Errol Braithwaite, the marketing executive at Bombela, accuses me of factual inaccuracy, sloppy journalism, and failing to meet minimum standards of professionalism. I politely demurred. I had quoted him in my Gautrain column last month, and spent a great deal of time answering each of his criticisms. Eventually, it seemed a better idea to let readers decide for themselves. A commenter suggested an even better headline might have been Gautrain Gauleiter, but I went with: Bombastic Bombela balks. Do click through to the full transcript for the full effect.

I took the time to read the entire list of Gautrain rules. These aren’t just niceties. They have the full force of law, except that they’re enforced not by police, but by Gautrain officials. And these two-bit officials can ruin your credit record if you fail to pay a massive fine for chewing gum. Read more: Gautrain has a law unto itself

In Joburg, it’s that time of year again. The cyclists invaded, took over the city, banned everyone else from the road, and had their private lycra-fetish party. Here’s what I think of that.

The laws about seat belts and motorcycle helmets are a direct infringement on your liberty by an overweening nanny state. This week’s column in The Daily Maverick stirred up a great deal of emotional response: Away with fascist seatbelt laws.

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.

After a conversation with me about an (ironically) unpublished column of mine, Phillip de Wet wrote what amounted to a reply, which was published here. I wrote the column early in March, before the Equality Court judgement involving Julius Malema. I wholeheartedly agree with the newly appointed Sunday Times editor, Ray Hartley, on that ruling: Hate speech ruling against Malema a blow to free expression.

Since his column was, in effect, a response, I thought it worth publishing my original column here. Is it provocative? Yes. Will it rile up people who don’t read past the headline? Probably. Does it condone hate speech? Not at all. But there’s a long way between disapproving of speech and asking the government to ban it.

Why Holocaust denial should be legal

Because an ideal, a thought, once caused the Holocaust, and remains deeply offensive to all reasonable people, expressing it is now illegal. This is dangerous.

Laws against hate speech rob a society of essential liberty. If offensive speech is not protected, what is the point of protecting speech at all? Who needs protection for speech with which everyone agrees?

Take, for example, laws that forbid what is known as “holocaust denial”. This takes many forms, from questioning the numbers of deaths in Nazi death camps, to denying that the Nazis did anything wrong at all.

Such ideas are, by all accounts, factually wrong. Moreover, they are deeply offensive not only to survivors of the Holocaust, but to all reasonable people who despise oppression and murder. Despite their offensive nature, however, expressing them should be legal.

Let’s consider some more cases.

Even if you overlook the suffering of poverty and starvation, and count only direct deaths resulting from incarceration, torture, and executions, Stalin killed more people than Hitler did. One does not have to have suffered under the yoke of Stalinism to consider the communist ideology that drove him reprehensible and dangerous. Stalin was not an anomaly who misunderstood communism. History has shown time and again that if you impose a system in which people are required to work for the benefit of others, the only logical consequence must be coercion, imposed by state violence. Dictatorship and revolutionary “purges” are natural consequences of the communist ideal.

Would you ban communism?

Some people believe that lesbianism is a deviant condition which can be “cured” by introducing misguided souls to intercourse with men. As a consequence, women get raped just for being lesbian. This crime is truly awful. It is more than just discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It violates every standard of decency. The crime should be punished severely by society.

However, should it be illegal to express the deluded opinion that encourages the crime?

Some people believe that their religion is the only true religion, and that their god has commanded them to convert others, by force if necessary. Non-believers who refuse to repent and follow religious strictures may be punished by ostracism or even death. This view is current in parts of the Muslim world, and is not unknown to history in other religions either. Remember the fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, fanatical devotion to the pope, and all the other attributes of the Spanish Inquisition.

Should the state ban Christianity? Islam?

Blasphemy is deeply offensive to many millions of people. It has been criminalised in many societies throughout history, and even into modern times.

Should blasphemy be a crime? And if religious doctrine holds that the Earth is the centre of the universe and man was created from dust, should we declare our Galileos and our Darwins to be blasphemous for expressing unpopular and offensive ideas?

Many people would be inconsistent in their answers to these questions. This raises the question: is there a line where freedom of expression ends, and criminal speech begins?

I could not draw such a line. Could you? Can anyone?

