[I have been warning for some years now about the extreme DAMAGE that is caused by raising the minimum wage. But today it really hit home to me just how much damage the ANC’s laws do to the very blacks it claims to be helping.

Now keep in mind that having a minimum wage is actually a violation of the Free Market principles first expounded by Professor Adam Smith in 1776. Let us not forget that it is his analysis which resulted in modern economics and which is the corner-stone of modern European and American wealth. Today the modern socialists violate the very principles which created the first world’s wealth.

It is much more difficult noticing the damage that socialism causes in the First World than it is in Africa. Here, where things are more primitive, the damage is easier to see.

I mentioned also that when Robert Mugabe came to power in Zim that they raised the minimum wage from $10 per month to $100. The result was that whites could no longer afford hiring blacks for domestic work. This may seem like menial stuff, but this did give many blacks a form of income. When the whites fired those blacks, many of those blacks never had formal employment ever again.

Now here in South Africa the ANC has brought in a bunch of “labour laws” designed, supposedly to “protect workers from exploitation”. This is just socialist jargon. The reality is that those blacks then lose those jobs – period… and they might never be employed again!

One of the laws forced employers to contribute monthly returns to an Unemployment Fund. This is a nuisance. If you have someone working for you a little bit, and you’re hiring them off the street, now suddenly you find yourself having to register them and filling in monthly forms and sending cheques to Govt. Immediately, what used to be a simple process now makes you think twice. So now instead of just quickly hiring a black guy off the street to help you for a few days in your garden or house, you rather just don’t! And both of you are the losers, but he is the bigger loser of the two.

Now remember that it is pointless raising the minimum wage if you are dealing with unskilled people. What can they do now? The only work they can do are simple tasks which you have to show them and supervise them to do anyway. They really have limited economic use for anyone. So it was much better under Colonialism when you could make a person an offer and he could work for you. If you had a small business, then the cheap labour actually HELPED YOU and you could expand and employ more people. Under Colonialism the economies exploded because cheap labour was an ASSET, plus it offered those blacks employment and some kind of growth as opposed to sitting around huts making a subsistence living (which is dicey at best). But now, a small business or a private person needs to think twice or thrice before hiring these people because nowadays they come with all sorts of strings attached which can get you into a LOT of legal trouble! So why bother?

Let me make a simple point which seems to pass so many people by. Government Legislation COSTS MONEY and SLOWS DOWN INDUSTRY. Keep this in mind. There hardly EVER is a law which improves efficiency. Laws are really just a way of putting the brakes on things. Government Legislation not only costs money to create, but it also adds to the input costs of businesses. Legislation comes at a price – a big price, especially if the laws are badly thought out by people who have no experience of how the real world actually works!

So I have always been EXCEPTIONALLY SKEPTICAL about the value of all the myriad of stupid laws the ANC has enacted in this country. And the ANC really goes to town when it comes to wasting money. Many times these laws also result in a requirement for NEW TYPES OF COURTS! All this is cost, cost, inefficiency, etc. Some months ago I warned of a realy crazy ANC law which is coming called THE NATIONAL CREDIT BILL. Wait until you see what that law will do to banking in South Africa. They claim (as they always do), that it will “help the poor” but it does the opposite. The NCB is going to create so many problems (including bad debt) for the banks, and this will have to be offset in one way or another. The banks will not be able to bear these costs without finding some way of indirectly charging customers for it. Watch the NCB… with it comes massive changes to computer systems (mega additional costs) and … MORE COURTS!!!

I know someone who often has a jumble sale which attracts the blacks in our suburb. And the black domestic workers attend it and buy there. But over the past few years there have been less and less black domestic workers attending the sales! Finally, the cause hit me. There are less and less black domestic workers in the suburb. Often the black domestic workers also stay in rooms of the people they work for. But it is now evident that the MAJORITY of black domestic workers have disappeared from the suburb I live in, during the last 5-10 years! We hardly see them on the streets. It has happened quietly. Even I make as little use of blacks as possible. And because of crime one thinks twice and three times before hiring someone you don’t know.

Our Govt pretends that the job situation in this country is improving. But I question this. Remember some weeks back I put out a study which showed that POVERTY AMONG BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS HAS DOUBLED SINCE 1994! That is exactly what I have been predicting and saying for years now. The ANC *WILL NOT* actually be able to improve the economic conditions of blacks because their methods are actually much worse than the efficiency of the white Govt which came before it. The ANC’s methods will actually reduce efficiency, and like Mugabe, they have created an enormous bloated wasteful bureaucracy.

They claim that a few thousand jobs were created recently – in a country of 45 million with 40%(43)+ unemployment. At best their supposed statistics are a “drop in the ocean” of unemployment. But I wonder if their job statistics ever included black domestic workers – many of whom were employed informally and there was no official record of their employment. My guess is that quietly, whites have been firing perhap hundreds of thousands of them in the last 10 years. And I will bet you that most of those fired blacks were unable to find ANY work at all afterwards.

