The Post newspaper provides a great moral compass for the personal conduct of our leaders. Their power lies in their knack for moral clarity: they say it as it is, without equivocating. They do not preach moral grayness or relativism: to them things are clear-cut - black or white. This is why there is nothing more enjoyable than reading their uncompromising commentaries on the moral aspect of our leaders.

However, their editorials on economic issues do not have quite the same usefulness. I have never seen a Post commentary on economics that was not replete with blatant logical fallacies. For some reason, they always err terribly on logic when they make comments in this area.

A logical fallacy is simply an argument that is false. People use logical fallacies consciously or unconsciously; those who do it consciously are dishonest people who try to distort the whole argument as soon as they find that they cannot answer the points of their opponents, whereas those who do it unconsciously can be honest but merely inexperienced in mastering the art of logical identification.

In their Saturday editorial against Mr. Magande, the Post employed what is perhaps the most common logical fallacy in debate: the strawman fallacy. This is where one begins by misrepresenting the position of his opponent and then attacking that wrong position which he has just falsely created with his own imagination. The reader will tend to agree with this argument because it is usually a good argument; the only problem is that it is not addressing anything the other person actually said, so it is really a false argument.

Simply put, the Post newspaper reported what Finance Minister Magande said on one page and then in their editorial they attacked what he did not say (unless they are the ones who mis-reported what he did actually say). Magande simply said that it is not government's job to give employment to every Zambian who is trained (or educated). This is quite clear because he even contrasted this with jobs offered by the private sector, whom he also said could help provide such jobs. The Post editorial attacked him by representing his position as if he said, "government is not concerned with job creation or employment in the nation", which would be something else altogether. And as all strawmen arguments work, many people agreed with the vicious attack of the Post on such a position because the way they argued against that position was agreeable to most people. Mister Michael Sata took advantage of this strawman by also attacking Magande the next day and calling him stupid for taking such a position – a position he did not actually take! The bottom line is that he was misrepresented and therefore their arguments, though interesting, are false.

Now, in attacking what Magande did not say (that government should not be concerned with job creation), they did even attack what he said (that government is not there to give jobs to everyone who is trained). But by mixing what he said with what he did not say, even the things that he said look wrong to an unsuspecting reader when in actual fact it was not wrong. There is nothing wrong with saying that government is not there to give jobs to people. They are not.

The problem with the Post is the same one I identified in my article (From Jobs to have to Jobs to do): everyone thinks a job is a reward, or a gift, or some special assistance to someone in need. A job is a function. You don't give jobs to people in order to help them or to thank them or to assist them. If this was the case, then one can justify nepotism: you obviously love your own brothers and relatives, so you should give them jobs when they have problems; if you don't have jobs for them in your company (or government), you should create new positions. No, a job is a function that achieves a specific purpose (in the most efficient way) and one should be given a job only because that job needs to be done and she is (realistically) the right person to do it. Government should not listen to the Post when it comes to economic policy; their thinking would be absolutely disastrous for the economy if put in practice. Socialists always reverse cause and effect, putting the effect before the cause. The effect of having a job is that you will make some money and you will indeed have better chances of survival. Survival is practically the result of the job, not the cause. If survival is treated as the cause for a job, then you will do exactly what the Post is asking the government to do: to create jobs in order to help people. Thus, a government can even create new ministries just to help more people have jobs!

How can such a government even listen to you when you tell it to trim down government because of its inefficiencies? How can they listen to you when you are also telling them that giving jobs to people is somehow a moral duty they have to perform in order to help society (socialism)?

Many people might now criticize the Post for holding such a position, but this is only because they can't see that they too apply the same principle in another area: the area of privatization. How many people oppose privatization because it causes people to lose jobs? So many people say that ZESCO should not be privatized because private owners will get rid of many jobs since they will be so concerned with profit that they would therefore try to make the company efficiently profitable by getting rid of jobs that they do not need. The Post is quite consistent in this regard because they use that same argument in their opposition to privatization. It is, simply put, an irrational argument. Cause comes before effect in true reality.

Anyway, the strawman fallacy is taken to a whole new level by the Post when they even go as far as practically asking Mwanawasa to fire Magande! From this, I believe they commit these fallacies unconsciously, not consciously. I do not believe they would deliberately use their words so carelessly as to cause public anger against an innocent person, the same way that they said the words of Mwanawasa could cause public anger against some innocent members of the Task Force a few weeks ago.