jonker’s site quotes the proper procedure for a drug bust in a public entertainment venue. It resembles what we saw here in exactly no respects. Every single one of these cops belongs in jail.

This scene isn’t isolated. Similar raids happened in several other venues around the same time, including at a Johannesburg joint named the Bohemian and several other Stellenbosch venues. At least I know not to call my retirement hangout the Bohemian anything.

I was shocked to hear one of the girls interviewed on TV say that the police told them to “sleep, sleep”. Where did they learn that phrase? The reason I ask is because I have heard that curious wording only once before, ever. It is hard to forget, because the surprising turn of phrase came from the three armed men who tied me up and robbed me blind last year. While we’re on the subject of my own robbery, two things seem relevant. One is that a radio call came in while the police were taking my statement, describing a robbery in progress three blocks away. The description of the suspects matched my attackers. I said so, expecting the half-a-platoon that attended the scene to jump in their cars and give chase, but no. They showed no interest whatsoever. I did receive a call from the police six months later. They hadn’t caught anyone, and they hadn’t found my car. They didn’t need any more information either. They just wanted to check whether I had, in fact, reported an armed robbery. They were working on it, they said. Yeah right.

Cut to Kwazulu-Natal, where a bunch of students had been making unreasonable demands, and even after they were met, carried on protesting and burning rubbish in the streets. Don’t get me wrong. They deserved to be locked up, the lot of them. They deserve to be expelled, too. Taxpayer money is wasted on their future.

Then the “adults” arrive, in the form of riot police. I was transfixed by the television coverage. What I saw was not a crowd control scene, with lines of riot police in shields and helmets deftly splitting the crowds, driving them back and isolating the troublemakers. It was like something out of a war movie. Stun grenades were fired haphazardly into a crowd, not to drive them back, but apparently to confuse and panic them. Surefire recipe for trampling, that is. At another location, a fellow who’d seen too many urban warfare cutscenes was sniping at running protestors with rubber bullets. Guy runs across an alley, a block away, and gets one in the side for having the effrontery to flee. Gotcha! Another officer stood firing down at students scrabbling through a ditch, trying to get out of the line of fire. No wonder serious injuries were sustained. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the crowd had turned really ugly, and felt itself fully justified to shoot back at the police, over such aggression.

Who trained these idiots? Isn’t there anyone in the police service that’s dying from shame at all this? Surely there are competent police officers, with adequate training, that can handle mild student protests, petty public nuisance complaints or a minor drug bust without charging in all guns blazing like Rambo on acid?

There can’t be all that many criminals in South Africa, judging by the number of prior crimes newly arrested criminals appear to have committed. Instead of budgeting for bulking up numbers and equipment, as the government has done, perhaps the crime rate — and the security of our would-be 2010 World Cup visitors — would benefit rather more from decent training.

Start with a fitness programme (hint: fatties can’t chase criminals, and weaklings can’t fight them). Then add some firearm training (hint: you can’t fire live ammo in crowded pubs, and you don’t point loaded weapons at unarmed patrons). Then perhaps a course on basic procedures in dealing with civilians (hint: you can’t grab her tits, you can’t mace people who are already down and quiet, and you can’t slap bystanders into hospital). Teach public order cops to restore public order (hint: don’t panic a crowd, don’t anger it by shooting fleeing protestors in the back, and don’t turn an unruly protest into a major warzone). Add to that some tips on how to at least pretend to want to catch criminals.

This isn’t a computer game. You aren’t special forces in an urban war. Just wearing a uniform and drawing a salary and bribing the public and speeding on public roads and going on strike once in a while doesn’t make you an effective police officer.

Finance minister Trevor Manuel promised money for more men and equipment in his budget speech. But before we create any more “kitskonstabels” and issue them with live ammo, perhaps it might be a good idea to invest some public money in training.

The public invests our police force with awesome powers. Not the state, or the law, but the public. The woman who got pepper-sprayed, the guy who got deafened, the woman who got punched in the face, the woman who was “body-searched”, you and me, and the thousands of other victims of police neglicence, incompetence, indiscipline and outright brutality. Many of whom don’t have CCTV cameras or fancy video phones to record the evidence.

