I thought that headline would grab some attention. It is entirely justified by the ITWeb column on internet pornography censorship above which it appears, methinks: I love my pussy.

Here’s a great little piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker, the editor of Mises.org, on the delusional and self-serving habit of politicians, journalists and dinner party guests to declare that this or that price movement is a problem, or worse, that it is “unfair”.

I’ll extract the most salient sections from the article:

What kind of theory of the world insists that houses and stocks always go up in price, whereas gas and grain prices always go down? That doesn’t really make sense. A price is not set by natural law, nor are price movements intended to follow a preset pattern like the movements of stars. Prices are nothing but exchange ratios — points of agreement between buyer and seller. They reflect many factors, none of them fixed parts of the universe.

So why do we expect some to rise and some to fall? It all depends on whether you are in the position of a producer or a consumer. As homeowners, we are in fact “producers” of our homes; that is to say, we are holding them with the expectation of someday offering them for sale. The same is true of our stocks. We already own them, so of course we want the price to go up. Then we can sell them at a profit.

On the other hand, on things we intend to buy, things like gas and grain, we want the price to be as low as possible. We want their prices to fall. That way we save resources.

So what’s at work here is self-interest. Think of the same situation from the point of view of someone who is a first-time homebuyer. Does this person want high prices or low prices? Of course the answer is obvious. This person wants the lowest price possible, so for this person this “housing bust” is not a bust at all. It is a boon. But once this person becomes a homeowner, matters change. Now he wants prices to rise.

Now think of the gas station owner. If it didn’t affect how much he sold, would this person want prices to rise or fall? Of course, he wants the highest prices possible.

[…]

It’s the same in all markets. We can see that it is perfectly absurd to attempt to fashion national policy around the interests of only one party to an exchange. To try to keep house prices high and rising cheats the first-time buyer. To keep them low cheats the current owner. To keep grain prices high helps grain producers but hurts grain consumers. Some gas companies might like high gas prices, but consumers hate them. On the other hand, gas prices forced lower by dictate might thrill consumers but producers might end up hurting so much that they shut down. That helps no one.

[…]

There is no way to observe an existing price and declare it just or unjust. As St. Bernardino — a shrewd observer of economic affairs — said,

Water is usually cheap where it is abundant. But it can happen that on a mountain or in another place, water is scarce, not abundant. It may well happen that water is more highly esteemed than gold, because gold is more abundant in this place than water.

The Late Scholastics, followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, all agreed that the just price has no fixed position. It all depends on the common estimation of traders. Luis de Molina summed up the point:

A price is considered just or unjust not because of the nature of the things themselves — this would lead us to value them according to their nobility or perfection — but due to their ability to serve human utility. But this is the way in which they are appreciated by men, they therefore command a price in the market and in exchanges.

[…]

Now, there are ways for a price to become a matter of injustice. It can mask fraud. The prices can result from or be influenced by some act of force, such as price controls or taxation or restrictions on supply and demand. Behind each of these, we find coercion, a body of people who are mandating or restricting in a way that is incompatible with free choice. Arguably, this is not just.

We can conclude, then, that to the extent we complain about unjust gasoline prices, we need to look at the restrictions on refineries or exploration or drilling, or examine the role that high gas taxes have in pushing up prices beyond what they would be under conditions of free exchange.

And as for those who believe that all prices should move in ways that benefit their own particular economic interests at the expense of everyone else, don’t confuse your agenda with a matter of justice. […]

This article makes a nice introduction for the coming week’s project: poking holes in last week’s Financial Mail cover story, Spillover: SA’s response to soaring global oil prices.

The last fortnight has seen a disgusting display of inhumanity, targeted against foreigners living in South Africa. Whether or not they’re illegal, whether or not they’re fleeing repression in Zimbabwe, whether or not they have jobs, local scum who think they’re superior have attacked anyone who is not like them, in the most brutal fashion. Our streets resemble the worst days of apartheid, and the pogroms continue.

We should be ashamed.

