a Privatised man

I don't know who he was because I only caught a moment or fifteen on the !Xolani [! =click i believe] show last Thursday morning. I don't often listen to the !Xolani show on SAFM for the same reason that I always avoided Current Affairs in the old days -the reek of 'realgoose' fills the air-.but on this occasion I heard what sounded like a formerly disempowered person, talking. I was confused because I though I was hearing Leon Louw except it was a different voice. He sounded like a Leon Louw clone-and what a glorious clone. He was so amazingly correct with what Mr Gore would call '-inconvenient truths-'

For those who don't know Leon Louw is the long standing spokesperson for the Free Market Foundation in the Southern end of the African Union. He has valiantly pointed out the benefits of a society in which all citizens are free to do their own thing for ages now and has had to endure all the usual 'slings and arrows' of outraged lefties desperate to promote their failed vision of collectivism notwithstanding its monumental global failure-catastrophic failure really for many regions of the world.

The ongoing difficulty that the Foundation has had over the past dozen years has been that those who support totalitarian social agendas have carefully smeared the inherently rational and sensible economic position taken by Libertarian economists with regard to economic life in our country.

Liberated economic theory is associated with so called 'western values' and the rising populist tide represented by the COSATU communist party alliance eschews free markets. At their recent congress the evil N word came up again after years in the doldrums with strident calls to emulate Bolivia, Venezuela and other proponents of the new Left and Nationalise Mines and Banks.

So it was amazing to hear the voice of reason coming from a member of the newly liberated class and what was even more cool was that the man's presentation was so obviously unscripted-[if there is one truly boring thing about the new SAFM set up it is the obvious use of prescripted so-called "live interview" material laboriously plodded over with amateurish earnestness by partially articulate presenters -.At least the amateurs on UJFM happily confess to being the station that is 'young enough to bend the rules' as they struggle with their own daily litany of mispronounced language.]

In a month that has contained a great deal of bleak economic news-carefully tucked away on the back pages of our day to day existence it was refreshing to note that the edge of sanity is beginning to manifest amongst those who hold the destiny of this country in their hands-and that the fellow can so obviously hold his own in a hostile environment. Now we need a hundred thousand more like him as we advance inexorably toward the coming era of the 'Privatised State'.

Democracy is only worth what it can defend; and the free market system is battling to hold its own against the natural trend towards monopoly that dominates all human behaviour. The Chinese neo-communist model of an economy produces rising material joy with few rights in areas of thought freedom. Counterbalancing this are the remarkably resurgent democratic India, and the ruling oligopolies of Japan and Korea. [ come to think of it all 'free world' democracies are really ruled by oligopolies].

Next door, Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into a corporate State which is bullying western interests in a new covert war of attrition against what was always called the free world. Assymetric corporate warfare some commentators are calling it. There are thought police at workt there too. Counterbalancing that is the chaotic democracy of Brazil. According to a recent edition of the Economist these four countries collective known as BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China] collectively control 75% of the total GDP of the 27 countries that make up their 'second' division table in world economies.

According to the anonymous speaker: The Free world comprises those countries that largely subscribe to market based theories of how a State should be run while Social based societies are frequently subject to interventions in the way markets run in order to confirm with specific agendas. The Libertarian speaker drew attention to the fact that during [an early] stage in the 1950's the average income per head of population in South Africa and Japan were the same, even more so when measured on the increasingly fashionable Purchasing Power Parity [PPP] scale [a fancy name for the Mc Donald's theory about how much a Mc Donald's costs in US dollars all over the Mc Donald's world.

He continued to suggest that as South Africa became more and more embroiled in its socialist style agenda politics [the politics of race]the country became comparatively poorer; until today it languishes in 26th position in the second division of world economies. Now as far as I know he didn't actually say the last part of that statement, I arrived where I was going and had to stop listening and I couldn't continue listening on my cellphone because I was in a meeting with humans. I checked it out later in the Economist. We rank 26 on their list and that is today's reality.

I would suggest too that the situation is is about to get worse as the Reserve Bank's Mr Mboweni starts tightening the turnique on interest rates. Oh dear.

The dilemma faced by the free world tinterviewee said, in this new era of asymmetrical onslaught is that the 'system' can only endure in a climate of competition and respect for common law: the common law that has enabled the free world to create a standard of living never experienced [to our best knowledge] by the human race in the 180,000 years since we allegedly climbed out of the trees.

We must understand how fragile this system is and how rare that speaker whoever he was [ and perhaps some kind bloggist will inform us ] is who actually understands that the world with which we play so carelessly is a mirage-a delicately contrived mirage but nonetheless like the glorious Matrix images it is ephemeral and can only survive when all parties play to an agreed sset of rules-Those
who seek to overthrow the 'system' cannot replicate it because their societies are founded on flawed principles of human interaction that mitagate against the creativity necessary to sustain this illusion.

We've had an amazing run for 500 years as this market based system free marketers have invented has gradually become so ascendant that all over the planet people are fleeing their horror filled lives to live the free world dream. Five hundred years since the period called 'the enlightenment'-this is a fraguile experience hard fought and compromised. Five hundred years? That is like we've had one good day in a year in hell, and it rained hailstones even most of that day.

So he's right and I welcome his voice of sanity whoever he was.May he continue to present his case.




Free world politicians are so compromised by a range of position shifts over the past couple of decades that