Is advocacy of violence a bad thing? Well, that depends. Is it wrong to denounce religion in general, or a particular manifestation of it? Is it wrong to preach a religion when some consider it to be intolerant, backward, offensive or outright dangerous? Is it wrong to claim homosexuality is sinful, a physical or psychological deviance, when your perfectly legal religion says it is? Is it wrong to advocate communism or socialism? Is it wrong to denounce fascism? Or to advocate it?

Offensive speech is often worthy of our contempt. But isn’t it even more contemptible to jail someone for expressing a thought, an idea, however offensive it might seem?
John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, wrote: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

He elaborated: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collusion with error.”

The only form of censorship that is morally justifiable is the right not to listen. Have you ever heard someone say, “That should be banned, because it might be harmful to me?”

If a questionable book or speech or idea prompts someone to commit a criminal act, surely the crime is already prohibited and punishable? How can you hold someone responsible for expressing an idea that may or may not, depending on interpretation, have led someone else to commit a crime, when that person was free to make up his own mind?

There is a temptation to argue that the crime might have been prevented, and if it was not, that it is too late to act against the criminal after the fact. But in what conception of liberty does one punish someone before a crime has been committed (or one can be certain that it is imminent)? Where do you draw the line in that case?

The only person whom society can be sure will not commit a crime is a dead person – or, equivalently, a man in chains. Would we agree to incarcerate a poor man because he might steal, or an angry man because he might commit assault, or a lonely man because he might rape? So why punish a deluded man for speaking delusions, on the flimsy premise that someone might hear him, believe him, and act upon the delusional thought? That way lies a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.

Noam Chomsky once said: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

Why protect inoffensive speech, after all? Denying the right to express a thought, however offensive, takes us into dangerous territory where authoritarianism and fascism take root.

Our constitution forbids, among other forms of expression, hate speech and advocacy of war. Is it wrong to express hateful views about hateful people? Is it wrong to call for war to defend one’s own country, or come to the aid of an allied victim of aggression?

Who is to say what constitutes hateful speech or warmongering? A government?

Governments – most particularly authoritarian regimes that in fact practice censorship – have been guilty of permitting and promoting the most awful ideas of all. Apartheid, for example, was declared noble and good by a government. Advocating discrimination, theft, assault or even murder against Jews, or intellectuals, or capitalists, or Christians, or heathens, or homosexuals, have all been condoned at one time or another by governments.

So who then? Society?

Anyone is, of course, free to denounce Holocaust denial, racism, warmongering, advocacy of crime, or any other ideas that seem offensive and wrong to their mind. As Mill explained, countering bad ideas with good ones is the path to progress and wisdom.

However, social censorship can be just as dangerous and corrosive as government censorship. Self-censorship creates a stultifying atmosphere in which ideas that do not conform to the norms and ideals of majority opinion are suppressed. It imposes strictures of political correctness, in which mindless optimism becomes the only acceptable form of expression. It makes ideas – and the media – servants of the political aims of society, and ultimately of government itself. It rejects critical thought by denouncing it as unpatriotic, negative, anti-social, or injurious to whatever political notions are in vogue at a particular time. Ultimately, it suborns speech to the dictatorship of the proletariat no less than if it had been suppressed by an authoritarian government.

Criminalising offensive speech – even in the hope of preventing consequent crimes – sacrifices an essential liberty of society. Worse, since it cannot suppress the unspoken idea that underlies the expression, it purchases only an illusion of safety.

Instead of making victims and oppressed saints out of those who hold offensive views, they should be encouraged to express them. Creating laws that suppress offensive ideas not only causes them to fester in secrecy, but it creates the perception of credibility. If the idea is false, why would society lack the confidence and conviction to counter them in the broad light of day?

Let people speak their minds, and let their ideas stand or fall in the open. Let the encounter with reason, logic and moral conviction remove the poisonous sting of hate speech.

My previous column at The Daily Maverick, Break the banking cartel, argued that the banks are unlikely ever to solve the problem of a generalised, cash-like, electronic transaction infrastructure that addresses the entire market, both rich and poor, local and foreign, buyer and seller, banked and unbanked.

Lest that argument be interpreted as a denunciation of bankers in general, I thought I’d question why everyone believes politicians when the latter blame the economic crisis on the former. Bankers are a product of their legal and regulatory environment. Hence, In defence of bankers.