That foreigners flock to South Africa is a compliment. Do we really want the sort of country that isn’t attractive to foreigners? Perhaps one in which the government has to fence people in? After the decades of succour foreign countries gave our liberation leaders, are we returning the favour by slaughtering them like animals?

The problem is deep. Much of it is appears to be simple tribalism, racism and xenophobia, yes. But that’s not the cause. The cause is two-fold: the failure of government to improve the lot of our own people, and a widespread misunderstanding of the economic issues raised by immigration.

Foreigners strengthen a country. Yes, there are criminals among them, who steal out of need or opportunity. But the majority — even the poor, the jobless and the refugees — on balance contribute to an economy over time. They’d have to, or they’d starve. The notion that they “steal jobs” is mistaken. They do take jobs, yes, but every new job created adds more value to the economy than it costs. They contribute to production, and to consumption, and as a result create new jobs in turn.

Many foreigners, both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, have become successful business people. They’re often entrepreneurs who create companies (and jobs) that locals haven’t created, to supply products or services locals haven’t (or won’t) supply. Obviously, they do compete against South African workers and businesses, but if they do so successfully, one has to ask why every consumer should pay the price for a local’s inefficiency or rapaciousness. Protectionism might help the protected, but it does so at a heavy price to consumers. Is it really fair to expect our people — many of whom are themselves poor — to subsidise inefficiency in the name of nationalism?

The most notable example of success that rests heavily on free immigration is the United States. It grew strong and prosperous on the hard work, the energy, and the entrepreneurism of immigrants. It didn’t let in only “skilled” immigrants. It recognised that free people, working for themselves in free markets, develop skills. That free people create prosperity and an economic vitality that is both deep and wide, and reaches far beyond just the immigrant communities themselves.

We demanded our freedom, and celebrated it when it was won, yet we refuse to grant others the same freedom? Why protest the pass laws, but demand that our borders be closed? Why ignore the biggest benefit of liberty: the ability to prosper without the dead hand of government holding us down?

True, immigration has its problems. Most notably, it’s a problem in welfare states. When taxpayers cough up to support people without the means to support themselves, it stands to reason that they don’t want bums arriving who leech off the system. This is the reason why modern America is no longer as welcoming as it once was, and why European countries have even bigger immigration problems. The problem isn’t immigration, it’s economic policy at home.

The obvious solution is simply not to offer foreigners any welfare beyond what the common decency of a civilised country requires. An even better solution is not to delude ourselves that a welfare state is a good idea in the first place. It sounds nice, but it is counter-productive. Let people invest their capital and spend their money as they see fit. Income is, after all, the incentive to be productive, so letting people keep their income seems smart if productivity and economic growth is what you’re after. Capitalism isn’t what makes people poor. You can’t sell stuff to poor people. What makes people poor is when free economic activity is strangled by state control. When markets are prevented from thriving unencumbered by regulation. When government discourages or even bans individuals from seeking profitable and sustainable ways to offer other people the things they need or want.

Liberation shouldn’t be a halfway measure. If liberation is to mean anything, it should carry both its political and economic meaning. Letting free people engage in free markets is how you create a wealthy, job-creating economy — something our government has singularly failed to do. For all its stated intentions and campaign slogans, it has not created jobs. It has not delivered a better life for all. And that’s not because of an “implementation crisis”. It’s because of a policy crisis. It’s because it cannot deliver a better life for all, even if it wanted to. All a government can deliver is the justice and liberty that permits each of us to pursue our own better life, however we define it.

Our economic growth lags even the global average, let alone the growth of other emerging markets. Our government takes almost a third of our GDP in taxes, yet what have ordinary South Africans received for this sacrifice? Very little indeed. No wonder they’re angry.

But making scapegoats of foreigners is misdirected anger. If the government seems reluctant to say so clearly, it is only because it knows the anger should really be directed at the socialist policies, the bureaucratic incompetence and the crony corruption of the ruling ANC. It deserves a great deal of credit for liberating our people. However, as a government, the ANC has failed the people.

