Agrarian Reform is the forced redistribution of land from the landowners to the peasants. It is a popular economic policy in many third world countries in Asia and I think in Latin America.
The problem: Western Colonial rule of Third world countries violently expropriated land(thousands of hectares) from peasants and gave them to favored families. A feudal system wherein the peasants work in the fields their ancestors died for but owned by illegitimate landowners is created. Today, the western colonialists are gone but the land is still owned by the mixed race descendants of the westerners or mestizos. These rich landowners’ families fill the ranks of the political class in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries.
The solution by leftist intellectuals and political movement: Everybody who has more than five hectares of agricultural land will be expropriated by the state and land must be redistributed to peasants working in them. Landlord is expropriated regardless of legitimacy of ownership.
The result: Landlords transformed agricultural land into industrial and residential land. Agri-entrepreneurs do not build warehouses or mills or trucks for fear of their business being expropriated.
Questions: What do you think of this? What is your solution to this if it is very difficult to trace legitimacy of ownership? Are there any libertarian analysis of the issue?
I live in an economically fascist Southeast Asian country where the masses are crying for socialism and ignorantly praise Obama for bringing change to the country that freed us from the brutal rule of imperialist Japan.
10.Land Reform - Because of past land theft and original claims not based on homesteading, many landholdings in
America are illegitimate. The Libertarian Party in cases of theft (for example, from the Native Americans and chicanos)
should support restoration to the victims or their heirs and in cases of invalid claims should advocate reopening the land for
homesteading.
BTW, there is a good text on this in the Land Theft chapter in Ethics of Liberty if you want more theory.
Man, that would win so many votes! Why aren’t people concentrating on the social benefits of Libertarianism to win over some half-hearted and misguided lefties? Appealing to people’s sense of fairness is an extremely powerful political tool.
I live in a country in which a full third of the population has moved to the suburbs of the capital in 1990, seizing the then-communal arable land. After the communist regime was done away with, the original holders of these lands claimed them back. Now, I know what Rothbard said on the issue but Rothbard had never seen land-hungry people: it is entirely unfeasible to uproot 500’000 people now, send them back to their god-forsaken towns where most will have to chose between subsistence and emigration, to free the land for 50 families who happened to be well-connected enough them for the King to give them extensive estates back in the ’30.
My own position is that, with the exception on the land theft that happened in the near past, all land ownership titles should be recognized as they are (or become within a month) the moment a libertarian-minded movement succeeds sin overthrowing the state.
Its just plain impossible to revert lands to whichever owner they could have belonged to a century ago (not to speak of not knowing how he got that land). Of course, the moment a free market is established land will begin to be distributed, by market processes, to the best users. As time goes by, the effects of the initial misallocation, brought about by statist intervention, becomes minimal. But redistributing land again once having the opportunity to, would only add to the maze of property titles. Trust me, this confusion is setting Albanian back a decade in development.
So, in two words: do not interfere and let ‘society’ decide what to do: if large landowners manage to keep their estates in the immediate aftermath of a libertarian revolution, then we should assume them to be legal owners from then on; if a flood of peasants manages to wrestle control form landowners, than it is the peasants who shall enjoy the land as rightful owners.
Well like all things it’s better to analyze this from the perspective of a free society. Suppose there is no state, and 500,000 people manage to squat the private farms or empty lots of some individuals. Now obviously with so many people living on it, the original property has been completely destroyed and replaced with something else, so there is no way to return the farm or empty lot to its owner. However, because the original owner had his farm taken from him, he does have the right to be compensated for his loss based on a contract with an insurer of property. The insurer will pay him back and then, if in any way possible, attempt to recover something from the people who squatted the land.
So you’re saying since the squatters have (presumably) modified the land, you cannot get it back the way you had it, right? The best an insurance company can hope for is to ask for some financial compensation from the new owners to recoup the loss they incurred from paying out to you. Could they frcibly extract that payment?
well that all depends. Every case in every country is special just like any individual.
I spoke to a Paraguayan guy (from Paraguay) and he told me know 80% of the nation’s wealth is distributed among the top 5 families. All resources, land, industries and governement are heavely influenced by the 5 families.
What do you do in case like this??? I dont know but I do know the present situation is unacceptable.
As a brazilian, I can tell that we never had a big land reform, and that was great!
Instead of goverment making some folks feeling entitled to some land just because, we had market forces doing the job of land distribution, and the result is that we have the best agriculture in the world, extremely productive and that doesn’t rely on subsides.
The land reform movements are a bunch of communist terrorists that have no respect for privaty property. They invade farms and instead of planting a single bean, they just destroy crops and equipment.
Historically, land reform means taking land from productive people with technical expertise to clueless, unproductive people with a chip on their shoulder. I don’t think it’s worked out very well wherever it’s been tried. And by tried, I mean forced at gunpoint/hacked to death by machete/etc.
That is the other thing these folks tend to overlook. If I were a landowner targeted for expropriation, my only question would be, how many guns you got? So much for all those elegant arguments about ‘true’ ownership.
I’m happy to hear how market forces successfully ‘redistributed’ land in Brazil. Can you show me links on this? I can relate with you about the land reform movement. The political party that combines maoist and stalinist doctrines in the Philippines wants to brainwash the otherwise docile peasants and rouse them to support Land Reform. What Byzantine said is very true. The wealthiest landowners in the Philippines hire mercenaries to exterminate the opposition.
This situation would never happen in a free market. Again to take a leaf form my own country, when in the ’30 a big wave of would-be land reformers asked the King to redistribute land form the wealthiest families (which, intoto, owned less than 10% of arable land), he just gave them the finger and left the market to sort that out. The result was that by the time the communists took over in 1945 land was very neatly distributed and there where almost no land-less peasants.
But the problem I was talking about applied to the transition between a state and anarchy, in which the solution you put forward is not applicable (there would hardly be nay such insurance product). If after the fall of the communist regime people had just opted for anarchy, the land problem would still have remained unsolved. And that’s why I believe that, only when we destroy the state and let anarchy prevail, only then, we should recognize as just whichever title emerges within a month. Its the only way out of, like sicsempertiranys said, civil war.
I’d really like to see Rothbard as an advisor to the post-communist government in in 1991. It would have been interesting to see just how much thought he really gave to the issue.