Communism cultivates corruption

IT DEFIES logic that one Christopher Malikane could be, as described in his article of February 15, an “associate professor of economics at the University of the Witwatersand”.

Professors of economics in any respectable university are well aware that communism as an economic model has failed miserably.

The evidence is freely available to any literate person, from the collapse of the Russian communist empire to the only two remaining communist regimes, Cuba and North Korea, about which the less said the better but for the irrefutable fact that nobody attempts to escape to these collectivist hell-holes, only from them.

Large firms, our learned professor declares, “should be transferred to the ownership of the people” and backed by a “state-owned bank” with “state-ownership of strategic sectors”.

Give us a break, professor. All the socio-economic evidence before us suggests that states and their governments are not only useless at running productive enterprises but, via a combination of incompetence and corruption, they destroy wealth and deny society the wealth creating power of the free enterprise system.

Further, they destroy individual initiative on the grounds that there is something evil about individuals pursuing their own interests. At least, sir, provide us with economic success stories based on, as you put it, the transfer of wealth “to the people as whole” which means, of course, that the economy would become reliant on the famous wealth-creating expertise of civil servants, politicians and bureaucrats.

That model has failed miserably. One wonders where this professor was educated. Perhaps it was somewhere in the now defunct communist sphere of influence. Hyde Park