We invest the police with awesome powers. If they abuse those powers, perhaps they should be taken away. If they demonstrate sheer incompetence, or violent arrogance, or blatant disregard for the law they’re sworn to enforce, perhaps those powers should be taken away. I would have thought South Africa has had enough of the state’s jackboots stamping on the faces of innocent civilians.

Which brings us right back to the argument for private police forces, subject to competition and contract obligations. Another comment on that original post said it’d be a bit like the Wild West. Well, what does all this look like? All the Bohemian needed was a pair of swinging saloon doors.

But failing private police forces, can we at least train the idiots we have, before we hire more incompetent bullies with inferiority complexes, and issue them with assault rifles and a licence to assault? Before anyone else gets hurt?

A calamity is unfolding. A disaster wrought, not surprisingly, by the lack of a free market in broadcasting in South Africa. I’ll quote from local rock DJ Benjy Mudie’s webpage:

Dear Rock of Ages listeners & fans,

Those of you that were listening to the show last Thursday would have heard the sad news that Rock of Ages is coming off the air at the end of March 2008. Radio 2000 has advised me that they are not going to extend the show’s contract and so after nearly 5 years of playing the best in classic and new ‘retro’ rock, both international and local, South Africa’s only rock show, Rock of Ages, will broadcast it’s last show on Thursday 27th March 2008.

There has been an outpouring of disappointment and anger at this decision and scores of listeners have emailed the station voicing their unhappiness and I understand that there are several petitions doing the rounds as well. If you would like to have your say on this please email the Program Manager of Radio 2000, Cuthbert Mashigo at cuthbert@radio2000.co.za. I would respectfully appeal to you to keep your comments polite, non-personal and non-political. I’m not sure if the protests will result in a reversal of this decision, all things are possible ….. however the important thing is that you have the right to speak out if you should choose, the SABC is a public broadcaster and as such is accountable to the people.

What is it with the SABC and rock music? Even PW Botha’s censors had more respect for rock. (Or maybe it just scared them.)

This is a disgrace. And a disappointment. It’s sad. And you and I pay with our tax and TV licence money for the SABC. You do pay your TV licence, don’t you?

But even if you don’t, it’s not like Benjy can get together with the likes of Chris Prior, Neil Johnson, Phil Wright, Rafe Levine, Leon Economides, and David Blood and start a rock/blues/jazz/metal station of their own. You can’t get frequency without the government’s permission. The state-owned SABC sits on most of it, and has no incentive to use it more efficiently.

You also can’t get a broadcasting licence without the government’s permission, and the government decides “what the market can bear”. Since when? Why shouldn’t the market decide what the market can bear? I’d reckon there’s a pretty reasonable niche market for rock, and it’d do just fine, especially if you spice it with some blues and jazz. You’d reach a pretty diverse audience, too, from teenage rockers to old hippies who would have remembered the sixties if they hadn’t been there, from avant-garde black professionals to angry white metalheads, from alternative and goth chicks to midlife-crisis bikers. But if I’m wrong, or these people have no money to spend on advertised products, why shouldn’t a rock station be allowed to go bust if it turns out there’s no market for it?

Here’s the text of my own e-mail to Mr Mashigo:

The last time I felt driven to write to a radio station I had to use a fax machine, because e-mail wasn’t around. That was in 1993, to express my disgust that Radio 5 was firing Chris Prior, who at that time had by far the best rock show on radio. I still enjoy the home-made tapes I made of his features as a teenager. In fact, the bulk of my education in music is thanks to Chris Prior, yet the SABC unceremoniously dumped him.

Then Benjy Mudie picked up the baton with his excellent Rock of Ages show, introducing listeners to excellent music, both old and new, that simply doesn’t get airplay anywhere else.

Now I hear his show may be cancelled.

Because of our restrictive licencing regime, it simply isn’t possible to create new genre-based radio stations in the vein of Classic FM, which means that SABC Radio, as the public-service broadcaster, has a responsibility to cater for all needs and tastes not covered by commercial stations. It also has the resources to do so on a channel like Radio 2000, which is usually given over to sport commentary or simply anonymous auto-queued music (good though it often is).

Other than the occasional news and talk radio, I do not listen to any music radio other than Benjy’s excellent show. I feel like I belong, there. It would be a great shame were it to be taken off air. It would also be contrary to the SABC’s public service mandate, I suspect. Since I pay tax and TV licences, and a private rock station won’t get licenced in a month of Sundays, this is most distressing.

