Overtures from state capitalists are a Trojan horse
Of all the scary things finance minister Tito Mboweni said in his mediumterm budget policy speech last week, this was the worst: “We need to demolish the walls that exist between the public and private sector.”
The notion is that a good relationship one based on trust between the government and business is good for the country and good for the economy.
At first glance this appears to be true, if only because business tends to whine a lot about government hostility and its growth-killing brinkmanship. The trouble is, the clamour assumes that a good relationship a trust relationship is desirable.
Really? Business wants business to prevail; the government wants (in conflation) the state to prevail. This is the basis of distrust, and it is a good thing, because the relationship between the parties is a turf war. Government wields regulation, and business has the constitution for a shield, while parliament writes the rules of engagement.
In a war, either party would be daft to trust the other. If business archetype Stephen Koseff says the relationship between the government and business is closer than ever and Mboweni says he wants more, business should be leery of a Trojan horse. He is a dangerous flyfishing fifth columnist, as is his boss.
But that is not why Mboweni is so scary. The worrying thing arose in 1911, when American explorer Hiram Bingham stumbled upon Machu Picchu, a mountain ruin in what is now Peru. Bingham thought he had found a lost 15th-century Inca citadel, but he was wrong. Excavations have revealed preBabylonian structures 10 times older and the original stoneworks were more akin to an aristocrat’s holiday house.
That would’ve been that, had it not been for a sinister coincidence. Also in 1911, the German sociologist Robert Michels gave the world Michels’s iron law of oligarchy (in political parties), which said that the “tactical and technical necessities” of any complex organisation create an oligarchy. Michels liked it so much he migrated ideologically from being a left-leaning syndicalist to the far right to a become member of the Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini.
This happened through Michels’s inevitable sublimation of the idea of state capitalism into the viral doctrine of oligarchy (see Hitler, Adolf). Michels was, after all, born into a class that appreciated the value of productive capital.
The sinister part is that we know that any civilisation older than Babylonia is alien of the extra-terrestrial type. We know this, first because Machu Picchu is in South America, where they also have those alien spacecraft landing strips, according to TV. It follows that Bingham must’ve stumbled over the wrong stone and released a fast-mutating virus (all viruses are originally extra-terrestrial), which he inhaled in the thin mountain air and later exhaled on an unsuspecting US from where it spread around the world.
Also, Charlton Heston (not his original name) is a good example of how rapidly and insidiously viruses get around. He once played the heroic lead in the 1955 film
filmed on location at Machu Picchu. Not long afterwards, he backed former US president Ronald Reagan and served five terms as the president of the National Rifle Association, which is clear evidence of an alien bug that spawns bullying oligarchs.
Mboweni’s toenadering to business is dangerous because it intends to advance the cause of the ruling oligarchy, whose ideology is state capitalism. SA’s elite, its oligarchs, are neither socialist nor do they favour the free market. They are capitalists who are state sanctioned to exercise force against citizens. Their intention is to extract rent (read e-tolls) at every opportunity and treat with disdain anyone who objects to its breach of the social compact.
Anyone co-opted into entering a deal sugar-coated as a public-private partnership with such an entity may as well make the world flat again.
The state is, for the moment, a necessary wickedness up with which the people must put. The walls between the public and private sector are there for a reason. The people are not daft, Mboweni. They can see you coming.
MBOWENI’S TOENADERING IS DANGEROUS BECAUSE IT INTENDS TO ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF THE RULING OLIGARCHY