Here’s a column based on the talk I gave at the amazing gathering of splendid people known as GeekRetreat last weekend. It argues that the most important hurdle to a universal online and mobile payment system that serves all South Africans is one law, namely the law against deposit-taking by non-banks.

Also published this week, a report on GeekRetreat for TechCentral, with details on two of the technology ideas that emerged.

Over on the M&G’s ThoughtLeader, Bert Olivier, an academic of the philosophical persuasion, rails against those who defend “the unforgiveable practices of capitalism”. He leans heavily on a polemic known as “The Corporation”, a documentary (and book) by Joel Bakan on which I’ve written before.

There’s so much to dispute in his post and the comments, I hardly know where to start. As one of the people who frequently offers a defence for the practices of capitalism (most recently here), I’ll make a few general points in rebuttal, though. I’ll refrain from cheap shots about the left-wing utopia from which most of us graduate (or drop out), thus to grow up and discover the real world. There is neat irony, however, in how our academic friend’s comrade in anti-capitalism, above, portrays himself. But enough ad humorem attacks.

Let’s begin by drawing some clear distinctions. Communism and capitalism aren’t just two systems among many. They are logical opposites, and are the only ways we know of organising production and consumption. One can either presume production and consumption are determined individually, or collectively. Collectivism presumes society (as expressed by the state) owns and organises both the production and consumption of its members. Capitalism supposes instead that individuals have the right to use and dispose of the fruits of their own labour as they see fit, without being constrained by any law other than those against infringing the same rights of others.

There are bastardisations of the concept, which is why “free-market capitalism” often needs to be spelt out. State-capitalism, for example, is merely a form of collective organisation. Socialism and communism are both collectivist in nature. The difference between them is a matter of degree, not nature. Any degree of socialism detracts from the general prosperity and must be enforced against the will of citizens. Any control of some parts of the economy, in order to be effective, eventually requires the control of more parts. In extremis, this means the logical conclusion of socialism is communist totalitarianism. Stalin wasn’t a perversion of communism. He was its logical culmination.

Limited socialist principles can appear to work, for a while, in rich countries, just like a rich individual can use his savings for a while without appearing to work for his lifestyle. It is no surprise that the well-intentioned New Deal culminated in the confiscatory taxes and economic malaise of the 1970s, and that a return to free market principles cured this malaise. Western Europe, too, became wealthy thanks to free enterprise and free trade. Poverty declined dramatically, and a large middle class was established. Once wealthy, it appeared to be able to afford a measure of socialism, but a few decades later, it is discovering that its savings are depleted, that not enough new wealth is being created. There is a price to pay for this well-intentioned idealism, and even rich countries find they cannot afford it forever. Unlike European economies, truly free markets need not fear immigration. Socialist markets, however, cannot afford to support even their own people, let alone people whose past production has not been decocted into the common pot. In poor countries, socialism has not offered a remedy for poverty either. It merely keeps the people mired in poverty — and that’s before accounting for the deleterious effects of tyranny or corruption.

The corporation doesn’t rule anyone. They can only profit if they offer things people are prepared to buy, and go to extreme lengths to do so. Do you really believe they determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work, and what we do? Would you have more or less choice if you were limited to your own production and barter trade with your neighbours? Thanks to the corporation, we now have a vast array of food, mundane and exotic, on offer, at real prices (relative to our income) that our parents and grandparents would think fantastical. The picture alongside is one of hundreds of stores from which I can choose within five minutes of my home. Thanks to the corporation, we have a huge array of clothing available to us to suit every taste, from ordinary and practical to uber-cool and fashionable. If your needs or interests are more specialised, you probably know a store like the one below. There’s a lot you can say about golfers and golf equipment stores, but you can’t accuse them of not offering choice. And yet, not being controlled by corporations, I have never felt obliged to buy as much as a golf ball.

Corporations determine what we watch and where we work? Whether you sit in front of the TV all day is your problem, but don’t blame the people who create the thousands of different shows for different tastes broadcast on hundreds of different channels. If none of that extraordinary choice satisfies you, you can still read a book, you know. Unlike our parents and grandparents, who were employed for life on the same boring corporate ladder, or our great-grandparents who were stuck on the same farm or village all their lives and did the work their fathers did, the modern professional workforce job-hops every few years. Many work for themselves, from home, doing things that companies don’t think worth doing. You’re saying people do this because they have less choice where to work and what to do than they used to have?

