Tag: Free Market Foundation

While health laws and regulations are always made with the best of intentions, the costs that they represent to the economy – particularly in trying times like today – are unacceptably high. This is especially true for small businesses that must comply with a host of First World standards. It is time to reassess.

From 1995 to 2015, informal settlements increased by 650% and the current housing backlog has risen to 2.6 million houses. President Cyril Ramaphosa claims that the Expropriation Bill allows the government to 'expropriate land for public use, for use of our people'.

South Africa’s labour-law regime is difficult, if not impossible, for small businesses to comply with. It imposes a relatively higher cost on them than on large firms. This leads to fewer people employed in small businesses, and often leads to small businesses not being formalised and therefore certainly not complying with the law.

Despite their ostensibly noble intentions, licensing laws protect incumbent firms by preventing new, small businesses from entering the industry and competing. This is in addition to creating new avenues for corruption, and criminalising ordinary economic activities. South Africa’s licensing regime must be significantly scaled back.

According to government reports Britain’s new prime minister Liz Truss is planning to freeze household energy bills at broadly the current level this winter, using government-backed loans to energy suppliers.

Historical land dispossession has handicapped South Africa’s economic development, particularly of small businesses and small-scale agriculture. This, combined with continued restrictions on subdivision, lack of secure title, and threats to constitutional property rights, impede rapid land reform and economic growth.

South Africa’s tax laws were designed for a high-income society – a result of a long history of the country accommodating a small, wealthy economy, and a large, poor one. But for a country with tens of millions being either unemployed or receiving very little income, being one of the world’s highest-taxed states does not make sense, particularly when small business growth is so crucially important to our economic future.

All taxes are wealth taxes. All taxes imply the transfer of wealth from the individual owner to a government agency. The only difference between taxes is the tax base or event upon which the tax is levied, and the difference between the total burden borne by the taxpayers and the amount of revenue actually received by the government.

According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey, just over 40 million South Africans were of working age (15-64 years old) in the first quarter of 2022. Of these, 14,914,000 had a job. This means that almost 15 million adults in this country were wage slaves; people who have no choice but to give up what they produce to someone ese just to survive.

The electricity crisis in South Africa is self-inflicted. This has become clear from the many costly disruptions in electricity supply over too long a period. There is something fundamentally amiss with government policy in this area. At the centre of the problem is Eskom, the leviathan which enjoys monopolistic protection shielded from potential competition.