Scrapping liquor ads will cost jobs

When President Jacob Zuma announced that billions of rands worth of taxpayers’ money was going to be spent on creating jobs, I gave him the thumbs up.  After all, employment is the key to solving the problems or poverty and crime.

But then I started wondering why no-one was actually saying anything about looking at ways of making sure that people who already have jobs were able to retain their employment.

Somehow or other, the whole notion of a government in a capitalist society spending money to create jobs clashes with the very fundamental of a free market economy which requires companies getting rid of people to ensure that shareholders get their pound of flesh.

So now, for the next decade, every time a big company makes a couple of thousand people redundant, you and I, as taxpayers, have to cough up for finding them jobs again.

But government is not exactly playing the game either. On the one hand it will be spending our money trying to create employment, but on the other it is doing things that end up with people losing their jobs.

Here’s a classic example:

The minister of health is under pressure to reduce the incidence of alcohol abuse in South Africa, a country identified by the World Health Organisation as a major problem area.

What the minister has indicated is that he is thinking of doing this by banning all alcohol advertisements. He wants to do this in spite of research and practical experience in other countries showing that banning ads has no effect whatsoever on reducing alcohol abuse. At best, banning ads might reduce actual alcohol consumption, but only by a few percent.

Some countries that banned ads in the past have now unbanned them simply because it had no effect whatsoever on reducing alcohol abuse.

In fact, ads haven’t been found to get youngsters started on drinking. What gets youngsters started on drinking, I am reliably told, is peer pressure and parental example. Friends who pressure friends into having a drink. Parents who don’t see the signs of alcohol taking over the minds and bodies of their children. Parents who shrug their shoulders, talk with bravado about how all kids get drunk from time to time.

So all that a ban on alcohol advertising would achieve, in fact, is that more than just a few thousand people in the media and marketing industries will lose their jobs as a result of roughly R2 billion disappearing out of the overall advertising pie. And I have to wonder how many of them will turn to drink as a result of being unemployed?

I know that for politicians and alcohol abuse lobby groups, banning advertising is an easy thing to do as it shows society at large that something is actually being done about the problem. This is what happened with tobacco. It wasn’t the advertising bans that reduced smoking, but rather very strict legislation about where one could and could not smoke. Anyway, if smoking is so bad for us (and, of course, it is), why doesn’t government just ban smoking? They won’t of course, because so much tax revenue would be lost.

But if banning alcohol advertising isn’t really going to have any significant effect, is it really worth sacrificing thousands of jobs just to make it look like someone is doing something?

I really think that government, consumer lobby and interest groups should be very careful of not putting people out of jobs for no reason other than scoring political brownie points with voters.

I have used the alcohol advertising ban as an example because it is a controversial subject. Maybe someone else will argue that I am completely wrong.

All I am saying is that before this sort of decision is taken, everyone concerned should think very carefully about whether the resulting loss of jobs is actually worth the potential benefit—not to mention the fact that consumers and taxpayers end up having to pay for this sort of mistake.

It’s not just about saving jobs; it’s also about saving you and me from having to pay for things that might well be completely unnecessary.

I think it is quite astounding the number of decisions that are taken by government and industry regulators in the interests of protecting the public when the massive cost of some of these measures is inevitably passed on to you and me, as consumers, in the form of taxes and price increases of products.

I don’t know about you, but I am getting thoroughly sick and tired of having to pay for the insanely stupid decisions other people make, especially the misguided do-gooders who are turning our beautiful country into a paranoid nanny state.