What everyone forgot about 9th grade economics

By Nicholas Jakari aka Blogroid

As the world hovers on the edge of financial catastrophe and allegedly clever people are meeting to figure out what went wrong and how it should be resolved in the future so it doesn’t happen again, a gap has opened into which talk of a transaction levy, also referred to occasionally as a Tobin Tax has been thrust like a sharp finger into the throat of the Banking sector which has summarily and categorically rejected it.

In this blog I am going to present an argument suggesting that almost without noticing the world has sleepwalked into a state of being where we have turned time itself into a natural resource and we have neglected to charge rent for that resource. And that a transaction levy is the natural remedy for the world’s current impasse notwithstanding the entirely predictable vested interest opposition to what is in effect a radical and revolutionary idea. I also accept that there are at least three probably four or maybe more, profoundly sensible reasons for rejecting such an idea… many of which have been besmirched by the blatant frauds perpetrated on the world by the financial services sector of the world’s economy.

Preliminary Tweet version of this blog.

[For those who need their information in Twitter style bites.]

Sovereign debt problem inherited from Private Banking sector demonstrates that using the Future, as a Factor Of Production without charging economic Rent for its use is unsustainable.

The longer more complex 9th grade version, for those who found Economics unbearable.

In making this presentation it is not my intention to break the Capitalist system, I like and teach Capitalism [whatever it is… like Zen it seems to be whatever its proponents intend it to be]. Rather it is to demonstrate how ‘capitalism’ is shooting itself in the foot through its unwillingness to accept that in the same way that the world has evolved from the Stone age to the age of Knowledge so too must the system evolve, that has helped to bring humanity from the caves to the glories of our present time.

In a few weeks now I am going to launch a podcast cyber serial called the Jonker Memorandum: [sub-titled] an Mzansian myth, following an apocalypse: about the ambiguity of memory, how the world ended and what happened afterwards. In that ‘afterwards’ world this idea of a transaction levy is the core mechanism whereby the world functions financially. The story is not about the transaction levy: rather it is simply taken for granted in the same way that we take electricity [for instance] for granted.

Rather than wait for the relevant footnote in the futuristic part of the story to be broadcast in about ten months or so [It’s a serial remember: in episodes.] it seems apposite, given the present crisis, to present the rationale for what is [in the story] simply a footnote to a logical conclusion. I’m doing this because it seems to me that in the general fuss over the Transaction Levy no one else seems to have presented a logical and reasonable explanation for why this instrument represents the inevitable next step in our human evolution. Of course I also understand that it may well take an apocalyptic event to induce its acceptance … hence the subtitle. And I’m sure that for many people the present crisis is an apocalyptic event.

I hope that I still have your attention at this stage.

Among other things I teach 9th grade economics, and it has fascinated me over many years how we introduce, at that level, a most intriguing set of concepts; that form the core foundations of economic theory in all its diversities: and then carefully ignore one rather critical part of the theory.

Or perhaps we willingly forget.

For those who have forgotten: 9th grade economics deals with three critical aspects of fundamental economic theory. First there is the idea of the so-called ‘economic problem’: scarcity, and the idea that all economic behaviour is concerned with the fact that people set out to satisfy unlimited wants and needs with generally limited resources. Note the idea of “Limited resources”.

Question: Is the future an unlimited resource?

The idea of limited resources leads naturally to the associated dual concepts of supply and demand, and the principle that when supply is constant [or declining] and demand is rising, then prices will rise. And alternately; when supply is increasing and demand falls, then prices, should, in principle, fall. There are many reasons why this doesn’t always work out so neatly but for the moment that suffices, as 9th grade economics will do. 9th Grade doesn’t do Fiat currencies and endemic inflation.

The second critical idea central to economic theory holds that to satisfy needs people produce goods and in order to achieve this satisfaction they make use of so-called “Factors of Production.” This is a teasing idea for 9th grade learners and inevitably causes some confusion, because it makes something obvious into something seemingly abstract.

So for instance in order to produce the ubiquitous cellular telephone one requires a range of materials referred to in all the prescribed textbooks as being derived from natural resources: e.g.: metals and plastics. One also needs capital in the form of the machinery needed to manufacture the instrument and the premises in which the machinery is housed together with the sums of money needed to finance the production through to the income stage.

Then there is the labour, and the endeavour and the knowledge needed to make the thing. So all in all there are seemingly five key so-called ‘factors’ involved in production.

When I first started teaching this subject [9th Grade Economics] back in the 70’s, at a time when the “Commanding Heights “ theory of national governance was in vogue around the world, my 9th grade textbooks referred only to three “Factors of Production”: Natural Resources, Labour and Capital. Entrepreneurs were regarded, as being akin to criminals [and gosh they still are in many quarters] and knowledge was a relatively static concept. Gradually since the 90’s Entrepreneurs have been added to the list, grudgingly in my own home environment, and more lately, especially since the likes of Facebook and Google the idea of pure knowledge as an independent Factor has been slowly “creeping like snail unwillingly to the pages” [to paraphrase the Bard].

At this point, with the 9th graders, it is usual to evaluate the various ways in which these factors are paid and it is here that things become both controversial and curiously obscure.

Labour is paid with wages and salaries. Capital is paid with interest, Entrepreneurs with profits and Knowledge receives royalties. These are all argued over routinely and these arguments do not concern us here.

What does concern us though is the textbook hypothesis that Natural Resources are paid with something referred to as ‘Economic Rent’.

And here my classes invariably grind to a halt. In the neighbourhoods where I have routinely worked over the years many of my students live in rented homes and so the first confusion is separating the idea of the rent their parents [often single moms] pay for their roofs, from this idea of economic rent.

The textbooks themselves are strangely silent on the idea of economic rent, something that carries over into 10th grade where the subject doesn’t come up at all; 11th where it receives a bare mention and 12th where again it merits a bare paragraph or two and so it continues into economics 101, 201 et al. Well its there: but buried well. The current standard [9th grade] text [in my district] is in fact completely silent on the definition of economic rent…. It simply refers to “Rent” conveying the impression that one simply “rents” natural resources in the same way their folks rent their homes, trailers, or even television sets. Almost no one ever gets it, and in the twelve or so minutes the syllabus prescribes for dealing with it, it generally gets lost.

