SCIENCE CONFIRMS THAT OPEN TAXI WINDOWS DETER THE CORONAVIRUS

The headlines chunter on about the foreign investor’s selloff and exit from the SA markets and yet the dear old rand is clinging on and is even up a bit over the last few weeks. How do these facts gel? Had every one of those sellers already gone short of the rand long before dumping the shares and bonds? Unlikely. The answer may lie in the stats about foreign trades published by the securities markets. These figures depend upon a small and inconspicuous flag being raised on the client entry page of the labyrinthine booking and admin systems.

The year 2020 is proving to be the most awful mixture of the COVID 19 pandemic, the US presidential election and an explosion of left-wing political activism. These three phenomena have been inextricably mixed into a potpourri of horror, fear, vindictiveness and ignorance by politicians with agendas and objectives far removed from what their oaths of office promised. The sole good news may be that there are signs that the nature and dangers of the pandemic are becoming better understood by most of the medical sectors and flickers of hope can be detected. Many places are able to report that the “curve is flattening”.

Ordinary folk, however, are wary, especially because decision makers continue to point out that the deadly virus is still at large, and the best defence is to flee and shelter. It is increasingly obvious that this advice is mendacious. In this country especially, the side effect of the lockdown, which even now is in some cases being tightened, has been to remove the right and freedom of citizens to create and provide goods and services for sale to each other. And that means unemployment, poverty and starvation. And there is little evidence that those responsible for this situation care very much.

Rule is now by diktat with punishment of all for the behaviour of the few. Reportedly police believe there are no more than 5000 anti-social criminally inclined people who rape, pillage and murder, especially after a few drinks. Why are they not the target of a concerted program of arrest and conviction? Virus or no virus. The sole industry to tell the politicians that their ideas are crazy, and impoverishing are the minibus taxis. They are a strong and violent lobby and government has crumpled before them.

It is inconceivable that the dead and buried idea that SAA can be revived if only because the people “deserve a national airline” or other such nonsense is back in the news. Why has President Cyril not told his staff and colleagues to stop wasting time on this project and do something useful? The cadres just do not believe that the money for everything, including sustaining their lifestyles, has run out. The first seeds of this poor airline’s demise were probably sown many years ago when it thought fit to grant free rides to all officials above a certain rank even after they had retired.

Another symptom of the pandemic may be that it has caused many people to lose their capacity to detect irony. In the last few months, the growth in support for what can now be seen to be an extreme left-wing and often extremely violent political movement that is vehemently anti-capitalist, has been amazing. They have persuaded many of the world’s richest professional sportsmen, whose mid-boggling incomes are utterly dependant on egregious rampant capitalism, to adopt their slogans and rituals.  English Premier League players not only replaced their names on their shirts with this movement’s offensive and racist mantra, they also all compliantly drop to one knee before kick-off.  Formula 1 who are valiantly trying to revive an eye-wateringly expensive sport also tried to get the drivers to “take the knee”  and obviously called in the public relations gnomes who have sold them the meaningless and clearly untrue slogan #We Race as One. Meantime Ferrari have other problems. It is interesting how the long unexpected layoff has shown up in a distinct rustiness and loss of focus amongst the sports men and women. There is obviously something in this “muscle memory” idea.

James Greener

Friday 17^th July 2020

 

ZERO BASED GOVERNMENT

The measure of notes and coins in circulation has soared to record high levels. Usually this parameter tops out each year around Christmas time and last festive season, before our planet fell ill, it was exploring the mid R160 billions. Currently it is about R10bn larger than that record, so clearly injecting liquidity to get people through the hard times is working for someone. This would include the wholly cash-based contraband cigarette business that appears to be thriving because of the continuing smoking ban. Also boosting demand for extra notes and coins must be those parts of the relief packages being (rather haphazardly) distributed by government to the needy. On average – clearly a very inappropriate statistic in this case – this means that every soul in this country could have around R3000 each stowed under the mattress. Obviously, the actual distribution if quite different from this and the implication for massive informal unrecorded economic activity and of course diminished tax collection will one day be wonderful material for academic theses. In the meantime, it oils the criminal sector and it will be quite difficult to get this Genii back in the bottle.

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators.” This quote from the American political satirist and journalist P J O’Rourke feels like it was coined to describe exactly the current South Africa. This is precisely what has happened since legislation with names like BEE and worse was introduced to control the price of labour. And now, if the leaked Top Secret “Economic Recovery Plan for Municipalities in Response to Covid-19” is to be believed, much more regulation and control is on the way. This plan, seemingly the work of NDZ’s ministry of Cooperative Governance & Traditional Affairs, will shove SA even closer to becoming a Marxist centrally planned state. President Cyril has yet to dismiss The Plan as fake news so one has to believe that he likes the idea. Discomforting. Oh, and what exactly is Cooperative Governance?

