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While Africa Starves, Its Leaders Change the Subject

Blog Post | Wealth & Poverty

While Africa Starves, Its Leaders Change the Subject

Zimbabwe’s catastrophic experiment with land expropriation has ended in starvation.

On March 6, Tristan Voorspuy, a former British army officer and founder of luxury safari company Offbeat Safaris, was shot and killed by pastoral herders in Kenya, while inspecting some of his lodges. His murder was only the latest in a spate of killings, land invasions and destruction of private property that are, apparently, being incited by local political leaders in the country. 

Three days earlier, Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, called for confiscation of farmland without compensation. These assaults on land rights in both countries are taking place while Zimbabwe’s catastrophic experiment with land expropriation and redistribution is reaching an apparent denouement in the form of widespread starvation. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

The issue of land rights in Africa is a complex one. In many African nations, the farmland was stolen, or purchased under suspiciously generous conditions, by the settlers after the European colonial adventurism revved up toward the end of the 19th century. 

On the other hand, the Europeans have become Africa’s most productive farmers, introducing to the continent large-scale farming, better fertilizers and higher yields, and more scientific ways of raising animals. By producing greater quantities of food more cheaply, they have benefited the local population as well as the national exchequer. 

Professor Rondo Cameron wrote in his 1993 book, The Concise Economic History of the World, that Africa was home to 120 million people in 1900. Today, it is home to 1.2 billion Africans. Only Latin America experienced comparable population growth during the course of the 20th century. 

Moreover, Angus Maddison’s data shows that Africa’s gross domestic product grew by over 1,600 per cent – not a far cry from the GDP growth of over 1,700 per cent in China. Of course, Africa was starting from a very low base, which explains why Africans remain the world’s poorest people. 

Speaking of the original inhabitants of the continent, there is very little evidence that Africans are desperate to farm. The idea of having a plot of land may be compelling for a variety of reasons – including the satisfaction of seeing an act of ancient injustice rectified – but land redistribution does not solve a number of practical problems.

First, most Africans desire to live in the cities, where they want to become accountants, managers and traders. Like people elsewhere, they abhor the drudgery and monotony of agricultural life. 

Second, reversion from large-scale to small-scale and subsistence farming can undermine farm efficiency and, consequently, food production. 

Third, experience shows that newly-landed small-scale and subsistence farmers are often in need of state subsidies, which puts further pressure on the exchequer. 

Finally, assaults on land rights can have catastrophic knock-on effects on the overall economy. 

Take the example of Zimbabwe. In 2000, Robert Mugabe, the 93-year-old dictator who has run Zimbabwe as his private fiefdom since 1980, gave the green light to his supporters to invade commercial farms, many of them held by white Zimbabweans. The private property rights of commercial farmers were revoked and the state resettled the confiscated lands with small-scale and subsistence producers – many with no previous farming experience. Agricultural production plummeted. 

The farm invasions had ripple effects throughout the rest of the economy. The banking sector, which used farm land as collateral, was hit by bad debt and curtailed the issuing of new loans. The manufacturing sector, which relied heavily on processing agricultural goods, went into a tailspin. 

Declining domestic production deprived Zimbabwe of the ability to earn foreign currency and buy food overseas. Famine and hyperinflation, which peaked at 89 sextillion percent in 2008, ensued and communicable diseases spread. That year, Zimbabwe’s GDP per capita collapsed to a level last seen in 1952.

In fact, the results of a poll conducted by the South African based Helen Suzman Foundation, in September to October 2000, indicated that only 6 per cent of Zimbabweans rated the land question as the country’s most important issue. Most were concerned with a lack of jobs and falling living standards. 

I suspect that Mugabe fanned the flames of anti-white resentment and green-lighted the farm invasions in 2000 for the same reason that Jacob Zuma has started to talk about land expropriations in 2017. 

Back in 1999, Mugabe lost a referendum on the new Zimbabwean Constitution and his party, the ZANU-PF, appeared poised to suffer an electoral defeat at the hands of the movement for Democratic Change in 2000. Similarly, in 2016, Zuma’s African National Congress suffered major electoral setbacks in the local elections and is poised to lose its parliamentary majority at the next general election scheduled for 2019. 

