Point of order
TIM COHEN: The road to hell is paved with set-top boxes
The migration from analogue to digital television transmission is now in much longer pipeline
The primary modern narrative of the ANC and its intellectual hangers-on about business is that it is resistant to change and incapable of changing on its own so the government needs to “intervene” aggressively in the economy to achieve “justice”. Yet nowhere is the intellectual vacuity of this philosophy more damningly refuted than in SA’s set-top box fiasco. This is not to say business doesn’t try to manipulate change, doesn’t resist change and doesn’t try to twist change to its own advantage. Of course, it does. But what the advocates of this philosophy, if we can call it that, miss is the huge writhing, inchoate mass that is “business”. It’s not the specific thing they think it is. They miss the role of the incentive systems that rule business and government for that matter. And they miss, most of all, that hackneyed phrase, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The story of SA's move — or nonmove as it happens — from analogue to digital provision of a television s...
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