The Situation in the Gifts Industry

Day 387, 02:43 • Published in South Africa South Africa • by Deus Ex

As I look out upon the marketplace early this morning, I see a lone seller with only a half dozen Q1 gifts. His price? Over 6 zar per piece.

It is a dire and desperate situation in the Gifts Industry, folks. It's a situation that's been growing worse and worse every day and now finally the industry is at rock bottom. I've personally not seen a single Gift for sale in weeks. My constituents have shared irritated tales of paying 4, 6, even 8 zar apiece for measely Q1 Gifts. Q2 Gifts, if they are even to be found, have even more outrageous pricing. The death of the Gift Industry has left us all in a terrible situation. OUr Wellness crumbles, making productivity economy-wide worsen, and our fledgling army is entirely without the reasonable means to improve wellness and combat effectiveness. The very core of the Erepublik World is built on increasing and maintaining wellness as it improve effectiveness in almost all tasks! And yet, here we are, with scarcely a gift in sight. This is a situation that is appalling, disastrous, and entirely unnacceptable. We need drastic change and we need it now. South Africa can't survive without its Gifts Industry.

Every effort has been made to try the free market, capitalist solution to the problem. At Ryan Dagari's suggestion, I personally put forward the final legislation lowering taxes in the Gifts Industry to almost non-existant levels. The Great Hope was that this would allow companies to be profitable enough at lower levels. Unfortunately, this was not the case and the situation did not change. In fact, it seems to have gotten even worse! Every effort has been made to have a free market solution to the issue but nothing has worked. Taxes cannot be lowered, it's not even possible. Letting the situation sit and "play out" as some critics have suggested is precisely what has been done over the past few months and the industry has only degraded more and more. Every logical capitalist solution has been tried, tested, and failed. It simply will not work, it's not the solution to the problem. This has been proven day after day, week after week, and the proof is in the current desperate outlook for the industry. Following the same lasse faire and low-tax course for yet another month (or two? or three?) WILL NOT WORK!

Clinging to the desperate hope that the "invisible hand" will fix all the problems in our economy is folly and narrow-minded. We simply need a different solution. Trying the same thing again and again, even though it has consistently failed in the past, is not the path to the future or to recovery. This is simple logic. Change is the ONLY solution and it is high time we had some.

So I present to you good people of South Africa the comprehensive plan that myself and Ryan Dagari have come up with. The first portion of the plan was proposed first by Ryan Dagari (of the Democratic Anarcho-Socialist Party). This is the nationalization of the entire Gifts Industry. This would be raising Income Taxes on Gifts to 99% making the few current Gift companies temporarily unprofitable. Workers will then be paid directly through Donation rather than via pay stubs as usual (eliminating any income tax on their earnings, giving them a higher net wage).The purpose behing to remove these exploiters and carpet baggers from the economy entirely. Their gross over charging for products must end! This move will then set the stage for government-sponsored companies to begin hiring co-op workers and producing Gifts on a low-profit model. This will require some selflessness on behalf of the workers, striving to create as much as possible and working chiefly for the good of the nation.

The second part of the plan is the companies themselves. This is where I, having founded and run the Bong Belly cooperative for so long, come in. I have proven, I think, that the cooperative model of business can be run highly successfully and is largely immune to the swings in the free market economy. The cheap Q3 food we produce at BB is proof enough of this. I think that the government should start or purchase, via Organizations, 2 companies to start with and they should closely follow the Bong Belly model for success. Just as in Bong Belly, the workers should be paid decent wages in addition to incentives such as free food and of course Gifts to keep wellness strong. This will make these workers very competitively priced at a lower cost to the Co-Ops and will help keep prices as low as possible. With sufficient supply of dedicated workers the industry can turn around very effectively.

As I said, this model will require some selflessness on the part of the workers, especially at first, as conditions will probably not be as optimal as described when the Co-Ops first start out. However, this model, if executed properly, will refound the Gifts Industry and allow for a strong supply of the precious commodity and can be returned to normalcy with time. It has even been endorsed by our resident Economics expert, minister of finance, and RBSA President: Hireshmont Vellos. Though he does remain hesitant about the temporary nationalization, as is undersandable in his position, he sees the strong possibility for success and is supportive of the cooperative model having seen teh stunning results of Bong Belly first hand.

I realize that there are natural opponents to nationalization. These seem to be the people who oppose it in entirety as destroying the free market. On the contrary, I believe I have shown that it will strengthen the free market in time. But there is a possibility that the legislation for nationalizing the industry will not pass due to individuals who are not willing to take the risk or who are too close-minded to consider sometihng outside of the ordinary "wait and see" policies which have given us this terrible situation in the first place. I will remind you that while Nationalization, as Ryan Dagari has proposed it, is optimal but not necessary for this plan to succeed. The government can still found or provide financing for successful gift co-ops without a nationalized industry. Even if the nationalization proposal does not pass it is absolutely imperative that the co-op funding ones do. Without them, we simply will not have a viable gifts industry in South Africa and this is a time when we need one the most.

So, post your comments here and on the Official South Africa Forum! We want to hear from you! Tell your congressmen that YOU support the Dagari-Deus Gifts Initiative!

DAS and BLF, the two parties of action, accountability, and democracy in South Africa.