You never lose your rights. Someone may violate them, but it is impossible to take them away from you, as every socialist has come to find out. In Soviet Russia, a government that was supposedly a reflection of the peasantry and working classes was routinely disobeyed by members of both those groups. This is true also of China now, though less so than in the past.
It was this expression of natural rights that led to the reforms by Deng Xiaoping in China, which were mostly a formalisation of what ordinary people had been doing in order to survive ‘Mao’s reforms’. This can be seen also in South Africa’s history and at the present time. People doing what they need to survive are often a source of much inconvenience for the State. For example, the taxi industry and the informal sector continue to vex past and present policy makers.
Sihle Ngobese, aka Big Daddy Liberty, has a mini-series on the taxi industry on Youtube; please take the time to watch it. The series helps highlight the difficulties caused by government policy for taxi entrepreneurs, among them being its inefficiency in issuing operating licenses and favouritism in awarding subsidies. Yet, the industry has also created associations which are community-based and local, to regulate themselves by resolving conflict through clear and common-sense rules.
The South African experience during the lockdown serves to reinforce this, through voluntary associations ranging from informal traders to taxi owners, business groupings, religious groups and so on. Notice the conspicuous absence of traditional leaders in this, for various reasons. Firstly, traditional leaders are landlords, with no understanding of the modern consumer economy in which informal traders and taxis operate.
Secondly and most importantly, individuals can only act through voluntary associations if they are to act at all. This makes traditional leaders irrelevant. Theirs is a leadership that is based on genetics, not competence. It does not relate to their ability to make the members of the nation they lead better off. The pre-colonial societies, with their looser federations of tribes, were arguably better than the current traditional leadership model in which the aristocracy’s interests are ultimately backed by the force of our modern state.
A common mistake that is often made is looking to politicians as representatives of the people, and a second mistake is looking to traditional leaders in the same way. Membership of any representative institution must necessarily be voluntary in nature. Churches are a great example, perhaps the best example when it comes to the South African context.
South Africa is in an unprecedented time in its history. The time for dialogue among South Africans on their future is at hand. The genuine and practical way to start this conversation is through identifying the associations of individuals that South Africans have freely chosen. This is a difficult task because the engagement must be meaningful and constructive. It must provide a basis for building a shared future in which people can choose to associate and disassociate freely with any other individuals.
When talking to taxi associations, we must understand their issues and offer solutions to these, as Big Daddy Liberty did, armed with research from the Institute of Race Relations. Voluntary associations are formed out of necessity; individuals usually respond to some threat or opportunity by associating with others where necessary. That is why these voluntary associations are often doing practical work, whether it is Afriforum repairing potholes, or a neighbourhood watch defending property and lives.
It is therefore critical that the intellectual capacity of liberals be devoted to understanding and providing solutions to local issues that are independent of a government that is not negotiating in good faith. While it is easy for a community to come together to fix a pothole or patrol the neighbourhood, or even to tacitly allow the breaking of an irrational law by not reporting a shop-owner selling restricted goods, it is not always obvious which other goals to pursue.
Many communities are ravaged by unemployment. Often, communities suffer from this, when local small businesses need services but can’t afford them at the price dictated by the distant Pretoria government. The solution here is an understanding of market forces by both sides, on which a common agreement can be forged at the local level to creatively sidestep the irrational law.
If the community backs the project, the recent past has shown us that there’s nothing that the government can do to stop it. For this project to be successful, complementary ideas would need to be promoted: self-reliance, the importance of savings over debt and so on. The connection between low-paid jobs, savings and increasing wealth needs to be understood.
In particular, people in townships can use their savings to build the economic future they want by investing these savings in local entrepreneurs. Over time, this will lead to a greater concentration of wealth creation in the townships. This is because the demonstrated success of local community institutions in enabling wealth creation will attract investors who will not even need to consult the national government.
But that comes with time, sacrifice and planning, including the promotion of the right set of values. In particular, we should not be ashamed to align ourselves with the moral message of abstinence as preached by the church and embedded in customary law, while simultaneously promoting the rights of women and promoting contraception as a valid choice for both men and women. The practical liberal understands that welfare is being used to keep people politically dependent on the government. It must go.
One of the justifications used for welfare is that it is needed to feed the children. It should be a matter of pride that a particular community of individuals is able to raise children though the sweat of their brow, helping each other, saving for the future of these children, and creating a wealth-generating economy that they can all be a part of.
Dependency eventually becomes slavery. A determination to rely on yourself, along with your voluntary arrangements with others, is a necessity for those who yearn to be free.
A sober analysis of reality, and abandoning fantastical solutions which conveniently ignore the real sacrifice required to build anything of value, must take root. The best chance at beginning this pragmatic process, whose rational outcome can only be liberty, starts with understanding how individuals exercise their God-given rights and authority on Earth. It will be through the voluntary associations that individuals spontaneously form when some important goal must be reached, regardless of what the government says.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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