It is an iron law of economics that, as countries develop, productivity increases, driven by technological advances that inexorably reduce demand for labour. Thus unit costs decline, rendering goods and services affordable to an ever-growing number of consumers.
Market economies defy the collectivist stance that it is all a zero-sum game in which one man’s gain is another man’s loss. It is to the market economies that emigrants wish to go and with good reason because those economies are not zero sum games.
Entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates do not become rich on their own. Their partners, staff, financial backers and shareholders also become rich or richer while the consumers of products such as those of Microsoft enjoy enhanced productivity with concomitantly higher earnings. And then there is that great American tradition of giving in which Gates has joined the likes of the Pews, Du Ponts, Fords, Sloans and Rockefellers.
And education, medicine, transportation and every sphere of life benefit from advances by those seeking their own ends who, as Adam Smith taught us, are led by an “invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of (their) intention.”
In 2015 the USA added 2.65 million jobs with unemployment at 5% which, taking into account that there are always those who choose not to work, is as close to zero as a sophisticated economy can expect to achieve. In December alone, the US created 292 00 new jobs.
Average hourly earnings in the US are equivalent to R400 or some R750 000 a year.
Here at home that well known economist, agronomist and mathematician, Jacob Zuma, has proclaimed that the sole reason for SA’s sad levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality is quite simple: the white man stole the land.
The Citizen reports that Zuma told an ANC gathering on Friday that “key among the ANC polices which would change the quality of peoples’ lives for the better was taking back the land that was stolen from them.” He seems not to be aware that just 5% of our people work on farms and this is a declining number as technology advances. With unemployment, including those who have given up looking, at above 35%, agriculture can perhaps make but a very small dent, if any, in that number.
Now SA is not alone as a country in which the indigenous peoples were dispossessed of land which they had for aeons considered theirs to roam, to live on, to hunt on, to raise crops on and so forth. They were, in essence, subsistence farmers and it is therefore not surprising that very few blacks desire to return to the land today.
Acting quite rationally, a majority of those chosen for compensation took the money and not the land. Modern farming demands high levels of skills and training, a willingness to assume debt and face uncertainties such as weather, personal safety and shifting demand.
As usual, our president ignores reality. He appears to believe that modern black South Africans would prefer to surrender their city lifestyles to return to the back-breaking, life-shortening and uncertain subsistence farming of their forebears.
In his classic work, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the late Harvard economic historian, David Landes, commented on the dispossession of the American Indians by white settlers. He wrote:
“The white man broke faith at will, while the natives were slandered as ‘Indian givers.’ Here, too, technology made the difference. Repeating weapons, batch or mass-produced with roughly interchangeable parts, multiplied the firepower of even small numbers and made Indian resistance hopeless.”
Unlike those hooligans who smear human faeces on statues, Landes knew that history cannot be altered.
He wrote: “The Indian tragedy illustrates the larger dilemma of modernisation: change or lose; change and lose. What is a man profited, if he shall gain the world and lose his soul? The new ways of today tear at indigenous peoples and ancient cultures everywhere.
“In the meantime the people of the United States are not about to give the country back and return to the lands of their ancestors. History, like time, has an arrow; but, unlike time, it moves at an uneven pace: it can only stutter forward.”
It is instructive to consider that at the start of the last century some 60% of Americans lived on and off the land feeding a population of some 120m. Today about 1% of Americans live on and off the land feeding 320m of the world’s best fed people, building up large stockpiles, exporting vast quantities around the world.
Modern agriculture is highly mechanised, scientifically conducted, run by folks with many years of high level university education behind them. And it is not and never again will be, labour intensive.
But, of course, these are facts and our Number One is interested only in his own poorly informed opinions, staying away from courts which could imprison him and enjoying a lavish and obscenely expensive lifestyle for himself and his burgeoning family at the expense of taxpayers.