One suspects that somehow over the years the idea of economic rent has become submerged into the idea of tax generally which all of us despise and which many regard as theft, and in its progressive income taxes form as an active form of discrimination against upward mobility. One of my heroines in the Jonker [my forthcoming podcast cyber serial remember] announces, following Nozik, that “Taxing people’s labour and the fruit of that labour creates a moral flaw at the profoundest heart of modern society” This is her prelude to the {historical in the story} introduction of the transaction levy.

More sophisticated textbooks refer broadly to supply elasticity’s and the difference between transfer earnings and economic rent, The illustrious Keynes refers to Locke’s definitions of Economic rent and generally over the centuries the idea of economic rent is viewed as “An amount of money, over and above that which would induce an owner of a factor to offer that factor for use. [Michael Parkin: Economics] Most tertiary level texts also associate the idea more exclusively with land than with natural resources; i.e.: a subtly rooted idea that all natural resources boil down to land… which in the 21st century is no longer as true as it was in the 19th.

According to Henry George a seemingly carefully forgotten 19th Century economic activist, famous a century or so ago for an idea called “Georgism”, “ A sizable portion of the wealth created by social and technological advances in a free market economy is possessed by land owners…. Via economic rents…” [Wikipedia].

He continued: “[In the economic meaning of rent, payments for the use of any of the products of human exertion are excluded, and of the lumped payments for the use of houses, farms, etc., only that part is rent which constitutes the consideration for the use of the land. The part that is paid for the use of buildings or other improvements is properly interest, as it is a consideration for the use of capital." [Henry George Foundation]

So you can see the idea is confusing. I don’t want to get hung up about definitions though: I just want you to remember that it is an accepted feature of commercial life that natural resources earn this thing called rent, which is basically different in concept from tax, interest, profits, royalties or wages: even though it’s all money.

Now I would argue that as we have moved from an agrarian to a Post-Industrialized market structure where the existing range of Factors of Production were appropriate to a world based on tangible goods we are now in a world where, most of the so-called “Developed” part is in thrall to economic activity that is intrinsically intangible. In the financial services sector, and specifically that part called “derivatives” trading, economic activity is basically a casino game based on a range of intangible variables

When I started teaching 9th grade economics in the 70’s, services were almost an appendix to a textbook. They were in practice, indescribably formal and access was hugely restrictive. They were generally a tiny part of overall GDP. Then we [the place where I live] were massively dependent on so called primary commodities for most of the GDP.

No longer.

Now services are centre stage and the biggest of all are the money markets. This set of production classifications represents the third of the basic principles of economic activity that we teach to 9th Grade. This refers to the idea of Primary [e.g. farming, mining] production, Secondary [e.g.: manufacturing cellular ‘phones] and Tertiary [banking, haircuts, insurance and the sale of collateralized debt obligations: or the derivatives market]. We do attempt to suggest to 9th Graders that by the time we reach the latter two we are dealing with something that operates in essentially an alternate reality… the exponential expansion of an idea called the ‘fractional reserve multiplier’ extending the meaning of money into an infinitely abstract probability. At this stage my more dismissively assertive 9th graders ask if i’m on crack or have been imbibing the holy weed.

According to a host of different commentators over the past months and years since the emergence of the international financial crisis and the Great Recession, The derivatives market in but two commodities: gold and silver, is around three times global GDP. That of the entire derivatives market involves debt obligations totaling more than 20 times the entire annual income of the entire planet.

In other words services have emerged: big time… and they are not paying rent… therefore the system, which should be supported, is breaking down: has broken down… to the critical disadvantage of the players. [Note: I have no problem with people getting rich… I do have a problem with people who are unable to recognize when they are committing suicide. If it is at an individual level its bad enough… but this Lemming thing is scary.]

Why should financial services pay economic rent?

It is because this abstract tertiary form of economic activity uses the most abstract of all conceivable Factors of Production to achieve its aim. Simply put: it’s Time. Specifically It’s “The Future”.

All debt is founded on the Time value of Money. In other words it is a lien on the future. That is: Value borrowed today is borrowed from the future. You buy your car on hire purchase: five years to pay, you are borrowing against your own future. You do the same thing with student loans. This is not new: it’s been done for millenia. What is new is the scale and scope of this lien.

In the 1970’s money was an economic lubricant, oiling the wheels of commerce. Today in a world of Securitised Loans, Commercialised Debt Obligations [CDO’s] and Hedge derivative options, not to mention high frequency trading, money has become a product… and it uses the future as its primary factor of production.

And since it has evolved into a product it too must fall under the auspices of [the more abstract] notion of Factors of Production… with the Future as the Factor. And in the same way that all factors of production pay some form of Rent, so too must ‘The Future’. The Risk and the rate of return: i.e. Interest, are the rewards and realm of Capital, using time, now on an unprecedented scale.

The idea that we can exploit the future which is, by the way, unlike any other Factor in that it is not scarce at all: the future is infinite, isn’t it? It’s an unlimited resource bounded only by our own fear and greed… and the nature of human disaster: the idea that we can hock the future for untold hundred of trillions: more than two or three planet Earths could generate in a century, and expect to pay for it from current output is so insane it is incomprehensible that we are still doing it.

If we are going to hock the future on the scale that we now do, using electronic convenience then algorithms must be developed and, then, strange as it might sound, the future must pay its way, or the system will break terminally, and I’m sure most of us don’t want that.

In other words: to restate Henry George:
“In the economic meaning of rent, payments for the use of any of the products of human exertion are excluded, and of the lumped payments for the use of investments, only that part is rent which constitutes the consideration for the use of the future. The part that is paid for the use of wealth denomination in any form is properly interest, as it is a consideration for the use of capital.”

The Transaction Levy [not a tax … a payment to the system for providing itself] appropriately balanced against reductions in other extortions we make on ourselves, will help smooth out the massive lump that lies in front of us: and promote the energy we require to take our human adventure to the next level… which is sure to be as different then as 2011 is to 1973, where the only thing that seems familiar is the shape of my classroom and the playfulness of its contents.

