That position is not primarily ideological, academic, or political. It is moral.

Roughly 20 million South Africans live in misery. They have no jobs and no way to earn a decent income around which to build a stable family and develop strong communities. Stop and think about what it would be like if that were you and you knew there was very little that you could do to improve your circumstances, look after a family, or offer your children the chance of a good future.

That is why this newspaper treats reform with such urgency.

The cost of bad policy is not simply lower growth, weaker investment, or deteriorating public finances in an abstract sense. It is unemployment-induced poverty that crushes the human spirit and leaves millions of cases of individual human potential unrealised.

This is why The Common Sense is so critical of those who obstruct reform, dilute it, or sit on the fence while reforms are delayed.

For South Africa’s political and business elites, the poverty around them is a choice that was made through policies that they either endorsed, sat on the fence over, or chose not to use the influence they command to counter. As a great South African once put it, “They have prostituted their considerable influence to be popular.”

The right reforms must pass a single test. Do they attract investment, raise growth, and create jobs?

The positions this newspaper advocates are put through that test. Hence its firm opposition to capital taxation and expropriation, and its firm endorsement of restoring merit above race in public and private appointment processes, refitting the Eskom coal fleet, exploiting South Africa’s oil and gas reserves, placing the entire rail and port infrastructure under private management, adopting a charter school model, and striking an investment and trade pact with the United States by conceding that its concerns about empowerment and expropriation policy are valid.

In very rare cases does a single South African entity, political party, or business forum endorse that full spectrum of reforms. Too often, reform is treated as a buffet from which bits may be chosen, but that cannot work to get the investment and growth rate up again. Last week, a column in this newspaper divided the world into two camps, the good people and the bad people. On reform, it is again as simple as that, and the good people are those who use whatever influence they have to advocate for ideas and policies that will liberate 20 million of their fellow citizens from misery. The others are on balance part of the problem and must be called out on that, regardless of how rich and important they may be.