Everything gets tested but political ideas, they become policy

The dog ate my assessment

The first time that grateful taxpayers get to react to some peculiar idea dreamt up by an errant politician, is when it gets forced upon them. In a competitive political milieu, there is – at least – the opportunity to vote out idiotic political hacks and replace them with people you hope will undo the damage. South African taxpayers have little expectation of seeing the padded rears of ANC fat-cats departing any time soon.

And so we have the tedious, but certain, progress through parliament of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Policy, the National Health Amendment Bill, the Film and Publications Amendment Bill, the Superior Courts Bill and various recent utterances by ministers of housing, and public enterprises (amongst others).

A recap: BBBEE creates a complex and astonishingly expensive mechanism of introducing race-based profiling across every single aspect of economic and social activity; the health bill will shut down the private health sector; the publications bill will censor the press; the courts bill will give government control of judicial budgets; the minister of housing, Lindiwe Sisulu wants to make it illegal for recipients of public housing to sell their property; the minister of public enterprises, Alec Erwin, wants to nationalise whatever is left over.

These are all quite dramatic ideas. There is a wealth of evidence produced by organisations as diverse as the World Bank, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit which shows that liberal economies fare tremendously better than state-controlled ones. We have the next-door evidence of Robert Mugabe's failed Zimbabwean state to go by if we wanted first-hand proof.

Yet, there is no debate over policy proposals. Once the ANC decides, it is as good as over. The experiences of those attempting to reduce the scope for damage in both the current health bill, and the judicial amendment bills show that government has scant regard for input from the very people who will be most effected by legislation.

The assumption by the ANC government is that people are puppets who can simply be told what to do. That a piece of legislation automatically guarantees complicity and submission. It does not.

History is littered with the shattered debris of failed policies. In 1662 Charles II, king of England, imposed a hearth tax on his island nation. Henceforth every household would have to pay two shillings per year, per chimney. It was designed to be fair, in that the wealthy had more chimneys and should, therefore, pay more.

It was an extremely unpopular tax, not least because tax inspectors had to come into people's homes to inspect. Almost immediately people began to avoid the tax by bricking up their chimneys. In 1684 a fire broke out, destroying 20 houses and killing four people in Oxfordshire, after a baker broke through from her stove into a neighbour's chimney in order to avoid the tax.

In 1689 the tax was repealed and replaced with one that was even sillier; a window tax. People avoided it by, as expected, bricking up their windows. It was even more unpopular being seen as a tax on "light and air". It may, or may not, have been the origin of the phrase "daylight robbery".

The point is that people are not mindless automatons. They will react to protect themselves from silly and victimising pieces of legislation. Every time a new threat to civil liberties is unveiled emigration consultants' phones ring off the hook. Business confidence is at a seven-year low, and falling.

The choice for government is to test their ideas and prove that they deliver positive returns for all. Otherwise the choice they leave South Africans is to deny the nation either their skills or their investment.