Thus endeth the 9th Grade lesson.

Observations

Michael Francis raises the question why are south african’s such violent people. He is a visiting Canadian from a relatively more peaceful part of that generally peaceful country. [see link below]

Why are ‘Saffers’ such violent people he asks? And he presents a generally wide ranging series of examples of violence in a wide social context and raises the probably correct perception, that in a world where people seem to respond to incentives, the fact that few violent act result in any real sanction is a great incentive to ‘bugger thy neighbour’.

I felt it was perhaps a disingenuous piece?  Written as devil’s advocate, to prompt a review of ourselves. Nonetheless perhaps the question should be why are human beings so violent towards each other and why are we a dramatically above average violent place.

I felt Mr Francis ignored some realities. As an offshore foreigner he presented useful insights, without necessarily viewing them holistically.

We are a post revolutionary society. The long awaited day arrived but we were soon habituated to the fact that we could now sit anywhere we could afford on the train. The shift to cash as the social determinant rather than complexion raises huge issues: you didn’t have to do anything when you were oppressed black, to be oppressed… blackness was its own qualification.

In a market driven economy, however, effort counts whether it’s the effort of creating patronage, and hence a cronyist access to cash; or the quaintly western view that other forms of effort are more appropriate, it’s still effort; and that raises new challenges and an awareness for many of their absolute impotence.

And this is normal. Transitional medieval European countries had murder rates quite comparable to ours for instance. France remained a violent society for most of the century following their famed Guillotine fuelled revolution albeit on a continually declining curve.

Taking my own neighbourhood as a for instance relative to his argument: In 1996 we had more than a 1000 reported murders. Now even if the recently released numbers were only 10% of reality, they would still have been only 10% of that figure.

Better. I would say that represents the beginnings of a response to the greater focus on reducing the incentives.

That plus a growing understanding of the fact that we are each,  notwithstanding any nanny state ideas to the contrary, responsible to ourselves for our actions

blogroid on September 19th, 2010 at 6:17 am

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/michaelfrancis/2010/09/16/crime-and-violence-in-the-new-south-africa/#comment-140203

Restrictions on media freedom

Weblog

Jozi

9 August 2010

What should we do about the threats to media freedom.

To the editor of a national sunday newspaper

Further to your editorial on Sunday.

You ask what i [we] think of the State’s intention to impose restrictions on what the media can report and the idea of setting up a tribunal to ‘try’ journalists for contravening the now narrower definitions of free speech.

Briefly i say it’s not a good idea… it’s not even an idea that can really work at more length though I say as follows.

Well i suppose  what follows is a summary of what i think. It may not be what you expect

And you may not want to print what i think… It is probably not succinct enough for a society raised on three second sound bites. That is ok. I am simply responding to your request.

Enjoy

regards

Nicholas aka Blogroid

What should we do about the threats to media freedom.

Writing as a white man. I say do nothing.* [We have an obsession in our world with being so-called "white"... sorry... i know it seems arbitrary and random]

Writing as a citizen I say the threats threaten me.                                                        Writing as a writer I say that the threats disempower me.

Then I realise that the threat is not to me as a white man, because I am irrelevant.  It is not to me as a citizen, because I have already lost my rights, to employment equity* [* a law that says you can only be employed if you fit into a desired racial or gender or disabled work category... white men are at the bottom of the desirability list].

And thus I am disempowered.

Notwithstanding all the blather to the contrary.

And writing as a writer of unfashionable themes I have always been disempowered.

Anyway.

So frankly in those categories I am indifferent to the state of the media, since little of that which is to be curtailed is of practical use to me.

Notwithstanding: In my role as citizen… This is the stuff of nation building, not the stuff of revolution. This is a struggle between [so-called] black persons in the now no longer  New Majority… for control of the State… This is the ancient common struggle of the dispossessed against the rest.

The ruling party has seen the threat of a real inevitable alternative:  It knows it must, like Bob [the Roz] Mugabe,[a neighbour] act speedily, to restrict/pre-empt the emergence of the real alternatives, before they gain traction. Repression is in: democracy is to be redefined                                                                                                        As that which suits the ruling class, which is here to stay.

Writing as an economist: restricting media freedom makes for economic weakness,

Economic weakness is bad for employment opportunities. So as one who needs to work; and for whom work is not plentiful, media freedom curtailed is not good.

Writing as an economic historian: Media restrictions are almost always accompanied by economic decline…

Argentina has never recovered from Peron.                                                            Venezuela is reeling from Chavez.                                                                                    Castro staggered from his deathbed [this past week] to breathe life into Cuba’s 50’s retro-post-repression slump… North Korea murders sailors to command attention to its squalor.

Afrika… ? Afrika weeps still where bull elephants trampled down the grass to reveal the thin soil beneath.

“Freedom next time”… Maybe.

An aging polemic poet warbles  ‘China seems the counter example… ‘ So…. Maybe they have more media freedom now than during the great leap forward [or rather backward in the usual way of media constructed euphemisms].

Our time lines shorten as memory shrinks: abetted by indifference to reality.

For the rest…

What separates the winners from the losers in the great global game

is the freedom of all the media to report …

Oh we forgot! … These freedoms are being curtailed all over. The Middle East curbs Blackberries. Even in the great democracies

Like America and England and places in between freedom is in retreat; and guess what?

We have the Great Recession and the immanent ‘double dip’ and the real likelihood of ten lean years ahead with no guarantees that it will end. So much for embedded journalism telling us only what ‘someone’ thinks we ought to hear.

In all this we ask… What is this, ‘media’, that must be controlled… who does it represent? Where will the benefit fall: and where the cost?

So in my view… writing as a whole person

We the citizens are all disempowered by an indifferent media  intent only on pursuit of the latest buck, trend, fad, whatever that will keep the presses rolling on indifferent shores… presenting only what some faceless gatekeepers want us to see. Much of what we do get is inaccurate, incomplete and often badly written, sloppy and routinely rude, even arrogant: truth a momentary fragment on the stock market page. But that is ok… We have the right to ignore it and know too, that many things we should know are routinely ignored, as if by design, or the self-censorship of presumed correctness… or brought out only on special occasions, like prizes at the fair.

