Comments on: We need a nanny state

By: Jonas

Jonas — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 12:10:15 +0000

China is not a communist country, despite official labels.

And more people died under Mao during the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution then under any other leader, ever, including Stalin. Mao was a seriously bad dude with wrongheaded ideas that the country only began recovering from after his death.

Sentletse, you make an interesting argument but your faulty grasp of China and Chinese history lets you down.

By: X Cepting

X Cepting — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:29:30 +0000

@Fergie – The Chinese can afford to pay our leaders bigger bribes for prod. orders, of course they are popular.

By: Mark Robertson

Mark Robertson — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:38:29 +0000

You raise very good points. The status quo in SA is a disaster, and for most, poverty is endemic. Most of our political parties are defending vested interests of elites, not proposing radical change. SA’s desperately needs a Marshall Plan to completely open up the economy and cut all the red tape that is destroying jobs – however the Dept of Labour and Trade Unions may be the greatest job destroyers of all. Is there really salvation in an even more nannying state? China is in fact not a socialist or communist state but a National Socialist state a la Germany 1937 – order, control, discipline, no labour movements, no class distinctions, Volksgemeinschaft, enormously productive. But on the other hand, controlled and repressed. It works for a culture of discipline and a ‘volkisch state’ like China. But in SA? With our culture as you note of “lawlessness, chronic idleness, poverty and dependency on the state .” Would an even more controlling state not just make things even worse?

By: fergie

fergie — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:33:02 +0000

@Chris2, thanks for a very good article about China. The workers in China are becoming restless and there have been many strikes in China. The workers in China are housed in group homes by the factories. The pay is one tenth of what a US workers makes doing the same work. This country has pegged their currency to the dollar and control what’s come in that country. I don’t understand why the leaders in SA are throwing praise on China when this country has destroyed the manufacturing sector in SA. The big question will COSATU wake up to what’s going on?

By: chris2

chris2 — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:52:57 +0000

Sentletse,
One must commend you for trying to gain a new perspective. I just want to correct a misconception about China. Mao was a totally corrupt leader who almost ruined China with his Giant Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, a man who fits in well with the likes of Stalin and Hitler. The brutalising of sections of the population, e.g. the intelligentsia, is beyond comprehension. Post-Mao, the Communist Party has apparently been able to re-invent itself and its policies and it has been following a radical modernisation tack with truly unbelievable results, although one tends to forget that the majority of the population is still eking out a living in an agrarian subsistence economy. Paradoxically, the leadership still pay homage to Mao, mainly for the benefit of the older generation who remember a greater equality (even if it was in relative squalor) and who have not benefitted much from the upswing. The phenomenal development in China during the past two or three decades has IMO only an equivalent in the rebuilding of more than fifty (West-) German cities in ten to fifteen years after WW2. China has unleashed a capitalist-type economy in which entrepeneurs can become wealthy; phenomenal investments in manufacturing plant by the West and Japan and Taiwan to exploit cheap labour has certainly kickstarted the development. It is a moot point whether the workers were exploited. Cushy jobs for all is simply not a formula for great strides forward. Adequate investment ist most important.

By: Belle

Belle — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:38:27 +0000

Democracies have failed all around the world …mainly because none of them practise true democracy, as defined by those ancient greeks, promoted Earned Freedom, not Bestowed Freedom.

True democracy requires that the right to vote is earned through qualification and productivity. The primary reason democracies fail is not because of poor leadership, but because of poor quality voters, who elect bad leaders.

By: Sipho

Sipho — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:27:00 +0000

Sentletse be serious now. There’s no country that is successful in the world. Every country has its challenges to grapple with. The call that we should all make is that people should never forsake their rights, because rights are always contested. They should always put up a fierce contest, be it at workplace, in society and in government.

By: Perry Curling-Hope

Perry Curling-Hope — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:26:59 +0000

Sentletse,

You appear to be labouring under a number of misapprehensions…

China is not one homogeneous country with one uniform political system.

Whilst there is autocratic central planning there are vast differences in policy applied to different regions.

Most of China’s booming and competitive economic output derives from the ‘Special Economic Zones’ (SEZ’s) in which very high levels of market freedom prevail
There is no ‘protective’ labour and environmental legislation, wages are determined by supply (very great) to the market and some entrepreneurs (and no doubt bureaucrats) become extremely wealthy.

By way of example,

One reason solar panels be can produced at approx. 1/3 of the cost in the West is that a major byproduct, silicon tetrafluoride, is stored in drums on storage lots or dumped, apart from the obvious factor of wages not being artificially inflated by pressure from unions or fiat of central planners.
In the West the stuff must be recycled at great cost, an ever increasing range of invasive regulatory mandates complied with, and a growing range of entitlements paid, rendering the industry totally uncompetitive…this IS ‘nannying’ by the state, and has never produced capital growth and economic efficiency or competitiveness.

Contrast this with China’s rural population, which lives in relative poverty under a yoke of feudalism and enforced collectivism and severe human rights abuse, which is the product of the dictatorial element of policy.

They’ve simply expanded the elite who enjoy freedom from repressive hectoring of their lives

By: Po

Po — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:51:11 +0000

China may be succesful, but there you can be executed for taking a bribe, to be gay is unnaaceptable, the people are censored, they are not free. They cannot vote. Do you really want to give up the freedoms of democracy to live like that?

By: kelvin

kelvin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:37:43 +0000

So Sentletse you want to return to the old apartheid days? Where the state tells you what to think, what to observe, what to read what to do and how to act. So you have proved the old school white south africans right, black africans are not mature, educated and well behaved enough to enjoy individual freedom, but need a strong dictator to rule them. You will make people like Hitler, Stalin and Idi Amin proud