By 
In his muddled article Tristen Taylor attacked free trade almost as strongly as Donald Trump (“Donald Trump rose to power on a broken social contract”, May 27).
Taylor is quite wrong about the Great Depression of the 1930s: it was caused precisely by an attack on free trade with high tariffs — as Trump wants to do now. The 1929 New York stock market crash happened with the bursting of a big bubble, caused partly by investing mania and partly by president Herbert Hoover’s stupid intervention in free markets.
If sound money had been protected and free trade allowed the economy would have recovered in a few years, but Hoover imposed high tariffs, notably the Hawley-Smoot Act of 1930. Other countries reciprocated. The result was that world trade ground to a halt and there was mass unemployment everywhere.
President Franklin D Roosevelt, a rich aristocrat, continued Hoover’s disastrous policies but was a great showman and convinced gullible people that he was ending the depression with this “New Deal”. He wasn’t.
Free trade and free capitalism always produce the most prosperity for everyone, especially the poor. Government interference always reduces it.
SA’s dismal economic performance, including 43% unemployment, is entirely due to government interference: job-destroying labour laws, poverty-increasing race laws such as BEE, and miles of enterprise-sapping red tape.
How to make our economy grow? Simple: remove the dead hand of the state. Allow our people to trade and do business among themselves as they wish. China removed the dead hand of the Communist Party from a section of the people (farmers and industrialists) and the result was the largest rise out of poverty the world has ever seen.
Andrew Kenny
Kleinmond
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