Certainty: The print media are in line for a thrashing by a tribunal

and so they will sell out [they have little choice… the people love their leaders]. And like mpimpis* [sic] they will take down the new digital media                           too: if they can; out of spite…. [The digital                                                                    media is in any event inherently reactive,                                                              responding to the tales promoted by                                                                                     the print guys.]

Contrarian: Were I the present govt I would be worried about                                      the fact that the Print bosses are pushing so hard against                                           this set of ideas [media tribunals, suppression of information Acts], knowing  full well that                                                                                                                                the harder they push the more likely the Alliance will dig in their heels                      in their now well worn reactionary ways. Being paranoid i would suspect their motives.

Why: The government                                                                                                                   by pulling this stunt stands to destroy                                                                                 their own moral                                                                                                                   credibility in the eyes of their offshore erstwhile supporters… Elites already struggling… who put their careers on the line for ‘The Struggle’:  The Hains, n others. There are many                                                                                                                    who are already disillusioned                                                                                                      by a perceived humiliating reversion to type                                                                     [that’s the problem with stereotyping] and to judge by the diffi –                          —-  -culties we have attracting investments, we will find the atmos                                         -phere even chillier when we alienate those of our former supporters                    who will now not care to admit any more that they once supported the democratic process in a place that has now fallen from the tree.

Do they care?

The Apartheid govt: discovered this,  eventually.

A lesson now lost: Remember the ‘50s, the 60’s? No one seriously

influential

considered the apartheid thing to be abnormal: impolite perhaps, but not really bad… was it?

Change as we know came slowly, till the ‘tipping point’.

The rest we celebrate.

The ruling Party should choose to assess how close it really is to that facile tipping point that demonstrates dammed, diminished moral rectitude, and invokes repercusions of an indelicate brand..

Truth: Ours is again a racist State, sorry to say.

We have laws that redefine through media

That affirmation is the new discrimination. Albeit we pretend it is not, our denial is no less than that of 1950 and brings similar embarrassment to those who proclaim it to be just.

The establishment and the beneficiaries loudly proclaim:

That it is right and meet that it should be. And so it seemed.

Black people cannot compete, they suggest, and need laws to protect ‘them’ because we [‘they’] have chosen the                                                                                                   Path of no to lo growth: and need to share a diminishing pie…                    Equitably.

Because we know that freedom and growth are soul-mates… and we are choosing to choose neither.

Question 1: Does this shift to repressive legislation indicate that key persons in the ruling party ‘know’ that economic stagnation is not only likely in a non-competitive environment: it is permanent and inevitable; and therefore that ‘they’, [the current ruling faction in the current                                                                      Ruling party]                                                                                                                                 need to corner whatever opportunities still can be wrested from                                the disaster represented by  two percent annual growth over sixteen years… a decade of AIDS denial…

and a failed education initiative that cannot produce                                                sufficient people necessary for growth…

Do they want the media

to point out that we are poorer now per capita than we were in 1981? Of course not: [and I am hence being naughty by spoiling the game with this evidence; and hence am obviously revealing a ‘racist’; sub-text/suggestion/implication/secret smug satisfaction… [choose personal prejudice as appropriate.]

Question 2: Does the ruling Party want to admit that they have given up on a dynamic open society… ?  The planned, Planned society proclaimed so loudly yesterday has foundered stillborn, on in-fighting and the delusion that societies can be planned.

Can those who promote this new repression admit that they see the inevitable endgame…  And are grabbing what loot they can before the steady decline in our fortunes becomes so glaringly obvious, that all the media clampdowns in the world cannot hide it? [ not that much can be hidden in a wired world… ask the Pentagon]

Synthesis: There is a wave of crafty disinformation being trotted out by those icons who would have us collaborate in the loss of media freedom… They are the siren callers; and those media interests that bow to their Medusa’s song [as they will. As they did before and have done again] will find themselves petrified and crashed against the rocks.

A muzzled media loses the only real tool it has … Credibility. The print media is already fighting its credibility death throes. This will hasten the coup de grace.

The State that promotes media muzzling, loses the only tool it has… Credibility.

Conclusion: Intrinsically there should be no discussion, no collaboration. The media cannot threaten democracy: free media are the lifeblood of democracy… Without a free media there is no democracy. Just as one cannot be partly pregnant: one cannot be partly free.

If those cohorts in the new post-Polokwane* ruling entity who see their path to unjust enrichment being balked by too much news about their aims and activities, too many stones being lifted to reveal the graft, corruption and tender fraud beneath, then they must act unilaterally and shame their fellows who died for freedom. The ‘media’ cannot collaborate in this betrayal of the people.

Postscript: Just in case. Flash forward:  Can you imagine a time when, like those past rulers, who ‘never supported Apartheid’ …”it must have been someone else who was responsible…” there will not be found one ruling Party parliamentarian who will admit to her/his grandchildren that “I voted to extinguish the freedom for which we fought”.

A luta continua

Going over sixty batting on forty

There are times when I just

Know that

I am tuned in

To the universe… or perhaps

Multiverse.

For instance two months

ago, I was

reviewing the course requirement,

for my students, for a new programme

called for by the State in

its revised schedule of life skills. These are

now a mandatory requirement for all

emerging new adolescent citizens. They deal with physical fitness

personal identity citizenship and job seeking.

It’s a huge programme loaded with usable stuff. Problem is the course is bigger than the time allocation allows for any thing but a taste.

So one has to be relatively selective

about the range of tasks one chooses from those

spread out on the table

like an enticing delicately shadowed smorgasbord.

One is obviously guided in these matters by the textbooks. It’s a new twist on an old subject that I have never presented, formally, previously

notwithstanding my elderliness [sic].

Textbooks are prolific albeit not prescribed, and so it is over to me to choose something and develop something because the modern textbook is primarily an “ideas’ thing, containing little content

and little  in the way of direct assistance.

They are however generally most useful.

for their primary function: ideas.

A chapter heading that caught my eye

shouted  “dealing with ill health,

accidents and disasters”.

