The current rise in food prices is very, very dangerous. Not because food will be more expensive, but because chances are the government will intervene to prevent this.

The unions in South Africa have already called for a food price freeze. This merely serves to show that they didn’t bother paying attention in Economics 101. Nor bothered to witness the results of price controls in our neighbouring no-crisis zone, Zimbabwe. If you cap prices, you cause shortages. Simple. Fact. Nothing can change that except complete nationalisation of the entire supply chain, and even then, the difference will be made up from tax, so lower real incomes will keep the real price of food the same.

The danger is that there are enough communists, socialists, interventionists and developmental-statists in government that they might just listen to the unions. If only to pander to the population and avoid the counter-productive impact of strikes and riots.

A recent commentary by the grandiloquently named Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, picked up by the Wall Street Journal Asia, makes a good example of India. His conclusion is similar to mine, posted a few weeks ago:

India’s current food price problem isn’t a market failure. Rather, it’s a government failure to allow markets to work. The only sustainable solution is to pull back the subsidies and protections. But sustainability is the last thing on the minds of politicians competing to win the next election with ever-higher subsidies.

It’s a simple truism that in a free market, the solution to high prices is high prices. High prices drive prices down by stimulating production and discouraging unnecessary consumption. It is also true, however, that artificial costs and inefficiencies introduced into the supply chain by government intervention merely serve to perpetuate the supply-demand imbalance.

Our government should indeed take drastic action, by removing any and all regulations, subsidies, tariffs and other red tape from the agricultural sector. It should take drastic action to ensure that any pending land transfers are expedited (or cancelled) as quickly as possible, to prevent otherwise productive commercial farm land lying fallow. It should take drastic action to guarantee farmers — including new farmers on restitution or redistribution lands — gain full title to their property, so they can raise working capital by using their land and equipment as collateral. It should take drastic action to complete its long-overdue audit of state-owned land, and make suitable land available to emerging farmers and communities. And it would do well to take to heart the lessons Aiyar cites from India’s agricultural policy and its history of government intervention.

Everyone asks what government can do. Instead of acting innocent and blaming corporate collusion, this is what the government can do. This is positive action. This is taking the moral high ground. And it had better do these things quickly, or people might start thinking the unions actually have the right idea. I can think of no more dangerous result of food price inflation than that.

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.

Leon Jacobs alerted me to the hilarious story of a delusional nut named Mark Boyle.

Boyle used to run an organic food company, until he sampled too much of his own merchandise and decided the world should do away with money. Presumably, the owners of the organic food company disagreed. So now Boyle is on a pilgrimage.

Travelling under the name “Saoirse”, which means “freedom” in Gaelic, Boyle won’t stoop to dirtying his hands with grubby money. Instead, he decided to travel the world on foot, subsisting only on peace and love. (And, presumably, a way to blog about it.) His intended destination was Mahatma Ghandi’s birthplace, in India.

Tushar Kanna, an Indian who commented on his blog was rather skeptical of this pilgrimage: “I really dunno what kind of haloed idea of India you have. … I feel if you want to explore India, board onto the next flight to take an enriching experience back home. The country as such is fantastic — a treasure trove of cultures bound to create a single nation. But if you just want to experience poverty, I’d recommend you to rather serve in the slums of Kolkata or Mumbai. Man, you’re really wasting two precious years of your life. … when I told my friends about you in school they passed it off as a story of a crazy foreigner with nothing else to do.”

You can see where this is going, can’t you? Hint: it’s not India. He got as far as Calais before the universe, in which he had placed his trust, told him not to be so daft. That’s where he discovered not only that the French have the audacity of speaking French, but that they don’t particularly like jobless, homeless backpackers, freeloading in their country. Oh, sorry. Calling him a “freeloader” is “harmful to the cause“, it’s unfair, and it’s the exact opposite of “accepting the gifts of the universe”. (By which he means getting some sap to buy him a ferry ticket, and giving him her daughter.)

Not only did the French speak French, but they didn’t much care to trade food for his valuable friendship. Worse, his offers of labour didn’t sell very well in a socialist republic where employment has been curtailed by decades of dirigisme and rigueur, which regulated and protected the unemployment rate until… well, let’s just say France stopped publishing an official unemployment rate.

So Boyle and his buddies made “a really brave decision — to go home”. What poor Britain doesn’t have to put up with. Boyle will now walk around his native country, learning French. Not that I can see why, if the French didn’t like him speaking English (and sleeping in their toilets), the average resident of English seaside towns will love him speaking French. Besides, they don’t speak French in Italy, Turkey, Iran and India, so this is going to be one long tour.

Illustrating the depth of this idiot’s delusion is his comment on a group of Ethiopian refugees he found in France. Apparently, his message about the moneyless life doesn’t apply to people who don’t have money. Especially not when they’re Ethiopians escaping “from Iraq and Afghanistan”. This level of geographic confusion doesn’t bode well for his hope that the next time he hits the road he’ll be more attuned to local culture. Let alone being more attuned to human nature.

Moral of the story? Lay off the organic nuts, lest you become one.

The electricity supply crisis that has South Africa’s economy in a mortal grip has been predicted for years. Though these pessimists had only basic arithmetic, elementary economics and common sense as qualifications, they can today claim vindication. That years of regular blackouts and would be this country’s lot, however, was known both within and without Eskom since at least the mid-1990s. If our central planners had analysed things closely, assuming only moderate economic success post-1994, they could have foreseen this even in the 1980s. Doesn’t “power rationing” sound awfully communist?