We should recognise that economics, job creation and prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Every participant in our economy on average produces more than he consumes. Therefore, we should welcome every participant in our economy, because their work makes all of us more prosperous. Their work delivers the services and goods that make all of us better off. A government can’t make a better life for all, but people can. Where they’re from is immaterial.

Our government has not only failed the people, but it has failed even to speak up against the oppression on our doorstep. The result? Many of the victims of Zimbabwe’s tyrant now need the safety of our country, as many of our own people once needed the safety of theirs. We should take them in. We owe it to them.

Taking our anger at government failures out on foreigners is misguided and counter-productive. It not only hurts our own prosperity and progress, but how is it different from the white redneck who went and shot hisself some kaffirs in Skielik? Or the scum that degraded black staff at their university? Do we all want to be like that? How can we condemn those acts, or blame people for calling us racists and violent third-world savages, when all they see on TV is racism and violent third-world savagery?

We, of all people, should welcome immigrants. We should thank them for thinking our country worth making a new life in. We are the rainbow nation. Or aren’t we?

PS. Tomorrow, Saturday 24 May, a march will be held in Johannesburg to protest the rising xenophobia in South Africa. Despite the participation of many confused socialists who misunderstand the economics of free immigration but instinctively realise this wave of violence is evil, this march is worth supporting. I will be there, marching for the first time since the liberation of South Africa. Join us. Meet at Marks Park, on Empire Road, near Hillbrow, at 9 am. From there, we’ll head to the Library Gardens, via the Department of Home Affairs.

David Bullard has been fired by the Sunday Times. Ostensibly, it was over last Sunday’s column, in which he envisioned what South Africa would look like had it not been colonised by the Dutch and the English. His vision isn’t exactly complimentary.

The column is condescending at best, and probably racist. But so what? It stokes debate, and that debate should not be about freedom of speech.

Before I talk about that debate, the obvious question is why fire Bullard for being offensive now? Hadn’t the Sunday Times’s editor, Mondli Makhanya, read him before? Doesn’t an editor who once bravely put “Manto: a drunk and a thief” on the front page agree with Salman Rushdie that without the freedom to offend, freedom of speech ceases to exist? Maybe he does. But Bullard made the fatal mistake of offending his paymasters. For that, of course, they have every right to tell him to sod off and exercise his freedom of speech elsewhere.

Except that his paymasters deny that’s why they’re firing him. Makhanya says his 19th century views are unacceptable in the newspaper. Yet Bullard has been cultivating that persona in the very same newspaper for years. He unapologetically trades on his arrogance, his Victorian superciliousness, and his ability to provoke outrage. If he steps over lines, it’s because with his dandy sartorial style, his whisky-drinking tastes and his cigar-smoking condescension, he consciously — and self-consciously — stations himself above arbitrary lines drawn by the hoi polloi.

It is certainly not the first time Bullard has been racist or offensive. Why didn’t he get fired before? The only other possibility that springs to mind is that the political class strongarmed the newspaper by threatening to pull advertising. That is, of course, their right, but it would genuinely surprise me if Makhanya, who stood firm in the face of far heavier political pressure caved over something as inconsequential as a column by a known stirrer. My bet is Makhanya was just waiting for an excuse to fire Bullard after the latter’s scathing attack on his bosses in the recently-launched media magazine Empire — an attack he has exploited on several public occasions to arouse shock and mirth. Sarah Britten speculates along the same lines, and reckons his axing can only be good for Empire. Bullard himself agrees. (I share Britten’s wish that Empire would get around to discovering these newfangled intarweb tube things. On the other hand, we all know what Bullard thinks of the internet. And in the interest of full disclosure: I too write for Empire.)

For my part, I agree with Rushdie. If Bullard’s column is racist, or offensive, or contains 19th century views, so what? You’re free to disagree. In fact, it’s far better for racism to be declared openly and discussed freely than to be suppressed. Just because it’s taboo in public discourse doesn’t mean it’s not flourishing in pub discourse. Or should that read “festering”?