Having somehow survived to my middling sixties

notwithstanding a

long history of disasters, ranging

from

a home being burned down, being shot, beaten many times and

kicked  sometimes;  fleeing a country with family

and pitifully

few

possessions

living like a

refugee

a few times,

half a dozen retrenchments

and all  the normal accoutrements of living

in a region at

war with itself,   I felt

that this was undoubtedly a

chapter that

was almost mandatory for

a youngster living in

our totally cool but nonetheless bizarre

City… Jozi.

I read the three

page

minimalist chapter.

It contained: a picture of Indonesians

walking past the rubble left by the great

December Tsunami, an image of two people

staring at each other in what could be an accusatory manner

and a cartoon style sketch

of six people, of varying ages gathered around

what could be a kitchen table with the dominant figure

of a man in the foreground holding a page

with the words

Disaster plan

A checklist of five numbered unintelligible items,

and a phrase

‘Find out about the types of natural disaster’

in your region.

Then there was a heading:

‘Discuss ways to deal

with an accident’

containing a story about an incident on a beach.

Our city is about 600 kilometres from the

nearest beach, and we do have some flooding issues at times

especially this past summer, which in my view, is the wettest

I remember experiencing [although like most people

I romanticist the past].

According to the ‘aged one’… the surviving matriarch,

who adamantly keeps records

of rainfall

in her garden

over the

past many

decades

we

have had more

than twice our usual

Volume

Of

water pour on us.

Now, ‘though it will be much

Colder, I

like

many others I’m

sure, look

forward to our usual

gloriously

sunny

May, having somehow

Gone through an almost sunless summer.

[So: If you are one of those readers coming

to our city for the World Cup, prepare to stock up on warm kit for night wear as the temperature

falls faster than a figure from a skyscraper roof when

the sun goes down

leaving you from roast

to freeze in minutes. You don’t have to bring it with you though…

because Jozi is one of the world’s great shopping malls where you can

buy stuff for almost nothing or for

millions

whatever

your preference.][end promo.]

We do intermittently experience earth tremors from the deep

level mines that honeycomb the southern

part of the city, some two

to five kilometres

down below

ground

level

These have become less as the old

mines closed down although

there was a

“scare” earlier this

week when a flurry of

relatively

low scale

‘tremors’ were

experienced.

So we are unlikely to experience a major

earthquake, or a tsunami.

We have no mountains to send these now notorious

mudslides

swooping down

on the unsuspecting residents

perched in shanties on their sides.

We have no big rivers that overflow their

banks and roar through the whole

city like we see in places like New Orleans. We do have

many wetlands that have been built over and little

streams that turn to raging torrents

in a thunderstorm and do harm

those who live in

precarious

squatter accommodation

on their edges. Only this week

the local rag ran a story about a local resident

who finds that his smart home, that

he thought was on the edge of a stream, was actually

built over a land filled tributary

now undermined

fatally by this hundred

year high

in the water volumes

for normal summer rainfall

So what could I realistically do with heavily pressured students that wouldn’t seem like an almost criminally capricious waste of time… Prepare a disaster plan for the Apocalypse predicted for 2012. Oh yeah!

And then the voice spoke… ‘My speak’ for that in

spiration that … Bang…

that… just arrives.

Our city does have one mega natural disaster type of river flowing through it and every day

People are killed by it.

And like the storms that lash our city sometimes for minutes at a time this river roars too.

We have what could be the world’s most unruly traffic flow.

I have rarely driven much elsewhere in

the world

but I have known people, long standing urban driver

visitors who have returned their hire or loan cars in return

for chauffeured transport

because our driving habits terrified them.

I do remember once having to

drive some four

miles through London

from Earls Court to some place

wherever.

My passengers were locals, who,

for reasons I don’t

remember, were only capable of telling me where

I should go not actually driving there themselves. They

arrived at our destination declaring

themselves petrified at what

I had simply regarded

as normal

driving

behaviour.

So I presented a task. With a concocted case study, based

on the stereotypical life

style of a party

happy

city; in which a night of pleasure

ends in a bloody

nasty

car smash.

I’ve dealt with enough

to know that

deciding

what to do when it happens

is not the time to start on a learning

curve from scratch…

It is already a steep curve: just knowing.

The outcome:

This past week I have spent some

Fifteen

to

twenty

hours grading first class submissions

from classes not normally

noted

for enthusiastic

contributions.

Enthusiasm is perhaps uncool.

I seem to touch a point of relevancy

and was happy.

As the man once said it’s great when a plan comes together.

During the follow up review of the

result we dealt with certain

matters arising.

• Do not get involved in Blame.
• Remain silent.
• Go into grunt mode.
• No Licence! No one leaves

the scene until the cops arrive.

• Turn off the engine

when the event is over, and

you stop.

Surprising how many people forget that: and it was

the one thing no

one mentioned on their checklist.

The class ended at 14.20 on Friday

23^rd April… a four-day long

Independence holiday weekend

loomed.

At 14.55 I was proceeding

east

along Empire road a

major arterial, cutting east west across the

northern border of the

spine ridge that bisects our region and

gives it the name Witwatersrand [‘Ridge of white

waters’ for the frothy indulgences that flow profusely

after the storms].

An unsighted vehicle popped out from behind

another

that was waiting at the edge

of a side street,

Hillside road,

to enter the main stream and cross to the other side…  darting as is the pattern.

The vehicle,

a gray Mercedes station wagon

appeared in front of me and

notwithstanding that such a thing is normal and I

have probably avoided fifteen to twenty a day seemingly for ever

as people dart through the morass of steel that make

up our plentiful overloaded rivers

of tar

on this occasion the driver’s judgement was in error

and although I almost managed to pull up, I was trav

elling at about forty in

relatively moderate traffic for a Friday

buzzing with a frisson of expectation. And

BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!BeGan

What followed amazes me so much still that

I am writing it down. We met. I

was in grunt mode. Why he did it was

irrelevant: shit had happened as they say. We exchanged

details. He was a policeman, a Brigadier….

