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.

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.

This Wall Street Journal editorial is an interesting read, about a country few of us know much about, El Salvador.

The core angle of the article is the threat of a return to socialism because El Salvador, which converted to the dollar several years ago, is being hit hard by the Fed-induced decline of the dollar. There are many other observations that are topical, however, especially for other emerging markets, like South Africa:

Since 1992, El Salvador’s democratic leadership has opened markets, reduced the role of the state in the economy, and created the conditions for competition in most economic sectors. In telecom, the government boldly went against the advice of a Washington consensus, which insisted that a 10-year private monopoly was the only way to transition from a state-owned monopoly. (That model set Mexico and Argentina back decades in telecom competition.) Instead, policy makers insisted on full deregulation, and competition has driven down prices and delivered top-notch service.

An untenable public pension scheme has been replaced by a privately administered, defined-contribution system; this removes a massive liability from the government’s books and increases the security of future retirees. Import barriers have come down, international competition now exists in the financial sector, and the economy has diversified into services and low-tech manufacturing.

Though official statistics estimate growth from 1989-2004 at 4.1% per year, former Finance Minister Manuel Enrique Hinds told me in an interview here that he believes it is much higher. He has published extensive research arguing that traditional methods of measuring Salvadoran growth do not capture changes in the makeup of the real economy. When these are factored in, he says, the average annual growth rate is 6.2%. Mr. Hinds’s estimates are supported by World Bank findings and also jibe well with the fact that, from 1991 to 2006, Salvadoran poverty was halved and extreme poverty went from 28% of the population to less than 10%.

I’ll quote the entire piece below the fold, because despite the fact that the WSJ Editorial Page is now free, I still can’t figure out how to navigate to yesterday’s articles, and whenever I click on a link someone else sends, I get to a useless “resubscribe” notice I can’t seem to bypass. I found the link at the top by checking my cell-phone browser’s history and typing in the article code. Hint, hint, guys.

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Per Bylund has had enough of authoritarian, expensive, rat-infested, inefficient rubbish recycling schemes. Even if the overflowing bins are gaudily colour-coded.

As a Swede I get to hear a lot of the myths of how wonderful a country Sweden supposedly is — the “prosperous socialism” it stands for, a role model for the rest of the world. For instance, quite a few friends from around the world have commended me on Swedish recycling polices and the Swedish government’s take on coercive environmentalism.

The way it has been presented to me, Sweden has succeeded with what most other governments at best dream about: creating an efficient and profitable national system for saving the environment through large-scale recycling. And the people are all in on it! Everybody’s recycling. […]

Even [Lena] Askling, [a columnist for Sweden’s top socialist newspaper, Aftonbladet,] who writes socialist propaganda for a living, knows the Swedish recycling scheme doesn’t work; and she concludes it is in need of more market.

Please enlighten me, wherein lies the so-often-acclaimed success of this system?

His rant covers the issue in great detail. The whole thing is worth a read. It does an admirable job at shattering yet another myth about the famed socialist utopia of Sweden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. ”Power to the people!” [↩]

A frequent theme in political rants, both on the libertarian/anarchist right and the socialist/anarchist left, is the notion of the limited liability company. Usually, the concept of limited liability is defined however it best suits the argument, and usually to negative effect. For example, the film The Corporation (2003) was recently screened on SABC 1 in South Africa. As with most bulk-buy trash, it was a late-night broadcast, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open after an hour and a half of distortion, sly inference, slander, oversimplification, quasi-legal mumbo-jumbo, out-of-context quotation, innuendo, and general anti-capitalist drivel. I’m strong, but not strong enough for 145 minutes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein all together.

Still, I got the idea: The Corporation, portrayed with sinister madness through a montage of accidents, disasters, lost legal battles, famous frauds, cuts to Hitler and a clever theme of selected crude advertising footage from the 1950s, is evil and dangerous. Worse, you and I are just wide-eyed ingénues too stupid to defend our virtue. For that, we have heroes like Captain Moore, Gnome Chomsky and the Little Gnome. One of the major themes in the film was this notion of (cue dramatic crescendo)… limited liability. It was vaguely interpreted to imply a corporation and the evil people that comprise it — by which they mean everyone above the LOE (line of evility) that you’ll find on every HR (human resources) org chart at about the level of M/CM (middle and compromised management) — gets to deny liability for their actions. In essence, a limited-liability company charter, granted by the evil corporatist government, is a licence to exploit, harm and kill, and exploiting, harming and killing customers and employees is a great way to make money. Or so the illogic goes.

If this kind of thinking is appealing, because you’re either a right-wing anarchist who thinks governments are evil and therefore legal protections granted in corporate law are probably evil too, or you’re a left-wing socialist who thinks corporations are evil and have corrupted government in order to exploit the poor masses, it may be worth reading an excellent essay by Brad Edmonds, over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in which he discusses what a limited liability company is and is not, who is and isn’t liable, and on what legal, political and philosophical grounds the concept is based.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up. — Hosea 8:7

It felt strangely like a wake, watching the inevitability of Jacob Zuma’s election as the new head of the ANC, and proposing a wry toast. Unless he is convicted on corruption charges, which is far from certain, South Africa’s list-based proportional representation system makes him a near-certainty to become the next South African president in 2009.

That’s what you get for half-hearted commitment to market reforms and economic freedom.

Although many praise the ANC for having steered a sensible economic course, I’m far from enamoured with its record. Instead of freeing the economy, it has largely pursued a brand of national socialism not unlike that followed by the racist National Party during the Apartheid years. That the intended beneficiaries of government’s policy were infinitely more fair doesn’t change the fact that government tried — and failed — to deliver services that are beyond the ability of a government to deliver. If national socialism didn’t even work for a tiny fraction of South Africa’s population, what chance would it have of providing for the entire population?

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Here’s what happens when the government runs the healthcare system. If this is what it’s like in a rich country like the UK, imagine what we’ll get when the government succeeds in insuring everyone, for identical benefits, at identical prices. Doctors won’t compete for patients, and as with any price controls, both supply and quality will dry up.

We’re already seeing it with pharmacies. How many in your area have gone out of business because they cannot afford to stock expensive drugs, or cannot compete while markups are capped — in rand terms, not even in percentage terms — the way the government insists?

Better stock up on pliers and superglue. Before hardware stores get the government treatment too.

Michael Moore, call your office. Do autopsies fall under the “socialised medicine” rubric? Perhaps not, but in Venezuela, you get them free anyway. Even if you don’t really need them. On the other hand, Reuters says it couldn’t contact officials to confirm the story, so maybe it’s just media propaganda for the Bolivarian Valhalla of Venezuela.

(Hat tip: The Scoundrel.)