Even if companies are monopolies, people have choices, to buy or not to buy, to spend or save, to buy here or buy there. Only by serving the needs of customers can corporations profit. Therefore, corporations profit only to the degree in which they serve the public good. When talking about monopolies, however, it is important to distinguish between those that are established or protected by law, and those that arise naturally. The latter simply reap the fruits of being better than competitors at providing a particular product or service, and are always vulnerable, should they abuse their position, to the emergence of new competitors with new ideas and better ways of doing things. Their power is restricted by the choice consumers have of buying their products or doing without them, as well as by the possibility for competition to arise — i.e. their power is restricted by the market, just as it would be if they were less powerful competitors. A monopoly’s power becomes unrestricted when it is protected by law. For example, in South Africa, new cellular operators cannot emerge, rendering the three current “competitors” a cartel. To use an example that isn’t likely to be clouded by “essential service” emotion, the same goes for casinos. They are governed not only by licence conditions, but by a limit on the actual number of licences in issue. Hence the lack of choice, the lack of variety, and the uncompetitive house rules.

It is true that rich countries maintain some subsidies or trade barriers. This is not free-market capitalism. This is just as evil as the subsidies or trade barriers maintained by developing countries. The latter are, in fact, much higher, so focusing on farm protectionism in Japan or Europe, for example, is largely a red herring. In any case, no matter whether the rich countries do the right thing — from which their own consumers would benefit — the developing world could gain a great deal of the potential benefits by dropping trade barriers unilaterally. In fact, if they do so, but the rich world doesn’t, the developing world will become more prosperous more rapidly, and there is every chance that they will eventually overtake rich countries — especially those like Europe, where the socialist streak runs deep and trade barriers are relatively high.

On corporate abuses: how many people bought GM’s pickups after the media reported on the fact that they exploded? Its failure to care about the welfare of its customers had a massive impact on the company and its profitability, and on the industry in general. The same goes for other corporate abuses. First, they are covered by laws against theft and fraud — laws which apply to all of us. Second, they open a company to potentially crippling civil liabilities. Third, they can harm the reputation of a company gravely; many have gone bankrupt after the public’s trust was destroyed by a major disaster or consumer safety scandal. Yes, corporate social responsibility is cynical, in some way. It is designed to convince customers that the company is serving them well and deserves their patronage more than a competitor does. I can’t see how this dynamic is a bad thing. Or did you want to start legislating the moral motives for people’s actions?

On subjecting corporations to the state, doesn’t the state serve its citizens, and exist at the pleasure of the people? And isn’t a corporation merely a voluntary association of citizens designed to pool resources and better divide labour, so the whole becomes more productive than the parts? Why, then, if the state is to be subject to the will of the people, advocate that certain groups of people should be subject to the control and regulation of the state (beyond ordinary laws against murder, theft and fraud)? This is philosophically inconsistent with a belief in the freedom of individuals, and a democratically elected state with constitutionally limited power, established by citizens to uphold laws that protect common rights and liberties.

Undoubtedly, some people do not act legally, or charitably, or morally. But this doesn’t change when you place them in a state bureaucracy with power over citizens. As long as such actions fall outside the boundaries of limited and justly applied law under which everyone’s rights are protected from infringement by another, individual self-interest pursued through free association and voluntary choice remains the best way to organise production in society. If you demand to see why, to quote Christpher Wren’s epitaph, look around you.

Beyond the ties that bind us all — to respect the person and property rights of others — what justification is there for wishing to tie down the capitalist Gulliver? What will be the consequences, unintended or otherwise? Fewer choices? Lost wealth creation? Fewer jobs? Less innovation? Forfeit poverty alleviation? I contend that there is no justification, except that Gulliver is big and free and independent. This makes the Lilliputians afraid of him. That such an instinctive, emotional response is natural makes it no less irrational.

Considering specific corruption cases in isolation may provoke outrage, but it’s a cop-out. It’s a defence mechanism against despair. Because a full litany of the depth of the crisis in South Africa makes depressing reading. Alec Hogg, the editor in chief of Moneyweb, writes such a litany in his open letter to ANC president Jacob Zuma, prompted by the finding in a recent survey that nine of every ten South Africans consider corruption to be a way of life.