[We changed all the titles last week in a relatively unheralded and apparently unpopular return to the brutal military titles of our past existence as the world’s last formal slave state after sixteen years of 'nice' inoffensive titles have left us with a morale free force and plenty criminals.. ]

He presented a driver’s licence… The last one

I was presented with

in a parking lot incident some years ago on

St Patrick’s day night, turned out to be fake…as was the id and

the licence plate

and the registration notification disc that

must legally be affixed to the left

hand corner of the windscreen.

The damage was relatively minor and we had to bear the cost… sa la vie.

I hope this is not the case this time. The damage to his

car, which I Tee

boned pretty square on, was more than

the apparent damage to mine, although being a

long weekend it will only be

next week that I can establish that

for sure. I lost no teeth nor windscreen.

So I am left with this amazing

sense of being in tune with

the universe… or multiverse… following

the inner voice, trusting the messages that flow through our

existence…

An inspirational decision

to deal with the immense,

traumatic and common consequences

that could result

from a car wreck;

being forced to evaluate the response to the situation,

critically,

during the process of grading paper after paper containing the question

“how to respond” prepared

me never mind

my students.  The teacher

was taught.

As recently as a few years ago my

response

to

the

event

would

have

been

violent,  emotional and enraged.

That

confrontation with someone who in this situation, could easily destroy my life, given that the return to the brutal titles of the past suggests a return to the brutal methods of the past, with which I, like most older citizens of our country, were all too familiar, would have been

as they say now…

inappropriate.

[it was then too of course.]

Listening to the inner me… what I call

“the voice’ in my head, that I have

reasonably established is a common

enough occurrence in fellow humans, to assume

that I am not crazy… the

Limbic brain on steroids perhaps… has again and again proved

propitious.

Like some sixteen years ago when I was about to leave

the house, as I normally do, without

a firearm… The “voice” said imperiously: ‘Take Oscar

[the gun]

and spare ammo’. Twenty minutes later I

was in the fight of my

life… and survived, massively

wounded by gunfire, but alive

albeit pumping blood, because the assailants

weren’t and because I had
taken note of that occasionally insistent voice.

This event has the same sense of orchestration that has baffled me for years and which I do not ascribe to some bearded player offstage manipulating events. Rather, it is as though an inner me moves ahead from a higher vantage, as It rides a sixty metre wave like a fish eagle, surveying the ground ahead: passing messages that few of us respond to, can respond to, and continue to live happily.

The death of White supremacy

WEBLOG

Easter Monday 2010

Jozi

There are apparently at least 35 ways of getting out of trouble. Of these the most efficacious is, Leave.

Chinese saying:

Quoted in ‘The Sovereign Individual” Davidson& Rees-Mogg.

The murder of an Afrikaner supremacist leader Eugene Terre’-Blanche [E.T.] over  the Easter weekend raises a number of critical questions for South Africans of all complexions and classes.

Watching the various media replays on his life and times on Easter Sunday I was struck by the veracity of his observation, that if his extremist version of Afrikaner politics could not survive in the new South Africa, then the Afrikaner could not survive.

Listening to the general outpouring of sms and tweet type comment in the wake of his most brutal slaying over the Easter weekend it was a toss up between those who said good riddance and those who echoed his plaintive observation

One understands the ‘good riddance’ part… personally I feel much as a former minister of police felt, upon hearing the news of the murder of another nationalist leader decades ago… He immortalised the phrase: “It leaves me cold”.  Nonetheless we have decided as a nation that the death penalty should be abolished and so one cannot applaud his murder.

Murder is after all most common, and the process of being murdered is extremely unpleasant and terrifying… to survive an attempted murder is something that leaves a life long scar. Since the ‘revolution of ’94 a huge number of people have been unlawfully executed by self appointed executioners.

While the overwhelming majority of the victims have been drawn from the majority community in the country, a disproportionate number, it seems, has been from the former ruling class with isolated farm owners and managers and often their labour force being a specifically disproportionate contributor to the overall toll. This is of course historically normal and has less to do with race than it has to do with displacement.

So it is with some surprise that one hears an outpouring of comment to the effect that it seems there is no future for those leftover remnants of the former ruling class who still remain in the country. Has the Afrikaner been asleep for 16 years?

The authorities are in a deep quandary. A rising proportion of the old ruling class is becoming structurally impoverished and there has already been an embarrassing incident, with an apparently friendly ‘competitor’ nation granting refugee status to a so-called “poor White” victim of the new dispensation that naturally favours the winners in the great so-called “Struggle”.

In addition the country is becoming poorer.  The country’s growth rate is consistently lower than the rate of population increase thus the amount of money per person must logically shrink.  Administered prices acting as stealth taxes continue to rise inexorably putting immense pressure on civil structures as they become overwhelmed with bad debts and shrinking revenue bases.

At the same time there is an apparent agenda becoming more visible and is moving at too rapid a pace seemingly for the authorities to cope with. The agenda is an Afrikanist one and is unrelated to the past Struggle.

In his hugely acclaimed work: “Guns, germs and Steel” author Jared Diamond makes the observation that the expansion of the [so-called] Bantu speaking peoples from Western Afrika across the broad belt of the continent and then South to but not quite having reached the Western Cape represents the longest continuous colonialist expansion in human hustory [sic]. This expansion has now reached a geographic limit and the pressure for performance is on.

The nationalist parties controlling most of the sub-continent in Afrika have an open agenda: The United States of [sub-Saharan]  Afrika… aka The Afrikan Union.

There is no place in this political agenda for so-called Afrikaners in or out of a Volkstaat. They are [regrettably] superfluous to need. They can exist\subsist as compliant taxpayers or they must go.

This does not mean of course that useful white people have no place in the Afrikan scheme of things. It simply means that as with oppressed minorities all over hustory, the simplest and most sensible way to stay out of trouble is to leave or at least plan to leave.

Now this statement is undoubtedly going to raise many eyebrows and cause a huge amount of outrage in some quarters; and sorry for bursting the bubble of bullshit with which we all wrap ourselves. And please note that no racial slandering is intended… i take an hustorians view of reality and the trends of hustory are largely apolitical.