What will get lost in the noise is the debate Bullard appeared to be trying to stir. Not very well, in my view. He expressed the argument in an offensive, condescending way, but there is a valid debate to be had about the modern tendency to dismiss colonialism as mere racist oppression and exploitation. It definitely was, in many cases, mercenary and ruthless. The degree of depravity differed from one colonialist to the next, and the English were far from the worst.

Many writers take the line that colonialism in India, for example, had substantial benefits, in addition to the well-known drawbacks and injustices. Those writers are not only Western apologists for racist oppression, but also Indian economists, historians, and prominent politicians, writing about their own country. For all the harm colonialism did, they argue, it also brought with it civil institutions and infrastructure. India can thank Britain, they say, for its liberal education, modern jurisprudence, and functioning civil service bureaucracy. Once liberated, it was on these institutions that economic progress could be built.

Reasonable arguments can be made on both sides of this issue. As Bullard shows, the same goes for unreasonable arguments. But that his column was grating and offensive does not mean it’s not a debate worth stirring. Yes, it means suspending conventions about what is politically correct. It means challenging well-established orthodox thinking on issues of history. It means treading sensitively around, and not being over-sensitive to, issues of race and oppression. It means rejecting the victim complex to which Bullard refers in his final paragraph, as well as the instinctive slam-dunk defense offered by perceptions of racism. But is it a debate worth suppressing?

I don’t think so. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, once expressed the 19th-century view that “[t]hose who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

It appears that view is also too 19th-century for Mondli Makhanya’s Sunday Times.

Update at 21:00 on 11 April 2008: If you’re interested in David Bullard’s columns, I hope you have bookmarks. Because you aren’t going to find them — not even previously published ones — at The Times website. They appear to have been orphaned. They still exist. For now. The link to his column in the copy above still works, and so do the links from that page, but without an article ID number, David Bullard is just a bad memory for the Sunday Times.

Update at 22:00 on 11 April 2008: Bullard responds, inserted in the copy above.

Update at 13:00 on 12 April 2008: The Saturday Star was quick to exploit this competitive opportunity, and published a page three article on Bullard in today’s first edition. It isn’t yet available online, but an image of the page is here. In it, he is quoted as saying that the column was merely an excuse for Makhanya to get rid of him, after he refused to apologise for claiming, in his Empire column that standards at the Sunday Times and other Avusa publications were in decline. After all, he says, his brief was to be “controversial” and “outrageous” and “to upset people” on a Sunday. “I was found guilty in the kangaroo court of Mondli Makhanya,” the piece quotes. Marvellously in character, he is pictured in a flashy pin-stripe suit and tie at the opulent Rand Club. “Wait until you see the next article in Empire,” he promises, “because now I don’t have to hold back at all.”

Update at 12:00 on 13 April 2008: Prompted by my response to Dawn in the comments section, I posted a short follow-up piece on the debate I believe Bullard was trying to stir: In defence of colonialism.

Update at 15:00 on 13 April 2008: Bullard’s Empire column, along with a full complimentary issue, has been published online. I noted it here. The direct link to his column is here.

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.

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

The threat from Essop Pahad, the “minister in the presidency” of South Africa, to withdraw advertising from the Sunday Times over the paper’s coverage of the theft conviction, alleged drunken misbehaviour, and abuse of power by Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister, is “dangerous, dangerous, dangerous”.

So says Anton Harber, the go-to man at Wits University for all matters journalism, in a column that sets out clearly why such a threat — which appears not to be empty rhetoric — would constitute “bad governance, an abuse of public trust and perhaps even corruption”.

They should be slapped down as fast as anyone else actively promoting the abuse of the state coffers in pursuit of their political agendas.

Other publishers and media owners might be tempted to rub their hands with glee at the prospect of this approximately R150-million being dispersed among the Time’s rival publications. If they do, they will be displaying an extraordinary shortsightedness.

