State intervention: Government continues crippling Africans through handouts

In South Africa and on the broader African continent, it seems the prevailing attitude is that black people need handouts of some sort from the government to succeed.

These handouts, in theory, come from their more well-off neighbours, taken by the force of taxation.

The benefits contrasted with the costs of such a policy that sees the state as the biggest economic player are never interrogated.

Ideals of state intervention 

Depending on the political climate of a particular nation, certain ideals about the role of the state in the economic lives of ordinary citizens prevails.

Ideas of rampant state intervention, motivated if we take the proponents of such ideas at face value, by a noble need for seeing the suffering of their fellow men eliminated.

South Africa is governed by parties that have an overt willingness for the state to be involved in the lives of citizens.

The history of the country is that of black indigenous people being conquered and subsequently ruled by a state that inhibited, if not extinguished, in some instances their life, liberty and property.

Those concerned with improving the lot of black people have seen the state as integral in achieving this end.

Of course, it was the state that inhibited the rights of indigenous black people in the past but beyond removing these inhibitions, political parties and commentators in South Africa support the state taking positive action, like welfare, free education and healthcare, free housing and in some quarters, actual free money.

All paid for by taxes and debt. Taxation presupposes productive activity. To tax something, one would need to first have created value, whose portion is then taken by the state.

The medium of exchange for valuable services or goods is usually the commodity that is taken as tax by the state.

In the modern day, this would be the fiat paper money printed by the central bank of any single country.

State intervention necessitates some form of taxation which, as we have established, presupposes already existing productivity.

Therefore, tying the material/economic prosperity of indigenous black people to state intervention programmes or actions is not sound.

Since there is a way for economic productivity to happen outside of state intervention.

By proliferating the idea that the government must do something first before economic prosperity can happen.

The required consciousness to create and accumulate capital, to be productive, outside of being connected to a state institution, is heavily diminished.

The continent is littered with the failures of interventionism.

The sad idea that black Africans need handouts from their well-off neighbours is damaging and the results are clear to anyone who looks up the economic data of any African nation.

Not to say there are no cases to be made for reparations for instance by black Africans against European and Arabic nations who terrorised them in the past.

Yet the necessity for creating one’s own capital, instead of taking it from another, whether justified or not, cannot be escaped. 

No prosperity through redistribution 

No nation in the history of nations, Western or Eastern, has ever achieved prosperity through redistribution instead of productivity and creation.

Yet, seemingly. African leaders have convinced themselves that the best way to improve lives is to have them run by the state.

To achieve what those who would argue for more intervention want to achieve, their solution of state intervention needs to be scrapped.

Instead, a belief in the myriad individuals who make up the black collective they wish to help needs to be cultivated.

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A belief is needed that even when left to their own devices, given the liberty to do with their life and property as they wish as long as they hurt no one, black people can still prosper.

Lest we perpetually march down the road to serfdom we seemingly have been on for a while as a continent.

-Mthembu, who has a law degree from Wits, is a legal researcher at the Free Market Foundation. The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the foundation.