The country is in the throes of a Revolution the ramifications of which are only barely understood. There are ideologues at large quite as irrational as the late ET, who, for similar reasons, seek to burn down the house in order to restore the ground to its original nature. The law has also been adjusted to exclude the former ruling class from the shrinking band of opportunities available to a country with a shrinking economy.

From the [so-called] white perspective most of the good reasons for living in Afrika are over: Cheap labour, control of resources and the State, low taxes, job security for incompetent mediocrities, and constrained opportunities for lucky beneficiaries.

That is over.

Now labour is expensive and [ unfortunately] every bit as murderous as it was in circa 1652, when the first regulations were introduced by the new Settlers to control the random rate of predatory murders by the indigenous displaced.The late ET and a few thousand dead former employers have discovered this to their disadvantage since the revolution. Legislative changes have  rapidly constraining resource control… So much so that we are increasingly net food importers, and we’ve slipped to number 4 in gold production after being number one for more than a century.Coming back from that is a task for the new overlords.

The Mozambicans it seems have never recovered their agricultural output to pre- liberation levels; and where they once dominated the global cashew nut markets they now struggle to supply any markets outside their own.  Zimbabwe too is unlikely to recover its own pre-eminence in the increasingly harassed tobacco markets.  Its immensely successful Beef trade, second it was always maintained only to Argentina’s, has also all but vanished in a trail of rustled cattle.

Hustory is pretty brutal on failure… when you go down so many others rush into the niche left behind, that getting back is a supreme effort of will and dammed hard work. This is why more than 90% of the 4000 Zimbabwean dispossessed kolonial era farmers and their families, either chose early retirement in new niche occupations, or retreated to a place run by extended kinsfolk. Even China, in the middle of one of hustories’ most remarkable comebacks, has taken centuries of pain to get there.

When my own tribe lost power in South Africa in 1948, a steady exodus followed their loss, as those with a limited foothold moved elsewhere, to gain a more secure footing. In 1951, of approximately 13,000,000 persons living in SA, 20% or 2,700,000 were [so-called] white with 48% being Afrikaners, and some 800,000 being Anglos. It is doubtful that there are 800,000 Anglos in South Africa today[figures: ref Juta’s secondary school atlas 1979].

Today the overall SA population is estimated at 50,000,000 and [so-called] white Afrikaners have slid from 10% of the populace to probably about 4%. The overall white population has slid to around 7% depending on whether one makes allowance for millions of Afrikan refugees or not in calculating the figures. To quote a hackneyed image: the writing is definitely on the wall.

To cope with the huge increase in demand for services in the new democracy Taxes on that overall 7% are now onerous and rising through a range of stealth sources, as the new ruling class seeks, rationally, to maximize its return on what may well be a diminishing asset.

According to a recent press report just 9% of businesses in the country contribute 93% of corporate taxes. The returns on these taxes are increasingly nugatory, with a tax fuelled rising rentier ‘tenderpreneur’ class apparently failing to deliver on the promise of democratic governance, and contribute much to the tax take.

Finally job security for incompetent mediocrities is now the exclusive preserve of the new ruling class, as is normal in all transitional societies. Hence the return to the spectre of the poor white Afrikaner facing large scale poverty a la 1930’s.

So the inevitable message for the beleaguered Afrikaner is, to quote Evita Bezuidenhout, to either “adapt or die”. ET obviously failed to adapt. The unasked question for him is: Why was a [so-called] White supremacist employing [so-called] black labour in the first place, when there are an estimated 500,000 unemployed [so-called] white Afrikaners ? [ref: E.News Sharpeville weekend] Perhaps we shall find out.

Had he perhaps found his own kind did not readily accept abuse or perhaps had become terminally work shy after centuries of sheltered employment. He certainly discovered [apparently] that the newly emancipated class no longer accepted abuse, assuming it transpires that a wage dispute led to the murder.

Alternatively, for those who believe there should be more to life than death [by stealth] and taxes, then like the Armenians, Greeks, Irish and my own Scots ancestors they should stop hanging around waiting for the murderer’s bludgeon and, do as the old Chinese saying suggests: run for cover… preferably to a place where the game is less overtly rigged against them.

Since it seems ET failed to adapt to his own philosophy, he proved inadequate: and was culled by the rising tide, struggle songs notwithstanding… When you behave like a loser your loss is total.

Remembering 11th Feb 1990

Listening to the news this morning i realised that it was twenty years since Nelson Mandela came out of prison and [later] became the first President of a New South Africa.

It was a time when all things seemed possible and, infused with the spirit of the times, i wrote a Prose Praise poem to the great man, in celebration of that moment. It was published five years later in a magazine produced by the institution where i had temporary employment at the time and later after he retired i sent a copy as a gift to President Mandela.

Now twenty years later, after a second President Thabo Mbeki, who will be remembered more as an AIDS denialist than for his achievements; and now a third president {Jacob Zuma] who will be perhaps known more for his ever expanding family, and his ever widening range range of mothers, the twenty year clock has ticked. All the media people are rushing to remember what they did on that momentous day…

I watched the day on television in an era before cellphones, You tube and this blogging frenzy: and this [below] is what i wrote… I wish you well to enjoy it… The President’s spokesperson said Mr Mandela had enjoyed it notwithstanding its non-traditional unusual construction.

February 1990:

A report on breaking through the ceiling:

A praise prose poem for Nelson Mandela.

The world came

to watch a

spectacle;

a man who had

been locked away

for twenty-seven years

was to be released.

And the spokespeople

for the media

and the great,

came from afar to hear

the wisdom

which it was

believed

this old man

had gained

during his incarceration.

After waiting

uncertainly

for hours

in the hot February

glare;

He finally emerged

blinking

into the sunlight.

Was led to a podium

around which

a Hundred Thousand people

had gathered and

onwhichtheeyesofFiveHundredMillion

faces

werefocussedviatelevisionsetsina

hundred and eighty

countriesbeamedbyinstantsatellite.

With a great sense of Majesty

All awaited

his unique insights, which,

his publicists claimed,

andwhichallwhocamewould

have

themselves

believe he had gained

through years of

incarcerated

introspection

The great buzz

was that this man

had

through his

suffering

acquired unsullied

wisdom and would

unitethecountryandleadhisto

rmentorsandhispeople

toapromisedland:

freed

of all the pain borne

by the suffering

for millennia.

