States of capture

Thanks largely to civil society, we have the makings of a great nation

Through a jet-lagged latenight haze it’s easy to understand why Netflix is so popular in the US. The country’s traditional TV fare is appalling – little more than a slurry of ads used to extend the 23 minute wafer-thin plot of a detective series to an interminable 50 minutes.

Is it my imagination or is there a preponderance of health-related products amid these mind-numbing ads? In the cold light of dawn I learn there’s a good reason for the ad profile — health care is by far the largest sector in the US economy. It accounts for 18% of its GDP, overshadowing the technology sector, and employs more workers than any other sector. An American friend tells me this power not only explains the wall-to-wall ads but also why the Sackler family, who control Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma, are not behind bars. Oxycontin is one of the opiate brands linked to 49,000 deaths a year in the US.

Forget about putting them behind bars; if the authorities were consistent they would surely have led an all-out armed assault on whatever luxurious enclave the Sacklers inhabit, reducing it and its inhabitants to dust much as they did to Baghdad after 9/11.

Of course Big Pharma is not the only capturer of the US state. We now know the US Federal Aviation Administration outsourced air safety to Boeing; and hundreds of families across the globe realise just how bad an idea that was. And then there’s gun control, or rather the complete lack of it.

So, we can safely say the US government is a captured one. It is captured by profit-obsessed entities that care for nothing other than the bottom line and which, despite promises to drain the Washington swamp, have

been allowed to thrive under President Donald Trump. As with all former empires, the excess of these powerful players will hasten the collapse of shareholder capitalism.

In China the “capitalist” system looks substantially different. Whatever it’s called, the system has nurtured phenomenal economic growth over the past 20 years and allowed millions of Chinese to become wealthy beyond their dreams. Next year the Chinese government will complete the roll-out of its ambitious social credit plan, according to which all 1.4-billion citizens will be monitored and ranked based on their behaviour. “Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” says a government document, which might be less chilling to Chinese steeped in Confucianism than it is to Westerners who obsess about individualism.

So, in China, in dramatic contrast to the US, it is the government that has captured business. Perhaps, backed by its social credit plan, it will succeed in developing a sustainable form of capitalism that will replace the West’s shareholder variety? Perhaps not. It will be a precarious balancing act.

And then there’s SA, where the third leg of the national institutional architecture — civil society — appears to be thriving. Though our economy is merely bumbling along, perhaps we should take some comfort from the fact that a remarkably resilient civil society, including the state-backed judiciary, prevented the Guptas and Bosasa from permanent capture of the state. We should also note that not even the Nationalist Party in its heyday was able to ensure the government could capture the economy. The shambolic ANC is much less likely to.

We have the makings of a great nation.