The Bank of Zimbabwe is led by a ‘genius’ who always comes up with remarkably new and innovative ideas every once in a while to deal with the chronic problem of inflation in the country. In spite of the fact that his ideas never work, the man believes these ideas are given to him by “the Holy Spirit”! That’s the governor of the central bank!

You don’t need the Holy Spirit to understand basic economics and to know that your country is doing things that will lead it to hell, economically. Zimbabwe has become one of the greatest enemies of capitalism in the world. The government of Zimbabwe is getting more and more involved in the economy, controlling almost every aspect of it, and Dr. Gono is one of the architects of this government interventionism, particularly in the area of monetary policy.

Last year, he single-handedly came up with this idea of just canceling the last three zeros on all the money in Zimbabwe and he thought this would reverse the problem of inflation. At over 1000 per cent inflation, this measure did very little to change anything.

So, this year (2007), the “holy spirit” has given Dr. Gono another incredible idea that has shocked everyone who knows anything about economics: he has actually BANNED inflation in Zimbabwe! I’m not kidding: Dr. Gono has ordered all businesses not to increase prices or wages, no matter what! Is this man something or this man something? This man is something. He is probably the only person in Zimbabwe who is crazier than Robert Mugabe himself, and the president loves him dearly, of course!

You need to be neither a genius nor in tune with the holy spirit to know what is going to happen in Zimbabwe: they are about to enter a new phase of untold poverty (and total lack of commodities) that will probably lead Zimbabweans to finally do something about their government. They can’t just keep on being so docile and fearful of one man; they have to get to a point where they give their lives, if necessary, to get rid of Mugabe and the rest of his insane cronies. Zimbabweans do not realize that it is much more important for them to remove Mugabe from power than it was for them to remove the white colonialists from power: they would be much better off going back to the colonial era than to continue under the irrational rule of Mugabe and Gono.

Another country that is suffering from the irrational idiocy of socialism is Venezuela. President Hugo Chavez is doing things that simple economics have already shown to be anti-productive. He is trying to control the economy, not only through price controls, like Zimbabwe, but even through nationalization of the nation’s key industries, the socialists’ biggest fantasy.

Venezuela has already started seeing the predictable results of this: they have started experiencing major shortages in commodities, and Chavez, like Gono, is going mad thinking of new orders to issue to the business community. But you can’t run an economy like that. I think the Venezuelans will most certainly kick this man out, and hopefully, the whole of South America will realize that their recent trend of voting in populist socialist presidents is the worst mistake they have ever made as a people.

It is always just amazing to see how much ignorance rules the whole world. People with PhD’s like Dr. Gono, still can’t believe that socialism is dead and that the economy can only thrive when the government leaves it alone. Government must concentrate on providing an environment that is conducive to life and work, an environment in which people are not afraid of violent crime and fraud; an environment of speedy and efficient justice.

Zambia can do well to learn from these countries. At the moment we are not making mistakes that are on the scale of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, but we still have not fully developed the right attitudes, so it is only a matter of time before we yield to such temptations. Government should not intervene in the area of ‘casualisation’, for example, and neither should they intervene in wages, maize prices, crop marketing, and so on. I know they believe they are helping the economy when they do this, but they are actually killing it. We must go the way of capitalism, the way of the free market, the way of prosperity.

We are lucky that our Central Bank governor believes in low government spending, low government borrowing, and to a good degree, in the free market. We are also lucky that our republican president does not believe in heavy intervention in the economy. If only they can solidify these positive attitudes with a full, integrated ideology so that they can become radical in their implementation of a capitalist society – we can move from third world to first in record time. Anything is possible with the right knowledge.