Let’s help Benjy get back on air. Thursday evenings won’t be the same without him. E-mail Mashigo now.

Update: Leon Economides, who used to present the Priority Feature with Chris Prior in the good old days, commented to point out where radio rock hides these days in South Africa. It’s like the late 1960s in the States. AM only. Groovy, and all that. Thanks, Leon.

Some things are not politically correct to say, so lots of stats are presented in support of rash generalisations that deny those things. Often, they’re contrived to support a pre-conceived argument, rather than constructed to shed light on the matter.

That the environment is not the biggest crisis of our time is one case in point, which I’ve discussed before. You’ll see plenty charts that show, for example, what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would look like on a map. Or how hurricanes have increased in frequency or intensity. A close look at the data, however, and you’ll see signs of contrivances, such as selecting end-points for data series to support the pre-conceived argument, or presenting speculative conclusions as factual data. And how the environment manages to recover from catastrophes — such as volcanoes, meteor strikes, earthquakes, nuclear testing — when it really is a fragile system, perched precariously atop an unstable equilibrium, and sensitive to every little belch and burp of human life, is left as an exercise for the reader. How humanity came to be so prosperous and well-fed if our production methods are so stupidly unsustainable, ditto.

But let’s look at a very different example. Let’s consider Microsoft’s success. It isn’t politically correct to suggest that the monster from Redmond occasionally makes smart business decisions. How it came to be a large, successful company that made more millionaires than most is left as an exercise for the reader. How a a billion PCs came to be installed around the world in 20 years, a majority of them running Microsoft’s terrible products, ditto.

Now granted, I’m not convinced that its bid for Yahoo! was a smart business decision. It smacks of desperation. It has spent ten years trying to find a revenue stream to which the Windows-and-Office cash baton can be passed, but no convincing candidate has yet appeared. In its search, it has a habit of buying up second-best players in a market segment, and then swamping them with Microsoft branding until they’re never heard from again. My own prediction on Microsoft is that ten years hence it will be known as a very good gaming company.

But take a look at this analysis, by Max Freiert, highlighted recently by the folks over at Junk Charts, who spend their lives debunking — often in the most entertaining fashion — statistics abuse by companies, governments and the media.

It shows this chart:

Then Freiert assigns value only to new customers, which makes the $45 billion deal appear like a valuation per customer of $1 200. This is patently ridiculous. But I suspect it is designed to look ridiculous from the outset. That’s why it does not take into account that Microsoft might derive additional value from customers in the overlap area, or might offer additional value to its own customers, and that these might all lead to higher revenue for Microsoft.

If we redo the calculation, but with the (equally arbitrary, but more realistic) assumption that Yahoo! customers who also use Microsoft properties are worth half as much as new customers who didn’t use Microsoft properties before, and customers who don’t use Yahoo! at all have no additional value at all, we get a per-customer valuation of less than $200. And if you postulate that the deal might result in the ability to offer new revenue-generating value to customers that didn’t use Yahoo! properties before, at the arbitrarily-selected rate of one-third of the value of new customers from Yahoo!, you get $150 per customer, overall. Does that sound more reasonable?

But what about the new customer numbers? Does the chart above really reflect visually how many new customers Microsoft gets? How small is that top slice really? The guys at Junk Charts, instead of mentally calculating the area as a reader is meant to do, simply recast the data as a bar chart, as a statistician might do. It’s not pretty, but it does make the point: actually the growth in customer numbers is pretty darn decent.

Here’s their reworked chart:

Check out the last line of the table in Freiert’s analysis, and you’ll see that his result is the same: new customer growth will be a substantial 31%. And if you look in the next column, you’ll see a 89% projected rise in page impressions. In fact, Freiert makes a big deal of this growth in Microsoft-owned traffic later in the analysis. But if only the new customers had any value, why the massive discrepancy? This merely confirms that assigning value only to those new customers is a ludicrous assumption, apparently designed to support a pre-conceived conclusion.

The growth in customer numbers is larger than Freiert’s pie chart suggests, and the actual price paid for potential new revenue is much, much lower than the $1 200 he puts in the headline. None of this shows that the Yahoo! acquisition really was a smart acquisition, but it does show that at least part of Freiert’s neatly contrived argument for why it may have been a daft acquisition holds no water.

