Tag: private property rights

We published a new research paper highlighting the dangers of property confiscation (also known as expropriation without compensation) and nationalisation. The paper Private Property, Public Interest: Alternatives to Confiscation and Nationalisation identifies at least five alternatives, each of which empowers the vulnerable, to the government's dangerous plans which simply empower the state.

South African competition law is highly regarded internationally. In 2018, the Global Competition Review (GCR) ranked the Competition Commission as the best regulator globally. With such praise, one would expect the economy to be the most competitive in the world. This is not the case. Instead, South Africa ranks very poorly in the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report, which measures the freedom of economies globally with standards like regulatory burden, property rights protection, intervention and the general ease of opening and doing business in a country.

South Africa’s flirtation with the idea that government should be allowed to expropriate private property without being legally required to compensate owners for it stands in stark contrast to the constitutional democracy we chose 26 years ago and is already doing great damage to the economy.

Proponents of socialism and social democracy would have you believe that capitalism is a purely Western construct that carries no deeper legitimacy in terms of our evolutionary development or our historical roots. They claim that the hierarchical nature of capitalism was imposed by the West, and without this system, humans wouldn’t arrange themselves hierarchically.

It is a reality of human nature that across all cultures all people perpetually strive to make improvements in their socioeconomic circumstances. A dream that all human beings strive to achieve. An opportunity to eradicate poverty and can come in a form of a job, education or even becoming a home-owner after an awfully long wait.

Any society that restricts the economic participation of half of its members is doomed to failure, and women make up roughly half of the population in any society. Regression studies reveal that equality before the law is second only to inflation in terms of its contribution to GDP per capita growth.

The people of Africa have been subjected to multiple injustices, slights, and violence. The list of things inflicted on Africans is endless and has no modern equivalent, except for Asia in geographical terms and the Jews in ethnic terms.