If you are not able to achieve for yourself the greatest desire of your heart, your life’s goal, your destiny, no one else will do it for you. At best, someone will make some token effort in exchange for something they want from you that helps them achieve their own goal.

This is a reality of life. We cooperate on shared interests, but these are always building blocks to the bigger picture. Never the whole thing.

I have come to the point where I judge political parties based on the number of promises they make to the electorate. The parties that promise to do the most for you are the parties that want to keep you dependent and use you as voting fodder. The state is not some benevolent god, it is made up of people with flaws and their own agendas.

This means a party like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is not even under consideration for me. They are promising everything from free housing to jobs, land and everything else that you should, by right, be doing for yourself. This is exactly the attitude that has led South Africa to the brink of destruction. The African National Congress (ANC) and National Party regimes gained power by promising to do all manner of things for the majority of the electorate and they kept this power by keeping enough of those people dependent on them.

I say, no more! I want to see a liberated South Africa, perhaps for the first time ever. That is why I will be voting for the Capitalist Party of South Africa (ZACP). I am sick and tired of being told I am powerless and that politicians know more than I do what I need.

The ZACP sometimes falls into the classic South African trap of promising to do things for people that they ought to be doing for themselves: The best example being their negative income tax proposal. They do so less often than the other parties and they have a principled commitment to liberty, so they deserve my vote more than the rest.

The simple fact is that no one deserves a job, no one deserves a business, no one deserves a house, etc. We come into this world having nothing, and whatever we have when it’s time to leave, we build for ourselves. We do this through cooperation with other free individuals pursuing their own enlightened self-interest.

I am excited that the ZACP seems to be aiming to free South Africans from the masses of regulations that we have to comply with when starting a business. Regulations on small business and the labour market are actively keeping people poor for the benefit of cronies in trade unions and big business. This is a crime against the human spirit, against our inalienable right to pursue happiness, as Thomas Jefferson might put it.

Life is wasted when the individual is not free. It might seem “sensible” or “commonsensical” to raise taxes on some or regulate the activities of others, but in practice, it means that a person might be born and spend their lives running up against artificial barriers. It means the ability to make what they may of this one-shot thing we call life is diminished. It is an act of great evil.

I hope that explains why I am supporting the ZACP. I do not believe they can solve my problems or those of the 9.6 million unemployed South Africans. What they can do is start getting this oppressive state out of my way so I can do it myself. It is the best thing I can do to get more liberty for myself on 8 May.

I will end with an obvious point but one that needs to be said nonetheless: Politicians are not gods. The ZACP should know that getting the support of voters like me means the very opposite of unconditional support. I will hold them to a higher standard if they get into Parliament because I will be expecting them to honour the principles they promised to stand for to the letter, no matter how inconvenient or harmful to their political fortunes.

Vote ZACP and maybe we can get started on the hard work of restoring to South Africans the liberties that have been taken from them more than 107 years ago.