Culture and development

Anti-business, Colonialism, Culture and development, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Indigenous self sufficiency, Slavery

Climate Change: The Trinity of Animism, Woke & the Holy Geo-spirit vs. the Western Satan

Johannes Wessels

Listening to an enthusiastic introduction of acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, a crucial question came to mind: How do (and should) we read books? Are our brains clean canvasses for authors to fill with colours and the medium of their word brush, or do we read through filters of our accumulated insights, always full of prejudices and opinions, ranging from mellow to stringent.

Ghosh leads an unmitigated onslaught on Western culture, economic development, rational analysis and even systematic theorising and science. He becomes the Matthew, Mark and Luke gospel writer for animism and vitalism, with Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth, and the Paradise of Indigenous Harmony his inspiration.

Continue reading →

Central planning, Culture and development, Eastern Cape, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Job creation and unemployment, Lockdown, Township enterprises

The waves societies choose to ignore at their own peril: face masks are the new ‘Heil Hitler!’

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

In the last months of the Year of Covid-19, the world experienced a massive resurgent wave. It wasn’t a wave of deaths by coronavirus, but a lockdown tsunami engulfing individual and civil liberties. The excess deaths caused by governments’ decisions to relegate non-Covid health issues to the realm of non-essential treatments, also became more visible for those who had eyes to see…

Another heaving wave – poverty due to the swelling unemployment and enterprise demise that the lockdown measures and the autocratic disruption of economic life brought about – also gained momentum. The impact thereof is certain to dwarf that of the virus itself.

If the worldwide death toll of 1.359 million attributed to Covid-19 is divided by the daily average global death toll of 158 085 (for 2019) and one fills the annual calendar according to deaths by cause, the feared pandemic with its vicious waves is closer to a ripple than a tsunami. EOSA developed a Cause of Death Calendar that shows:

Covid-19 related deaths scarcely exceed a week on the annual calendar, filling a mere 8 days, 14 hours and 30 minutes. (This includes all Covid-related deaths whilst several studies already found that pre-existing co-morbidities, and not Covid-19, accounted for the majority of these deaths. In fact, a UK study of 20 133 inpatients found that Covid-19 was the sole cause of death in less than 1 in 4 deaths Covid-related deaths).

Continue reading →

Anti-business, Central planning, Company tax, Corruption, Crime against business, Culture and development, Economic freedom, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Enterprise friendly environment, Job creation and unemployment, Lockdown, Municipal efficiency, Municipal legislative compliance, Public service delivery, Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), State Capture

Is it right to pay tax when clean and safe hands are missing at the till?

Johannes Wessels (@johannesEOSA1)

SARS commissioner Edward Kieswetter’s biggest headache is not the gaping R300 billion crater in tax income this financial year or the growing Everest of assessed losses for companies that will impact negatively on CIT for years to come. His biggest problem is how to convince taxpayers to sustain a government that under the pretext of “a better life for all” has served up a toxic mix of corruption, wastage, mismanagement and anti-growth policies.

In addition, the very same government has doggedly pursued a lockdown strategy not underpinned by much logic that could yield any outcome other than a severe economic disaster with long term humanitarian effects. These effects include shortened lifespans, poverty related deaths, and deaths from medical conditions the government deemed non-essential. The toll of this inept strategy will in all likelihood dwarf the real Covid 19 death toll.

Lockdown has mowed down millions of jobs and several hundred thousand businesses. Those that survived have been severely crippled: they have a radically reduced income, have run up losses or have achieved less than half their previous taxable income.

One recalls the words of Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, whose theology and philosophy influenced ancient as well as modern thought: “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”

Tax compliance in a lockdown context

Continue reading →

Central planning, Culture and development, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, ENTERPRISE TYPES, Inequality, Job creation and unemployment, Lockdown, Marxist-Leninist ideology, Spontaneous order

Will Cyril be remembered as Nongquase II ? The modern day killing of cattle…

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Just just now (and not “long, long ago!”) there was a man who ordered his people to shut their doors and refrain from going to their places of work. His name: Cyril Matemela Ramaphosa. He told the people of South Africa that there was a way to ensure that the reputedly voracious beast called corona virus would not create havoc in the land.

The Keiskamma Tapestry, Cattle-killing Panel, Detail 3. Copyright Robert Hofmeyr

All his people had to do was to follow the advice of Nongquase as recorded in writing by William Wellington Gqoba who, as teenager, had lived through the infamous cattle killings and the resulting famine amongst the Xhosa:

“Shut yourselves in your huts… In order to survive, you are to use many doors to close each hut, fasten every door tightly, and abstain from witchcraft.”
William W Gqoba: The Cause of the Cattle Killing

Substitute the words “abstain from witchcraft” with the phrase “abstain from going out to work and buy only what we allow you to buy”, and one has the contemporary equivalent of a decision that had decimated the livelihoods of tens of thousands of the Xhosa in the mid 19^th C with a spiralling death peak caused by the resulting famine.

This is how it is happening in real time now. Cyril called together the many-too-many chiefs that form his cabinet. They talked and they talked and they talked. And they consulted with themselves and they consulted among themselves and they consulted again for themselves.

Continue reading →

Construction services, Culture and development, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Informal businesses, Small enterprises, Small towns

Creating jobs and reducing poverty: why not enable the informal sector properly?

Author: Frederick Fourie

President Cyril Ramaphosa aims to set the country on a new path of growth, employment and transformation. Key to this are action plans for employment creation, to be deliberated at a jobs summit.

The South African Informal Sector: Providing jobs, reducing poverty A new edited volume, published by HSRC Press, flags the importance of explicitly addressing the informal sector in such initiatives, given the key role it plays in providing paid employment and reducing poverty. The book is based on research done in the Research Project for Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3).

This research shows unambiguously that the informal sector is an important source of employment (and of paid employment), with a growing propensity to employ. Regrettably, for many decades the sector has remained forgotten or, at best, in the margins of economic analysis and policy consciousness. Many policy makers appear to group it together with formal SMMEs. Such an approach risks missing key elements of the ‘forgotten’ world of informal enterprises – their potential, the constraints they face, their particular vulnerability, and the policy support they need to be viable and self-standing.

How many jobs are created in the informal sector?

Continue reading “Creating jobs and reducing poverty: why not enable the informal sector properly?” →

Construction services, Culture and development, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Job creation and unemployment, Professional services, Religion and economics/Ideology and economics

The economic consequences of Luther: Ideas have legs, but some come with leg-irons

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

500 Years after Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman saved their theses to the internet: Beliefs have economic consequences.

Old news, one might say, recalling Weber. But Weber’s thesis was always contested: assumptions of cultural traits based on unreliable statistics from the 19th C. Cantoni, Dittmar and Yuchtman (further-on Cantoni and co.) offer hard micro-statistical evidence from the century when Luther protested against Papal authority : 1517 was a watershed year in how people viewed the world and those (world)views had economic consequences.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper of October 2017 they state: “the pre-Reformation era can be understood as an equilibrium in which a monopolist religious producer (the Catholic Church) provided political legitimacy to secular authorities at a high price—charged in the form of control over resources, tax exemptions, and some degree of political power. The Reformation represented a competitive shock in the market for salvation. Protestant reformers offered a popular, lower-cost alternative to the Catholic Church… This had implications for the allocation of resources between secular and religious uses…”

Continue reading →