The letter is worth reading in its entirety, if only to be reminded of the weight of evidence against individuals involved in public and private corruption in recent years — some of whom remain unmolested by public reproof or legal censure.

I’m doubtful whether it will have much impact. The fact that Hogg feels the need to resort to transparent flattery, and to gloss over Zuma’s own proximity to, tolerance for, or involvement in corruption, suggests that he knows the letter will not find a sympathetic ear. Nonetheless, it is a letter that had to be written, and should be read. Widely. Well done, Alec.

If you really care about global warming, there are a whole bunch of things you probably think you shouldn’t be doing that you should, and vice versa. The environmental religion of the modern age, in which an angry Gaia will punish us for our sinful ways, but we can redeem ourselves by sacrifice and self-denial, has spawned a mythology of classical proportions. The problem is that many of those myths, spouted as accepted wisdom by an uncritical media and special-interest activists, appear to be just plain wrong.

Wired magazine goes to the actual science — remember science? — and makes some proposals for those who really care about climate change, and think not only that reducing carbon emissions will actually help, but delude themselves that it is possible to reduce them enough to make even a little dent in anticipated warming.

Here is its list, each of which is explored further in a separate article:

• Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle
• A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C02 Than Heating
• Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet
• Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming
• China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware
• Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory
• Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
• Used Cars — Not Hybrids: Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead
• Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

It doesn’t say all of these are good ideas, of course. There are excellent reasons to slash-and-burn overgrown, bug-infested jungles, to plant more productive crops, sure. But there are also plenty excellent reasons not to cut down old-growth forests. However, if your policy goal is to reduce carbon emissions, which seems to be the sole fetish of environmentalists and policy makers, then all of these points, including razing the rainforests, are valid.

Meanwhile, the US Congress is about to debate a cap-and-trade scheme that will vastly expand government powers and revenue, cost consumers trillions in bureaucratic red tape, tax and lost economic growth, and achieve very little indeed. In welcoming an open floor debate on these mushy measures, the Wall Street Journal writes:

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling “landmark legislation.” They’re too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

Ouch. Nothing like a fat bureaucracy to infringe on the liberty and prosperity of the people. Nothing like a first-country moral crusade to give developing-country leaders ideas to foist upon their long-suffering people. Nothing like an overbearing state to hold down the development of the poor.

As if $130 oil isn’t reason enough to consider more fuel-efficient cars, reduce energy usage in industry and invest in alternative energy sources.

While we wait for this legislative disaster, however, would the disciples of St Al please report to the consistory, so they can get cracking on Wired’s measures?

(Hat tip: Climate Skeptic.)

The decision to add the polar bear to the list of threatened species, on the basis that global warming threatens its habitat, is dangerous, and it’s going to hit Americans — and anyone who buys American products or relies on American investment capital — in their pockets. Not only trade, but similar decisions made by other countries or by international bodies, will spread this damage worldwide.

Environmentalists failed to convince the US legislature to enact draconian new laws to enforce costly measures whose benefits are at best speculative. Having failed to make their case, they fall back on what appears to be an innocent and even noble regulatory decision. They know listing the polar bear as threatened opens the door for litigation to enforce their ideas about carbon dioxide emissions on others, on the basis that any such emissions contribute to the destruction of the polar bear’s habitat.

Bloomberg’s Kevin Hassett says “this action will almost surely go down in history as the turning point in the global warming debate”. In an editorial titled Polar Bear Ruling to Bring Tsunami of Lawsuits, he writes:

Environmental groups are already preparing legal challenges. Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity told USA Today last week that the Endangered Species Act requires agencies now to address greenhouse gases, and warned that “we can and will go to court to enforce the law.”

Not only big companies will feel it. In theory, they could sue you for the car you drive, or the air-con you install in your home. And you won’t have a big company’s crack squad of expensive lawyers to protect you from the attack dogs of the green left. In short, this is a big deal. A very big deal.

At least we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that these superior beings (environmentalists, not polar bears) are obviously smarter than the rest of us, and care more too. So perverting the judiciary to achieve their political aims is a small thing when they’re saving the world from certain destruction. In fact, perhaps we should start a Fascist Party, so they can protect us from ourselves.

The poor panda, which really is endangered, had no chance. It was never, ever, going to be this profitable to the cause.