Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In case you ever questioned the importance of the Takings Clause, consider the case of Zimbabwe, which has just nationalized all farm land. What a mess Mugabe has made of that country.
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Not to question your ultimate point re: Mugabe, but the issue of how you redress the seizure of land by white colonists is a bit more complicated then "you should institute a Takings Clause." Why should farmers be paid for land that they stole in the first place (and stole not so very long ago)?
(Note to the Repubs who will now chime in to call me a commie traitor -- do you support paying the government of Cuba for property that it seized from US companies?)
Land reform under Mugabe has been an absolute disaster, destroying both the food supply and the one export crop the country had (tobacco). Other factors were at work, of course -- including drought and a declining tobacco market worldwide -- but still.
But lack of land reform was also a disaster. Zimbabwe agreed to no land reform for 10 years after independence, and postponed land reform for some time thereafter. The result was a thriving tobacco economy, on the one hand, and a rural black population that starved on land that was too small and too infertile to support them.
Back when Mugabe was still nearly sane, initial land reform efforts were gradual and measured -- generally, seizing land that large commercial or private farmers had chosen not to plant, and dividing it among black subsistence farmers. But this was too slow to satisfy the starving population. And, as with most things in Zimbabwe, it was plagued by corruption and, ultimately, completely torpedoed by Mugabe's general slide into utter whackjobdom.
Still, what would you do? Many Zimbabweans would compare the suggestion that the country should buy land from white farmers to the suggestion that the US should have compensated slaveowners in 1865.
