Envy as a sullen demon / AI generated
Good things come to an end; bad things have to be stopped. I'm not sure where I first heard that expression but it has been top of mind for me as 2013 drew to a close.
The most obvious good thing that ended was the Mandela era. The most obvious bad things are everything that has gone wrong in our country since we elected Jacob Zuma as our president.
I've been trying to get my head around exactly why we are screwing up so badly as a nation in the post Mbeki era. It comes down to one word — envy.
Envy is what leads us to constantly focus on other people's success instead of building our own.
Envy is what leads to the obsession with how much executives earn compared to the lowest paid workers.
Envy is what leads to the obsession with how much whites earn compared to blacks.
Envy is what leads to the obsession with how Afrikaans medium schools continue to thrive while other indigenous languages are side-lined.
And this is killing us.
It kills us because our response is to try to put in place some sort of “corrective” action.
So we want to cap executive salaries. So we want to take from whites and give to blacks. So we want to force Afrikaans medium schools to teach in other languages.
I don't want to debate the morality of such actions — there are some people who feel very strongly about such matters and it is their right to do so. I don't believe though that we appreciate that all corrective action comes at a cost.
The cost of racial quotas in the workforce is that positions go unfilled because one is not able to find a qualified person of the appropriate demographic to fill the vacancy.
In the private sector, the result of unfilled vacancies is a corresponding loss of productivity. Loss of productivity means lower profits. Lower profits mean less tax ploughed back into the fiscus.
In the public sector, it means that unqualified or unproductive personnel are placed into those vacancies — think of schoolteachers who cannot teach or of police officers who cannot write out a docket.
Some departments then hire consultants at huge expense to perform the functions that full time employees are paid to do but cannot. You and I pay for this.
Other departments simply do not do what is required, then get taken to court and are forced to pay out compensation. You and I pay for this.
Racial quotas in higher education come at a cost. There are insufficient black matriculants with decent mathematics scores needed to study science and engineering and medicine. So instead of increasing numbers of white students in science and engineering and medicine, universities enroll black students in social sciences and theology and other frivolous degrees. The cost to you and me is fewer doctors and engineers and scientists, and more unemployable graduates.
The true disaster for us as a nation is that no one in our mainstream political leadership is willing to step up and say openly that these practices are killing us.
The idea of criticising affirmative action in any form is such a political hot potato that everyone skirts around it.
The result is that the practices continue, expectations are raised, the ability to deliver falls.
The governmental response in every case — to meddle further; imposing new quotas and putting in new rules while continuing to blame apartheid — has served them well. Every new quota and every new rule increases the cost to society and decreases the amount of wealth generated and the number of jobs created.
But consider this: every time government increases its stranglehold on the free market, the beneficiaries are inevitably those who are in government.
If you want to see how this ends, check out a recent study in The Economist which compared the personal wealth of the 50 richest members of Congress in the US and the 50 richest members of China's parliament.
The American politicians clock in at a total of $1,6 billion. The Chinese politicians clock in at a total of $94,7 billion.
So, my wish for us in 2014 is that we lose the envy, forget corrective action, and set the economy free.
As our collective wealth grows, there will be more money to plough into infrastructure, social welfare, public healthcare, education.
Happy New Year.