Author: James Peron

Markets are competitive – it’s a mantra that we hear often, and I’m certainly not disputing it, at least when we are speaking of depoliticised markets.

Capitalism has long been attacked with the argument that it leads to individualism, which is a social evil. It wasn’t a very clear or cogent argument but it was popular.

Poverty, in some important ways, is similar to the pandemic, as are all major problems. To solve the problem we have to understand the basics thereof.

That’s how it is with migrants. The prime reason people migrate is to improve their economic status. In short, that means by moving they produce more wealth in their new location than they did in their old one.

One of the great errors in economics has been the assumption that value is the result of the labour used to produce a product. While this fallacy is often associated with Marxism – because Marx’s entire theory of exploitation relies upon it – this assumption was not originally his own.

On February 24th Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Even as I write his troops are still bombing civilian targets and killing women, children and the elderly.

On January 24th Minister Stella Ndabeni Abraham proudly told the public, “We have a responsibility to enforce regulatory compliance in the SMME (Small Micro Medium Enterprises) sector and close businesses that are trading illegally.”

Several decades later, we are witnessing something reading like Sharpe’s fiction, but it’s a costly dilemma for South Africans.

One message from the Holiday season has been ‘on earth peace and good will toward men’. That is what freer markets ultimately strive to obtain. It’s more than just profit, or jobs, it’s human well-being and happiness.