In many ways, the crisis caught South Africans completely unprepared. In early January, I wrote a column dismissing low-wattage fluorescent light bulbs as an ineffectual and expensive eco-fetish, and that even if some people prefer them, governments should not force such a choice on consumers by doing something stupid like banning incandescents. That column now appears spectacularly ill-timed. Even if the arguments remain valid (which they do), they’re rather beside the point now. I had not considered a catastrophic failure to meet electricity demand very likely. In short, I was too optimistic about the promises and competence of the government. I was naïvely willing to believe the repeated lies we were told by the Eskom fat cats and government bureaucrats that they had things under control.

The government failed its citizens in the most irresponsible, negligent and incompetent manner possible. Eskom directors got paid millions in “performance” bonuses. The shareholder that employs them — government — seems to think telling the media now and again that there is no crisis constitutes due performance.

The shortage of electricity, even if it turns out to be mild in the long run, has the potential to cause extremely grave consequences for economic growth, job creation, poverty reduction, price inflation, small-business survival, and investor confidence both here and overseas. Everyone except the idiots who caused the crisis says so.

Yet nobody has been fired. Our politicians didn’t even feel it necessary to shift the blame by some token dismissals of powerless and innocent underlings. They seem to think that saying sorry will make everything alright.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Indian Tata group has unveiled the Nano, an aptly-named new car that will sell for just R17 500 (Rp100 000, or $2 550), not counting taxes and import duties. MyBroadband carries the AFP story — presumably because the Indian Tata conglomerate is heavily invested in South Africa, including in its telecoms sector — and has a picture, reproduced alongside.

Horrid, innit? But hey, it’s transport. And cheap transport at that. For the price, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a ten-year-old wreck in South Africa.

One would think that such a bold competitive move, bringing prices down and promising to improve the quality of life, employment opportunities and business prospects of millions of people who previously couldn’t afford the luxury of a motor vehicle, would be hailed as tremendous news. You’d think it would be held up as a symbol that free enterprise can yield success not only in the rich west, but also in the emerging markets of the south and east.

No. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, which jointly won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is “having nightmares” about the prospect of a low-cost car for the masses. Despite the fact that the car has a tiny engine, meets emissions standards, has a claimed fuel efficiency number well ahead of even the smug hybrids of the rich, he is among the critics who reckon it can only contribute to noise and air pollution, and therefore it’s a bad thing. Better to keep cars expensive, so only the rich get to pollute the planet.

There, with one simple phrase, Pachauri betrays the nightmarish aim of the environmentalists. The sanctimonious elite seek to bar progress, and their anti-prosperity goals are aimed not only at the extravagant rich, but also at the ambitious poor, who are still climbing the ladder of rising prosperity and quality of life purchased by rising production and economic development. Can’t have the natives driving cars, now can we?

What people like Pachauri fail to realise is that prosperous people have the means and motive to do something about pollution and environmental quality. By keeping the poor pinned underfoot, all the self-proclaimed “socially conscious” set do is ensure that the poor will have higher priorities than being nice to the planet for the sake of the rich. All they will do is make sure the poor won’t have the means to protect themselves against the natural changes and disasters that are an inevitable part of living on this active planet of ours.

If the madder branches of the Cult of Gaia resemble suicide sects, the remainder appears to be into human sacrifice.

This editorial makes a good point about the opposition of green groups to the climate agreement the White House favours, which prioritises economic development and quality of life standards, and insists on including China and India, two of the world’s four biggest CO₂ emitters, in any deal.

In a sense, [US president George W] Bush and [Australian prime minister John] Howard are calling the bluff of global warming alarmists by insisting that China and India be included in any emissions-reduction effort. They know the enviro-activists’ ultimate goal is not what the green lobby and complicit media have been selling to the public, but rather a crippling of thriving capitalist economies. Braying at a plan that insists on China’s and/or India’s participation exposes their real objective: punishing success.

China and India are by far the world’s worst large polluters, in terms of emissions as a function of economic output. This is the only sensible way to measure it, since it can be justified only in terms of economic benefit. No amount of pollution is a justifiable cost without a commensurate economic benefit. That makes it all the more reasonable for the US and Australia to insist that China and India contribute to any efforts to curb emissions.

Environmentalists accuse Bush and Howard of being disingenuous, and they have a point. The two know full well that global warming is hogwash, yet they support the greens’ measures for large-scale human interference with the fragile, ineffable mystery of life on earth.

But the real reason they’re wrong is far more serious. The leaders also understand that environmental activists are driven by an underlying anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist guilt complex. That their eco-demands will not so much clean up the environment as harm productive countries and curtail economic progress. But if that is true, why argue that green measures should be extended to China and India, two relatively poor countries that have yet to enjoy the full benefits of industrialisation and development? After all, prosperity is how countries earn quality of life, liberty and leisure. Prosperity produces the means to achieve a clean, healthy, enjoyable and productive environment. To solve the problems, including pollution, requires creating wealth, not destroying it.

It is true that successful countries shouldn’t be singled out for attempts to hobble their economies in the name of environmentalism. But Bush and Howard should be arguing against the misguided efforts by greens, not in favour of meting out eco-whippings equally. They should argue against hindering progress, instead of arguing in favour of hindering everyone equally.