COMMENT , by Pete Bower
GAUTENG
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 17 No 8 August 2016 PUBLISHED BY Bowford Publications ( Pty ) Ltd Established 1985
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FRONT COVER
Fresh heirloom vegetables ... they may look odd but their taste is far superior to modern hybrid varieties . Win a hamper of heirloom seeds worth R500 . See page 32 .
COMMENT , by Pete Bower
Make it leaner
By the time you read this the municipal elections will have come and gone , and you should have a newly-elected , or re-elected , councillor to look after your civic affairs . I hope you have the candidate of your choice in your ward . By now , of course , we are all pretty-much “ electioned out ” and heartily sick of the hot air and lies spewed by political parties in attempting to win our votes . Now , we need to get on with the business of life , rather than allowing ourselves to be drowned in the business of politics . For if there is one fact about South Africa above all others , it ' s that we have far too much government ~ certainly far more than we need . And that ' s putting aside the fact that a great deal of our government , at all levels , is useless and counter productive . Yet , sadly , we have become so used to having our lives micromanaged by government that many of us now rely on handouts , freebies and legislative breaks to get by . And here I happen to agree with commentator Peter Bruce who argues for the abolition of the provincial tier of government entirely . Collapse the provincial governments upwards into the national departments as appropriate , and downwards into the municipalities and metros , absorbing those provincial civil servants of any value as appropriate and using the exercise as an opportunity to flush out the inefficient , inept and corrupt . But more than that , the stark fact is that an awful lot of what goes on in South Africa is unsustainable , economically unsound , unfair and inefficient . Essentially , the government , in the form of the ANC , has not learnt , or chooses not to learn , the most very basic lesson of political economics , and that is that governments do not create wealth . Never have , never will . It ' s the private sector ~ businesses , big and small and made up of the collective effort of private individuals who by making and selling things and providing services to others ~ that creates wealth . A portion of this wealth is then syphoned off and given to the government in the form of tax revenue and it is this revenue that the government uses to provide social services and infrastructure to the country ' s citizens . The government , however , easily deludes itself into believing that it creates wealth when it starts initiatives such as the Extended Public Works Programme ( EPWP ) and the social grant system . In the EPWP , thousands of otherwise unemployed people are given bright orange overalls and a pair of gumboots , are taught some basic manual skills , and are then sent out on projects such as road maintenance , infrastructure rehabilitiation , riverbank cleaning etc , and are paid a small wage accordingly . The idea is that these individuals , who would otherwise be workless , now plough their wages back into the economy by buying food and other essentials , thereby stimulating the economy and , hopefully , creating wealth . The question remains : where does the money for those meagre wages come from ? And the answer is clear : from the taxpayers . The jobs the government has thus created are not , therefore , proper wealth-creating jobs and rather serve to create a class of citizen who beomes reliant on the government for this sort of handout . The same goes for the social grant system , in which millions of South Africans who would otherwise be totally indigent receive a small sum of money each month , which enables them to buy ( some ) basic foodstuffs and other necessities . Great idea , except that the money for this ever-increasing number of payouts comes from a very much smaller number of taxpayers , and the nett effect , again , is to make a class of individual who comes to rely on the government for his or her existence . While we have too much state intervention we also have too much state infrastructure . Frankly , governments should not be in the business of owning airlines , ports or rail infrastructure . Nor do we need so many government departments , with their entourages of ministers , deputies , director generals etc which are nothing more than an ANC-inspired , Zuma-led jobs-for-pals scam . Only in a country as delusional as ours do we find a Ministry for Women , Children and the Disabled ! Quite apart from the fact that it is very hard to find anybody who knows what the department actually does its very name is , frankly , an insult to all three categories of person supposedly “ protected ” by said ministry . So , in a word , if it is to prosper , this country needs less government , less government intervention and less bureaucracy , not more .
SAY YOU SAW IT IN THE GAUTENG SMALLHOLDER