Nationalisation is one of those stories for which the punchline is: “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
OK, that was easy. But in fairness, we criticised Eskom even before it ran out of electricity, for using more resources than needed to serve its politically captive customer base. Political markets resemble the broader market of civil society in that there are incentives, agreements to be made, and resources to be traded. The difference is that most of those resources are other people’s money and, due to the multilateral nature of political choice, those resources were not obtained without coercion.
Such countries that focus primarily on protecting private property rights, the foundation of all other human rights, have also been the most successful at limiting the power of their own governments to infringe on such rights. The SA government’s push to, at best, allow the state to confiscate property without compensation, and at worst nationalise all land, therefore does not bode well for the domestic market.
As the private medical sector shrinks or goes underground the government medical sector will suffer a disproportionate loss in efficiency, and the bureaucrats will demand more money. Always more money.