We also now have lots of blacks here in South Africa from neighbouring states who are happy to do any work you give them, and because many are here illegally, they will do it without their employers registering for UIF. I am shocked at how many Zimbabweans are working here in Johannesburg! It is almost like “Little Zimbabwe” here these days. It is quite shocking to find how many whites from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe are here, and then even more shocking to find how many blacks from Zimbabwe are here as well. The whites and blacks have been migrating south! (I have over the years mentioned this southward migration which took place all across Africa).

Let me state clearly once more that there is virtually nothing the ANC can do to actually “help” the blacks because its socialism stifles all business and makes it more inefficient. The ANC has no interest or knowledge of how to truly implement a Free Market system because at heart all their economic ideas are nothing more than variations of Karl Marx’s ideas.

Today I took my mother to a boutique she has frequented for the last 15 years. That boutique is in such a bad state – it is ready to close down. She was told that its customers are mainly white people who are buying on credit and they are not even servicing their debts properly so the store may have to shut down. Also, it seems the boutiques main suppliers have stoped supplying them. I am not sure if the suppliers have also gone bankrupt!

I’ve been taking a look around, and I think that with all the excitement of our short property boom coming to an end, I think much harder times are going to be upon us all. I think the last 5 years have gone a little better than I had expected. Even so, when I look at the businesses and shopping malls, I see plenty of closed shops.

I went walking into the large Brightwater Common mall this morning for the first time in about 2 years, and I noticed how many shops had shut down. I was looking for a particular shop I had been to before. It was gone, and so were many others. The enormous parking area they built for it is hardly used. I’d say only 20% of the parking area is actually filled with cars – and that is on a busy saturday morning.

A walk through Randburg mall will shock anyone who was last there about 10 years ago. Even during this supposed “boom”… a large portion of the shops there are empty.

I have often told the story of NorthCliff Corner near where I live. The owners of it spent millions jacking it up before 1994 in preparation for the massive BOOM everyone was expecting then (which never materialised). NorthCliff Corner has battled since then to even get all its shops filled up. Instead, there used to be 4 banks which drew a lot of customers. One by one, as the business declined, the banks withdrew. The last remaining bank there shut its doors 2 weeks ago. Whenever each of the banks closed, it resulted in a big drop in business for the whole centre. I often go there, and I know a coloured woman who has a business there, and she was so unhappy when the bank closed. She told me it would reduce the number of people coming to her shop.

As I look around, I think that the “slightly rosy” time we’ve had (economically) in the last few years is fast coming to an end. It could be that the next 5 years will see the downward swing resuming – perhaps even with a vengeance.

I would like to see what Mbeki’s CIA and Globalist friends do, and if even that will be able to stop the slide downwards. The ANC also needs to “deliver” on its extravagant promises and utopian lies to the blacks. The blacks are getting itchy, especially since things are not going so well for them.

And wait… the ANC is going to stuff up the Black Taxi Industry which President PW Botha created! I can’t wait to see what the ANC’s new taxi laws do… as it puts many black taxi operators out of business, PLUS… I can’t wait to hear the complaints from the blacks as they find TRANSPORT harder to come by. My suspicion is that the ANC’s interference will reduce the ease with which blacks used to get taxi transport. It might also increase their transport costs! Wait…

Even that jerk, our Minister of Safety and Security, who said that people could leave the country if they don’t like crime… had to admit on camera that YES VIOLENT CRIME IS GETTING WORSE IN JOHANNESBURG!! Communist asshole!! He only admits the truth when it is completely unavoidable. Typical of these ANC wankers.

So I think everyone is in for a harder time in the coming years, but interestingly, it may be BLACKS who are actually in for a tougher time (economically) than even us whites. The next 5 years are definitely going to be interesting to watch. I think the myth of our economic and political “stability” is going to take a tumble.

It might even give more impetus to the blacks to rather go for a COMMUNIST solution and to switch away from voting for the ANC, to voting for the South African Communist Party openly!

I don’t care who the hell the blacks vote for because they’re all crazy and they’re all lying to each other anyway. Black leaders lie to their followers, and the followers are stupid enough to believe the lies. And, more often than not, the bolder the lies are, the more likely the followers are to believe in them! Its a vicious cycle of stupidity and mass insanity… and when all the madness is over, the blacks will be dozens of times worse off than before. Mark my words.

We whites must just work on our own survival plan because these blacks are going to self-destruct. I have always believed that when they self-destruct that they will try to take us down with them, and at that point, we should see to it that we are ARMED! By that time, we had better be armed with military rifles if we intend surviving! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I sure as hell don’t want to go down with them. When that day comes I want to try, as best I can, to fight them with everything I have. Jan]