Not wanting to be left behind in using the crisis to launch a plan, Tidemarks would like to offer a far more certain and undeniably simpler method for getting this country back to work and shaking off the economic shackles inherited both from the lockdown debacle and several decades of political interference in everyday commerce and industry. To be known as Zero Based Government it proposes immediately to suspend legislation that does not deal specifically with crimes against people and property. All laws and regulation prescribing who must do what with whom and at what price must be abolished indefinitely.

At a stroke, thousands of civil servants will have nothing to do, nor a salary to expect and would need to pour into the labour market to see what their skills are worth. Within a period far shorter than anyone would predict, human ingenuity and enterprise will blossom. The now very mature and ubiquitous internet will quickly become a marketplace where among the most successful products will be those that best enable this new regulation-lite civic model. The demand for bandwidth will bulldozer the foot-dragging protected networks and their chums in government out of the way where they squat malevolently. The next tech dollar billionaires will be hungry and bright young South Africans. This proposal is strongly supportive of economic freedom in the sense that it grants freedom to anybody to participate in the economy without the dead hand of bureaucracy setting quotas, terms and prices. Watch this nation fly. If and when in a few years, there is a yearning for the old days of cadres and corruption, well then, the old statute books will still be on a shelf somewhere. But no one will remember where.

A plague at least as life threatening as Covid-19 is raging through parts of East Africa. There, massive swarms of locusts are devouring as much “…(food) in a day as the entire population of Germany”. Without detracting from the severity of the problem it is odd to see the Economist magazine using such a meaningless unit. Does their legendary style guide now have tables of the daily food consumption of different nations? And might such a unit not have the potential to be construed as racist?

James Greener

Friday 10^th July 2020

WHY AIRLINERS ARE SAFER THAN MINIBUS TAXIS

Each week Tidemarks resolves not to dwell too much on the social calamities inexorably unfolding around us. And so far, it has failed. The financial and investment world is trying desperately to appear relevant and important, but its signals are even harder to discern in the noise being made by all the rest that is happening. The rand is inching better, and one must thank the exporters who are fighting huge battles in order to get their products delivered offshore. A particularly annoying development is the insistence that any office or even building where a worker tests positive must be immediately closed for differing lengths of time while disinfecting measures are taken. This impediment to productivity, a parameter not recognised in government institutions, is immense.

Relentlessly and pitilessly the Covid-19 infection is spreading throughout our population. However, extraordinarily little beyond this simple observation is at all clear.  Now it seems that the reliability and accuracy of the screening protocols and the pathology tests are not grreat – a fact well known to the professionals, but for obvious reasons not shared with those of us who have a tendency to panic or fret. Who has not wondered at the efficacy of that thermometer “gun” that confirms one’s temperature at 32 degrees – the same as the 10 people in the queue ahead? Confusing and unhelpful treatise outline the implication of false negative and positive test outcomes, but merely confirm our suspicions that there is little to do beyond following the simple hygiene and distancing protocols. Trying desperately to look as if they know anything more than this, our leaders deliver cringeworthy lectures on how, for example, airliner air filtration systems work.

It may be dawning on a few  ANC employees that working for an organisation that is selling a service for which there is declining demand, and in many cases, downright antipathy, is unrewarding. So much so that their salaries are not being paid on time. Of course a political party has little to sell except patronage and many of their customers are themselves experiencing financial hardship and even questioning whether they want to be seen supporting the party that has effectively abandoned those who it so strenuously claims to support.

When the markets and investment talking heads can get a word in edgeways between the political pundits panicking about the approaching US election, they seems bemused that Tesla, the electric motor car company founded by Elon Musk, the Pretoria boytjie, now has a market valuation greater than Toyota. This is indeed a fascinating fact, but not one that overcomes the simple matter that the amount of energy available in a volume of liquid fuel is way more than that stored in a similar volume or weight of even the best battery technology that Elon and his buddies have so far managed to develop. Perhaps one day this disparity will become either irrelevant or even reversed, but until that happens anyone contemplating a long journey through say the Kgalagadi or even the Karoo would be unwise to choose a Tesla over a Toyota.

Formula 1 returns this weekend, but like most other spectator sports, without any spectators. This may be less important for the atmosphere than the ball sports as the cars themselves are noisy enough, but we will miss the eye-candy items strategically posed around the paddock and grid. It feels as if the changes that have taken place in this motor racing during the Covid-19 hiatus may be greater than  in any other. Mercedes Benz signalled its sensitivity to current affairs (and threats to its customer base) by changing the livery of both the cars and the drivers’ overalls to black. The timeless advice to “follow the money” popped up again this week in the news that Cricket South Africa had found a headline partner in Betway, an online betting business. Hollywood Bets is already a sponsor of KZN cricket. Despite the alleged depression, these companies appear to be able to make money. But do remember that bookies are always keenly aware which sporting results will be most or least profitable for them. Just saying!

James Greener

Friday 3^rd July 2020