Thursday, July 16, 2009

Bad Ideas in South Africa

There's an interesting article at CATO called, "The Zimbabwe-ification of South Africa?" Apparently the South African government is considering expropriating land (ie stealing it from its owners by force), and redistributing it (no doubt to political supporters). Despite the terrible failure and economic destruction wrought by such policies in neighboring Zimbabwe, South African Marxists have learned nothing. Of course if they had, they wouldn't continue to hold Marxist views. Here's a comment by one of the South African ministers pushing such a program,
"It shouldn't be a situation where we can't get land because it's too expensive because it's owned by Americans, by Germans, by other Europeans and people outside this country, and not Africans. . . ." "To redress [the] imbalances of the past," Mr. Nkwinti continued, "the government must have enabling laws that can allow the pace and the price of land acquisition to be in the hands of the state, rather than in the hands of the seller."
This is typical of statists/collectivists everywhere, including here in the U.S. Look at the healthcare debate and you will see echoes of this sort of thinking. We don't like market-generated prices because they just don't meet our ideas of the way things should be. Therefore we will use the power of government in order to artificially force things into whatever mold we think should be best. The authors point out that,
Land expropriation does not lead to justice or prosperity. As the case of Zimbabwe shows, it is a road to economic destruction. South Africa must turn back now before it is too late.
Unfortunately this type of advice, based in reality and on examples of past failures, will likely fall on deaf ears. Ideology, "fairness," and the need to "do something" are just far more important.

2 comments:

  1. Don't we do the same thing here with imminent domain? I remember reading about a case in which they redefined any house in a certain area as unliveable (and therefore automatically condemned) if it didn't have 1 bathroom for every 1.5 bedrooms and central air. Which would have resulted in the mayor's house being condemned if it had been in that area. (My house would be condemned under those rules, too.)

    However you name it, imminent domain doesn't seem like a good idea. I wonder about this, though: It shouldn't be a situation where we can't get land because it's too expensive because it's owned by Americans, by Germans, by other Europeans and people outside this country, and not Africans

    You can't really argue that European nations and the US abused Africa shamelessly for quite some time. Do we own that land because of that shameless abuse, or do we legitimately own that land?

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  2. Yes, there are all sorts of examples of eminent domain abuse in the U.S. -- such as condemning neighborhood houses and giving the property to developers because they can increase the tax base.

    "You can't really argue that European nations and the US abused Africa shamelessly for quite some time. Do we own that land because of that shameless abuse, or do we legitimately own that land?"

    If you look further up in the CATO article, the land he is talking about is foreign-owned as a result of investment in "game preserves" and real estate. That seems to indicate relatively recent foreign investment, not colonial holdovers -- although I could be wrong. And I'm not sure how much of that investment goes back to the apartheid days.

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