It was a daft acquisition for other reasons. I could create a chart to prove it, but I fear you wouldn’t believe me.

No less an orator than president George W Bush of them great misunderestimated United States, trotted out this line in an address to the Economic Club of New York just now. He promised to strongly promote his free trade proposals, and spoke eloquently against isolationism and protectionism — sentiments that I, as a foreigner, cheer.

This raised a laugh:

It makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the US markets. It’s our money to begin with. It seems like we ought to let it back.

Proof that seven years of regular practice can make a moderately competent speaker out of anyone.

Every time another public-office sex scandal breaks, it’s the same tired old political fight. If it’s a Democrat, the Republicans demand that the sinner’s head rolls, and the Democrats call the Republicans partisan hypocrites. If it’s a Republican, the Democrats demand that the hypocrite’s head rolls, and the Republicans call the Democrats partisan opportunists.

So, who’s right in this political pickle and moral morass?

First, a warning. This post may contain generalisations. Generalisations are statements about groups that are often, but not always, true for individuals. Not all Republicans are moral conservatives, and not all moral conservatives are Republican. Likewise, not all Democrats are liberals, and not all liberals are Democrats. In my own case, as a classical liberal I largely share the modern liberal’s principles on morality. I believe in individual liberty. Within the boundaries of laws that protect such liberty, I think private behaviour is no business of the state, nor of or the public. There are exceptions, such as in cases of public officials breaking laws they swore to uphold, or exposing their offices to risks such as blackmail, but in general, what Paul does with his Peter is none of my concern.

Now, what about the liberal charge of conservative hypocrisy over morality?

The liberal left claims to be, well, liberal. It claims to tolerate just about anything in terms of private behaviour. Rightly, in my view, liberals say it’s none of the government’s or public’s business what goes on behind closed doors.

On the other side is the self-styled “moral majority”, who define morality in rather more narrow terms. They claim moral behaviour in private defines a person’s character, and therefore it is a prerequisite for public office.

Now when someone gets caught with his pants down the moral conservative simply says, “resign”. This is perfectly consistent with the conservative’s political position. With the liberal left it’s different, however. Their reaction depends not on their own objective principles, but on the subjective principles of the culprit. When a Democrat (like Bill Clinton) gets caught with his Peter where it doesn’t belong, they say it’s just a bit of hanky-panky and it’s not that serious. But when a Republican gets caught with his pants down, they’re all over it like a rash, if you’ll excuse the image. That’s when they accuse Republicans of hypocrisy.

But the Republicans aren’t being hypocritical at all. If you call something a sin, that doesn’t make you a hypocrite if you sin. It makes you a sinner. Declaring that you expect moral behaviour in yourself and others doesn’t make you an infallible saint. Frowning on moral failings doesn’t make you immune from those failings. Moral conservatives would be hypocrites if they didn’t apply their own standards of behaviour to their own politicians. But they do. They’re being perfectly consistent: they expect morality, and punish immorality.

By contrast, the supposedly liberal left are being hypocritical by applying different standards to different people. They would like everyone to apply their own liberal standards to their own people, but then apply standards they don’t even agree with to others. Why was Larry Craig, the Congressman with the suspiciously wide stance, excoriated by Democrats? Because Republicans consider what he did wrong, the Democrats hold his behaviour up as evidence of hypocrisy. Cue shrill schadenfreude. But those Democrats would be wrong. Craig’s actions were not evidence of conservative hypocrisy. He wasn’t above the standards he espouses. The moral conservatives didn’t let him get away with it because he’s Republican. He resigned, and that’s perfectly consistent with the morals he claims to uphold. It was their own reaction that was hypocritical. Shouldn’t liberals be defending his moral right to have anonymous sex with uniformed fellows in toilet stalls? Shouldn’t they apply their own standards of privacy and moral choice to everyone? Instead, he got mobbed for reasons of partisan hypocrisy.

On Eliot Spitzer, for example, a real liberal — whether classical or leftwing — would say what he does with his Peter is his own business, but he did break the law in the state of which he was governor, and he did lay his office wide open to blackmail. So he should resign on those grounds, as opposed to moral grounds. A moral conservative would be perfectly consistent by saying the filthy sinner must burn. That some moral conservatives don’t live up to their own standards does not make this position hypocritical.