Slowly

he ascended the steps

and trod

with unaccustomed grace

toward

the podium.

A hush

fell

uponhalfaBillionhouseholds.

Fathers

shushed their children

andbeatthosewhospokewhilethegreat

Man

began to speak.

And the sound of wonder

amongst

the gathered dignitaries

and the watching multitudes

turned

to

consternation.

For he spoke yet

anancientanditwasbelievedarecently

discreditedlanguage

and none had thought

to expect

it.

And so they sat

in bewildered

and bemused

consideration

ofwhattheywerehearing

while

a

howlingmobofjubilantsupporters

soon turned their joy

to rapturous

violence

smashingallthewindowsonthesquare.

.NiK(1990)

Publ.  1995.

Bedford Yearbook

On Intra-racial inequality

According to the headline article in The Star Business Report for Wednesday 3 February 2010,  ‘Intra-race inequality’ is rearing its head. The headline article author, Samantha Enslin- Payne says,  “The gap between the rich and the poor in South Africa has widened not only between race groups but within race groups.” Her conclusion, or that of the study, which she quotes: more income redistribution strategies in addition to the present Black empowerment strategy known as BEE.  

Curiously the varied groups of economists who have compiled the report on which this headline is based, have concluded that what is needed to solve this problem is more of the same medicine that caused it. For offshore readers who may be puzzled: BEE is an affirmative action programme in South Afrika aimed at redressing the wrongs of the past by decreeing that all the top jobs in the country must be filled by persons who were previously maltreated. The idea is understandable albeit economically irrational.

Perhaps the principles underlying economic scarcity and its effects on supply demand relationships is so 9^th grade that the Cape Town University school of Economics [Co-compilers of the report] has decided, that because BEE is a decreed sacred cow, the iron laws of economics do not apply to this battery of policies. Perhaps they consider the core principles of economics, the iron laws of supply and demand, to be somehow passé.

 How difficult is it to understand that the whole point of BEE has been to create an elite group of scarce black “Innies” who have to be placed at the top of the economic tree,  irrespective of the fact that such persons to be affirmed are in short supply relative to the number of posts to be filled. The demand for top jobs is considerably greater than the supply of reasonably competent affirmable citizens.  

Equally inevitable, since the “Affirmed” category of population are drawn from the majority, is that those who are fortuitously “in” have a vested interest in keeping their competition “out”. The formerly advantaged or [so-called] “white” group is excluded by legislative fiat and ruthless albeit denied discrimination.

Nonetheless the rest, the other 95 black applicants for every top job pose a threat to every relatively incompetent incumbent beneficiary of Affirmative Action, many of whom owe their livelihoods to their association with the ruling political party. 

There is nothing new about what we are experiencing…  An artificial shortage of skills at the top means the emergence of the so-called Maroga class of executive [failed incumbent chief executives who are dispatched bearing vast lucrative payouts] .

As we have witnessed these executives have taken such a vast slice of the relatively static pie that is a relatively stagnating economy, that there are only crumbs left for the bottom crew who must actually do the “work”.

Hence a widening gap between the fortunate short supply fellows at the top and the vast oversupply of inherently commoditised labour pooling at the bottom. What is so difficult to understand about this and how will redistribution change this equation?

 These fortunate few who scrape their way to the top know two things. Their stay will be short;  and that they must get a lifetime’s compensation for each hour of employment. They also subliminally know their retention of employment depends on remaining a scarce resource. Thus they have a [regrettable and obviously inevitable] probablty subliminal vested interest in the failure of all plans to enlarge a competitive skills base.

 The author of the story, Ms Enslin Payne quotes a Mr Duma Gqubule, a BEE consultant, for instance, who may be a jolly nice chap but nonetheless owes his professional xistence to legislative fiat, rather than to any particular entrepreneurial flair. He says “”It is absolute rubbish to blame inequality on BEE”. Naturally he will support the laws that guarantee him a job in the same way that former, protected,so-called “ white” railways workers for instance, supported Apartheid. 

Any economist worth their salt knew that the inevitable outcome of creating artificial demand categories would result in rising incomes for scarce top-level workers and declining incomes for lower level workers. The economists compiling the report are either disingenuous or the report has bheen edited bny someone with a destructive agenda.

Since talented black workers can now start at the top of an existing corporate system, it would be irrational to expect them to start their own businesses, especially given the hugely hostile environment in which SME’s in South Africa have to function. [This point was most succinctly made by one Mr Moeletsi Mbeki recently in a book called Architects of Poverty: an evaluation of how BEE has sucked the lifeblood out of black entrepreneurial endeavor].

It is not a coincidence that the period over which this intra-race inequality is said to have widened is also a period when Industrial output has declined from 24% of GDP to 14% pre- recession, and quite probably 11 or 12% post recession. Coincidentally mining output has declined dramatically as has agricultural output and the only part of the South African economy showing growth are government services and the growth of the BEE evaluation sector.

 Naturally a vested interest group seeking to maintain preferential advantage a la BEE would also seek to eliminate competition from all classes of skilled workers:  hence, for instance, the elimination of apprenticeship schemes [never all that popular with the previous elites] and their substitution with the rank and useless SETA system. Also noted is the elimination of a reasonably effective education system [for the old elites] with an [OBE] Outcomes Based system that is producing disturbingly negative outcomes.  

Naturally the OECD sponsors of the report are also not going to point out the obvious source of inequality, as being the fostering of elites at the country’s developmental expense, since they [the OECD sponsor group] represent country’s that are inherently our competition and it is in their competitive interests to see us self-destruct, notwithstanding the inherent irrationality of the concept.

 We do not need a strategy of income redistribution the present one is already yielding the unintended outcome common to failed experiments in social engineering world wide… Consider how Venezuela’s poverty levels are busy rising in the wake of the faltering oil nationalisation strategy, which is simultaneously enriching a newly emerging class of cronyist elites.

What we need and will inevitably now never get is to unshackle the chains from our citizens; and let each work according to its abilities: and be rewarded according to their productive contribution.