ON THE WATER
NEELS BLOM: ANC’s HiPPO tack ignores dumb elephant in the room
The dumbed-down opinion on land expropriation without compensation is HiPPO from SA’s highest-paid politician, President Cyril Ramaphosa
Engineers have a wonderful expression: HiPPO. It is an acronym for "highest-paid person’s opinion", an aberration widely perpetrated by those who would presume to shape public opinion. A reader in the comments section of Friday’s reportage about land expropriation quotes Sherlock Holmes as telling Dr Watson that "it is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." He refers to the dumbed-down opinion for which there is no supporting data that the expropriation of land without compensation is a good idea. It is not. It is just HiPPO from SA’s highest-paid politician, President Cyril Ramaphosa. This is not good enough. Here is why. The basis of a liberal democracy is the acceptance of the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. This is the idea that defeated the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Cold War, and that defeated fascism before that, and before that the divine right of kin...
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