Liberals would have a lot more credibility if they didn’t yell “hypocrisy” every time a moral conservative gets caught in an immoral position. Because by doing so, they betray their own hypocrisy instead.

I’ll admit, I’m one of those people who are thrilled to see the back of Eliot Spitzer, New York’s law unto himself. I’m just disappointed that his fall was prompted by a petty sex scandal.

Spitzer made a career out of screwing people he shouldn’t have screwed. But since he went around destroying the careers of high-profile people, often with no basis in fact, and with little more moral justification than the puerile principle that every Goliath must be wrong and every David right, I really would have preferred him being taken down by one of his victims, such as Hank Greenberg or Dick Grasso. I wish the victims of Spitzer the judge, Spitzer the jury and Spitzer the executioner, had been able to defend themselves against their inquisitor.

Problem is, he didn’t often bring those victims before a court, where his self-aggrandizing crusades might have faced rational, independent scrutiny. He preferred extortion and public humiliation as his weapons of choice. He preferred to denounce the heretics from his bully pulpit, and club them with the extraordinary legal powers he wielded.

Take Dick Grasso, for example, who got publicly humiliated with disclosures and insinuations that were none of Spitzer’s business. By all accounts, Grasso did a great job keeping the New York Stock Exchange competitive against both upstart competition and foreign stock exchanges. The NYSE’s board thought fit to pay him handsomely for those services. Yet for some reason, Spitzer thought he had a right to second-guess the NYSE’s own shareholders. He thought he had the moral justification to publicly challenge Grasso over his remuneration, using absurd arguments about the stock exchange’s culpability for the behaviour of listed companies, or worse, that the performance of a stock exchange should be judged on whether share prices rise or fall. If that’s what Spitzer really wanted, he should have nationalised stock markets and got it over with, rather than singling out apparently innocent executives to strong-arm.

Speaking of innocent, the case of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is even more blatant. Spitzer forced this long-serving head of an insurance company into a hasty resignation not by charging him in court, but by calling his actions illegal on television and threatening the company that employed him with indictment. If Greenberg had indeed broken the law, Spitzer’s duty was to charge and convict him in an independent court. It would have behooved him to do so without creating a media circus around it. But though he had been entrusted with the power to prosecute, Spitzer declined, preferring public insinuation as his billy-club. Last time I checked, falsely accusing someone of a crime on television constitutes defamation, not justice. As for the threat of indicting Greenberg’s employer, AIG, we know what such action can do to a company: Arthur Andersen was indicted, but was exonerated on appeal. By then, however, there was no company left to save. Justice delayed is justice denied, in such a case: indictment can be a death sentence for a company. It is an extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily blunt instrument. Use it judiciously, or not at all. Spitzer abused it to ruin the careers of people he had no intention of giving their day in court. If he wasn’t entirely false, but had made good on that threat, he would have robbed shareholders, destroyed jobs, reduced competition and punished policy-holders, just to feed his monumental ego and burnish his political stature as a supposed corruption buster. In his crusade against what he saw as corporate corruption, Spitzer came to epitomise the corruption of state power.

If he wants to screw around and hurt his family, that’s between him and his family. It’s reprehensible, but a man’s private moral failings are his own business. Granted, he was breaking New York law, and no person given a position of public trust should get away with doing so. Granted also that he exposed an office of public trust to the risk of blackmail and extortion, which is a grave offence. But still, it is an unsatisfying end to his career. He should have crashed and burned in one of the dogfights he picked with innocent high-fliers. That would have been justice served.

You can’t make this stuff up. From CNN International:

Follow the logic here:

The government will table draft legislation intended to regulate the private health sector, including private hospitals, within two months, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Wednesday.

“It is clear that we cannot sustain unregulated private health care service delivery in this country and at the same time regulate the medical schemes industry,” she told the National Assembly.

“We must therefore regulate the providers and the industry as a whole.”

Of course, once the industry as a whole is regulated, they’ll find that they cannot regulate the health industry and sustain unregulated medical supplies, cleaning services, labour, construction, equipment manufacturing or import… in fact, they cannot sustain unregulated anything.

All aboard? Next stop, central planning. Funeral services will be held in the dining car once a day and twice on Sundays.