Liberals and libertarians have to become more activist about their beliefs and this does not mean the type of activism typically seen on the left, which generally amounts to inconveniencing everyone else. Libertarian activism in particular can be more enlightened; it can be about forming win-win partnerships especially in areas of the country that are far removed from the authority of national government. In that way we can spread the benefits of our values in a practical manner.
It may take some time to bring certain ideas to fruition but the libertarian has to be involved in their community. If you subscribe to a particular religion, that is an ideal place to start because much can be accomplished via the church, synagogue, mosque etc. If you don’t belong to a church you might be a member of a school governing body or a neighbourhood watch or even a workplace. All of those work because you can meet other South Africans who may come from different backgrounds to your own.
Having met different people, the next question that should be in your mind is how to serve them? How can you sustainably make their lives better off? Sometimes you can do this through business and sometimes through charity or something else, but the main thing is this should not depend on what the government thinks about the thing being done. The laws set at national or even provincial government level are not enforceable unless your neighbours decide to help the government in enforcing the law.
This should never be a problem if you restrict yourself to only those things that don’t really harm anyone, victimless crimes. Examples of such crimes are things like adults selling drugs to other adults (anyone who has been a UCT student will tell you that respectable drug dealers exist), adults hiring other adults to do jobs without caring what minimum wage the government has set or what employment equity targets the government has decided on, or adults performing services like building a house on each other’s property without paying attention to the regulations supposedly governing this.
There are certainly many other examples that can be found but if you would rather not take the risk of ignoring victimless crimes (which are not really crimes just a way to restrict the freedom of individuals), then at the very least mind your own business. If you want to get involved in this type of activism then you should be careful, only do those things which don’t truly violate the rights of anyone else.
Our problem as South Africans is not that we have an oppressive government that can enforce its whims; instead we have a government that aspires to much more than it can enforce because it knows that private actors will enforce many of the government’s aspirations. The incentive is usually the opportunity to benefit from the legislation/regulation; most regulation on companies is enforced by other companies in the same sector in order to keep out competition from the same sector.
Whenever you hear some CEO say ‘We welcome regulation of our industry’ what they’re really saying is ‘we will help you write rules that will keep new entrants out and make life harder for the smaller companies’ and this is something we have to start to fight against. The South African market is concentrated precisely because of this anti-competitive behaviour and the competition commission exists to stamp out rather than encourage competition.
You do not need a regulator of competition, you need to do away with the regulation so that competition can flourish. More South Africans need to realise that feeding on the carcass of our economy by protecting turf is not a sustainable strategy. We can hardly expect trade unions to stop anti-competitive behaviour through regulations in the labour market when large corporations do exactly the same thing in their industries.
The government does not act in isolation, every bad law, every regulation has someone in the private sector who supports it otherwise it wouldn’t exist. In some ways, we are the authors of our own misfortune and the government is a reflection on who we are. Just consider how South Africa’s environmental lobby is opposed to fracking, offshore oil and gas exploration despite the fact that we desperately need the investment and accompanying jobs. Everyone is looking out for their own slice of self-interest and no one considers how this is harming everyone else.
That is what libertarian activism must break. It must break this small minded thinking that seeks to benefit at the expense of rather than with someone else. This is the trade unionist who wants to have a well-paid job at the expense of the unemployed person, the corporate CEO who wants to maintain market share at the expense of the entrepreneur, and the environmentalist who wants to maintain a pristine environment even as millions go hungry. South Africans should adopt win-win rather than zero-sum thinking.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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