BRIAN KANTOR: Reform agenda entails more order, and less legislation and control
The government’s priority is not only to restore order but create confidence that it can provide protection against disorder
The willingness of communities in SA to defend the property of others — specifically shopping malls — during recent riots is of deep significance. At great danger to themselves they established a line that looters and vandals feared to cross. They did so protect what was of value to them — convenient access to the great variety of goods and services, necessities and luxuries at shopping malls and their retail tenants.
In fact, people were defending the market-based economic system, of which the last step in a supply chain is the well-stocked shop around the corner, from which such people have realised they benefit in practical and important ways. They are unlikely to be able to explain that the market delivers via a highly complicated, well-informed supply chain that reaches across the globe, one that is held together through the discipline of required returns on their owner’s capital put to risk in all the different enterprises that link producers and their customers...
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