To allow the government to use their expenditure to punish those they disapproved of and reward those they like would be to had them a powerful weapon to use against their critics. This month it may be the Sunday Times, but if it proves effective then you can be sure that it will be used against others. It means that publishers and broadcasters will have to think twice every time you do something which might find disfavour with the presidency, such as questioning the use of beetroot rather than antiretrovirals, or pointing to the poor conditions in your local hospital’s maternity wards.

It would be a matter of time before such a weapon was used against those who did no more than give favourable coverage to the wrong faction of the ruling party.

Well said. The threats to media freedom are mounting. President Thabo Mbeki regularly uses his bully pulpit to castigate what he believes to be irresponsible, inaccurate or unpatriotic reporting, usually in response to criticism of the policies of the ruling party, or the actions of the executive. Like anyone else, he’s entitled to his opinions, but a president should use his status and power judiciously. When a head of government publicly denunciates the very institutions that exist to protect the people from their government, this has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

When that same government threatens to use the prodigious power of public money against the media, this too has a chilling effect on press freedom. Not to mention that it’s your and my money, taken from us by legal force with the promise to use it for the benefit, not to the detriment, of the people.

Thomas Jefferson put it this way: “I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.”

That’s exactly what the ANC government is doing.

But they’re lying, the politicians might (and do) say. Again, Jefferson, who himself suffered greatly, both personally and as president, from the very press whose freedom he defended, responds: “The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.”

A free press can be good or bad, but without freedom it can only be bad.

“The press is a machine, it doesn’t have any freedom. Freedom belongs to the people, they have a right to make choices.” — Dali Mpofu, CEO of the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, quoted in the Mail & Guardian.

More funnies in the same story, from Snuki Zikalala i’Afrika, the government spin-doctor turned SABC news director who has undisclosed information on the dipso klepto health minister that differs from everyone else’s, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, the presidential hagiographer who thinks journalists harbour subversive fantasies involving baked beans and trespassing on the body of said minister.

Watching the news reports about Burma (now called Myanmar by the military junta) in the last couple of days made me ashamed to be a citizen of a country that voted, six months ago, against a UN Security Council resolution that would have:

…urged the Government of Myanmar to release all political prisoners and make tangible progress towards national reconciliation, leading to genuine democratic transition; It called on the Government of Myanmar to cease military attacks against civilian in ethnic minority regions and in particular to put an end to the associated human rights and humanitarian law violations against persons belonging to ethnic nationalities, including widespread rape and other forms of sexual violence carried out by members of the armed forces.

Why did South Africa do this? Because of some procedural rubbish about which of the damn Useless Natterers committees could “better handle” the matter. Here you go, folks. Here’s how the matter is “better handled”:

Ask this chap, he’ll tell you:

I wonder, sometimes, why on earth South Africans rose up against an oppressive regime. Why they faced ostracism, teargas, bullets or torture in their demand for freedom and democracy. Have we forgotten so soon what it was all about? How can South Africa, of all countries, hide behind procedural technicalities in their craven demurral from even token pressure on the violent oppressors of Burma?

These are stains not on the pavement, but on our national character:

It makes me sick.

(Images courtesy of Ko Htike, a Burmese blogger who deserves a medal.)

The annual Economic Freedom of the World index for 2007 has been published. Zimbabwe isn’t exactly a winner, but South Africa’s performance is merely average. According to the report:

The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property. Forty-two data points are used to construct a summary index and to measure the degree of economic freedom in five broad areas: (1) size of government; (2) legal structure and security of property rights; (3) access to sound money; (4) freedom to trade internationally; and (5) regulation of credit, labor and business. This year’s index includes a number of new components based on the World Bank’s Doing Business ratings.

South Africa’s score rose slightly, but it slipped to 60^th in the rankings, from 54^th in 2006 and 36^th in 2005, as other countries overtook it and new countries with higher scores were included among the 141 evaluated. The report is copublished by the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute in Canada and more than 70 think tanks around the world.

