Just like daisies - spend 20-30 years under progressive liberal administration and people yearn for freedom. From Toronto, Canida's The Globe and Mail:
Libertarian Herman Mashaba elected mayor of Johannesburg
Herman Mashaba is a millionaire tycoon, an ideological libertarian and self-proclaimed “capitalist crusader” who lectures his listeners about the evils of big government and minimum wage.
He is also, shockingly, the newly elected mayor of South Africa’s biggest city. That’s a revolutionary phenomenon in a nation dominated for 22 years by a left-wing ruling party, whose cabinet ministers tend to be communists and union leaders.
Less than a month after winning office as Johannesburg’s mayor, Mr. Mashaba is already energetically putting his free-market ideas into action. He is distributing thousands of title deeds to impoverished residents, trying to create a new class of landowners. He is plotting with private developers to turn the city into a vast construction site, and he is pledging to use small businesses to slash the unemployment rate.
“My job is on the line,” he says, inviting voters to defeat him in the next election if he fails to reduce the city’s jobless rate from its current 31 per cent to below 20 per cent.
Great values:
His highest value, he says, is “individual freedom.” He rails against the “culture of dependency” and excessive regulation in South Africa. “I’m just asking the government to leave us alone,” he says.
Two ideas that I really like:
Despite his wealth, the 56-year-old mayor describes himself as “pro-poor.” He has even cancelled the ANC’s plan to create new bicycle lanes, seeing it as a middle-class luxury and preferring to spend the $5-million (U.S.) on housing for poor people.
Bellingham just spent a bunch of money on some new bicycle lanes - these occupy some of the busier thoroughfares and restrict traffic from two lanes down to one. They could have moved the bicycle traffic off to a more residential street and not impacted the flow of traffic and quieted the flow of automobiles through the residential streets; just one block north or south.
But he believes he can best help the poor by unleashing the private sector. This week, he called a meeting of private-property developers, expecting 40 to attend. Instead, more than 100 developers flocked to the meeting, eager to hear his ideas. A day later, he sent an e-mail to his senior officials, ordering them to boost their help to the developers by easing regulations, improving street cleaning, increasing visible policing and fixing infrastructure.
Private Sector is BOSS! Make things conducive to small business and watch the economy bloom.
Tip of the hat to John Lott for the link.