The Free Market Foundation (FMF) launched the report at separate events in Johannesburg and Cape Town today. I was unable to attend, but the organisation’s executive director, Leon Louw, said in a statement:

After impressive gains from greater political and economic freedom achieved in and after 1994, SA’s overall economic freedom score has stagnated during recent years, although there have been significant changes in individual components in the index.

This year’s report notes that economic freedom remains on the rise, and also confirms that it is contagious — albeit not as highly as some would like to think. “Countries ‘catch’ about 20% of their average geographic neighbors’ and trading partners’ levels of, and changes in, economic freedom,” argue the authors, Russell S. Sobel of West Virginia University and Peter T. Leeson of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. According to the announcement:

The average economic freedom score rose from 5.1 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.6 in the most recent year for which data are available. Of the 102 nations with scores in 1980 and in the most recent index, 90 recorded improvements in their economic freedom score, and just nine saw a decline. In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom, 8.9 out of 10, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Zimbabwe, which isn’t a failed state according to its ambassador to the US, is ranked dead last, behind Myanmar. “[Prosperity, security, freedom and life expectancy] are part of a fundamental base needed to build a free and prosperous nation. A quick glance at the countries scoring lowest on the index quickly shows that without economic freedom, especially protection of property rights and the rule of law, there is little individual freedom and little in the way of prosperity,” said Temba Nolutshungu, Cape Town director of the FMF.

South Africa’s scores in each category changed as follows:

• Size of government: remained unchanged at 5.5.
• Legal structures and security of property rights: improved from 6.6 to 7.0.
• Access to sound money: declined from 8.2 to 8.0.
• Freedom to trade internationally: declined from 6.9 to 6.6.
• Regulation of credit, labour and business: improved from 6.4 to 6.8.

The full report is available from the Cato Institute or the Fraser Institute. Eustace Davie, a director at the FMF, discusses the report in an article of the week. Because this link may not last, I’ll reproduce the full text below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pity the farmer in a bureaucratic state who spends his every waking hour stepping in steaming piles of regulation and law. Joel Salatin is just such a man. He writes:

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

I should note that I disagree with four out of every five words on the web site that hosts this piece. In fact, the only words I won’t quibble with are “are” and “and”.

The site, mindfully.org, is a eco-leftists fever swamp, though it seems to have been abandoned now. It defends, for example, a precautionary principle that logically precludes its own application. It also notes with glee that Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was found guilty of “scientific dishonesty” by the Orwellian-sounding “Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty”. It fails to note that a superior authority cleared Lømborg, directing a scathing rebuke at the Committee about the lack of evidence it presented, its failure to even refer to Lømborg’s own text to establish the facts in the case, its use solely of published criticisms by others of Lømborg’s work, and its use of “condescending and emotional” language. It fails to note other studies which similarly found that the criticism of Lømborg was largely unsubstantiated and constituted an abuse of authority on the part of the Danish commission. A review in the Journal of Information Ethics found: “The inevitable overall impression of the debate is, not that Lomborg has deliberately been twisting arguments, but many of his opponents have. This is somewhat more than embarrassing.”¹ This indicates a deliberate bias on the part of mindfully.org. Some of the other material on the site borders on tinfoil-hat paranoia, and might present a problem for the authors if the men in white coats were to come across it.

With that disclaimer, do read the farmer’s lament. It offers a disturbing insight into what happens — even to citizens like Salatin who in principle fully agree — when governments use law and regulation to enforce on a powerless population its own politically-correct notions about food, health and living.

1. For more details, see A Critical Consideration… by Arthur Rörsch (inexplicably in Microsoft Word format) and When Scientists Politicize Science by Roger A. Pielke Jr. (in PDF). [↩]

I often say, in connection with issues such as foreign aid, state subsidies, or celebrities stumping for Africa, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions alone do not justify policy. The consequences of policy are what matters.

This observation cuts both ways, however. This editorial by Gregory Clark, author of Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, uses the same aphorism, and then, ironically, proceeds to illustrate the point.

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