After 23 years of ANC rule, South Africans are disgusted by high unemployment, failing public services and widespread corruption. Better to change the subject and pick on a small and defenseless minority. As I said, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

This first appeared in CapX.

Blog Post | Economic Freedom

The Degrowth Bestseller “Slow Down” Perpetuates a Major Myth about Capitalism

Free markets have often been accused of incentivizing short-term profit-seeking, but really the opposite is true.

Summary: Kohei Saito’s book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto critiques capitalism as inherently short-sighted, blaming it for environmental harm and societal problems. The book fails to explain how its preferred centralized government systems would better prioritize long-term outcomes. The “tragedy of the commons” shows that, contrary to Saito’s argument, private property systems provide the best incentives for sustainable planning.


There is a common view that free-market capitalism systematically perpetuates short-sightedness. The dog-eat-dog selection pressures of the free market force capitalist enterprises to focus on next quarter’s profit-margins at the expense of any long-term vision of a better future, so the argument goes. 

This is a central thesis of the 2024 international bestselling book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito, philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo.

Saito blames capitalist short-sightedness for virtually all major problems of modern society, from the world hunger of the post-Industrial past to the environmental collapse he predicts will happen in the future. 

About the future, he writes:

Capitalism reflects the opinions of shareholders and business owners living in the present and therefore ignores the voices of future generations, creating yet another type of externality by shifting the burden of environmental damage to the future.

About the past, he writes: 

Problems arose from conducting agriculture under capitalism as well. Agricultural businessmen became concerned primarily with the short-term bottom line, preferring to profit from serial cultivation of the same land over leaving fields fallow to allow their nutrients to be renewed. Funds used to maintain the soil, such as those used for irrigation systems and the like, were also cut to the bare minimum. Capitalism always prioritizes short-term profits.

This argument has a fundamental flaw, one that is common to many critiques of capitalism: it blames the economic freedoms of capitalism for failing to perfectly solve a problem that all other systems of political economy solve even less well. 

Saito is correct to observe that sometimes capitalists are short-sighted, often pursuing short-term profits instead of their own long-term interests, let alone the wellbeing of future generations. But nowhere does he even begin to explain how the government officials empowered within his preferred system would be better incentivized than private property owners to think long-term. 

Despite all rhetoric about “the common good” and “collective ownership” and “the will of the people,” at the end of the day each limited resource is going to be controlled by some individual with a disproportionate material interest in the wellbeing of herself and her family. A regime of private property allows for long-term planning by ensuring that what individuals don’t consume today they can save for tomorrow, or better yet invest and profit from tomorrow. By contrast, all divergences from the system of private property result in a “tragedy of the commons” to a greater or lesser degree. 

The tragedy of the commons, a basic concept in economic theory, is the circumstance that arises when multiple agents have access to a scarce resource that is unowned or “commonly” owned between them. It is a “tragedy” because the lack of private ownership creates a race to exploit the resource before anyone else does, destroying the feasibility of long-term planning. Long-term planning may be in everyone’s interest, but the first agent to sacrifice the common good gets rewarded at the expense of everyone else. 

This situation manifests frequently in the real world. In a New York Times article reporting the extinction of several species of aquatic wildlife in Bahía de Los Ángeles, Aaron E. Hirsch explains:

If a fish population is controlled by a single, perfectly rational agent — an idealized entity economists refer to as “the sole owner” — he or she will manage it to maximize its total value over time. For almost every population, that means leaving a lot of fish in the water, where they can continue to make young fish. The sole owner, then, will cautiously withdraw the biological equivalent of interest, without reducing the capital — the healthy population that remains in the sea. But if the fish population is available to many independent parties, competition becomes a driving concern. If I don’t extract as much as I can today, there’s no guarantee you won’t take everything tomorrow. … Around the globe, the same dynamic has unfolded in one fishery after another. … A 2008 United Nations report estimates that global fisheries, currently worth about 80 billion dollars per year, could be worth more like 140 billion — if only they were managed properly.

In his 1962 book Man, Economy, and State, the economist Murray Rothbard explains that much the same dynamic is at play in the allocations of tax dollars by government officials: 

…while a private owner, secure in his property and owning its capital value, plans the use of his resource over a long period of time, the government official must milk the property as quickly as he can, since he has no security of ownership. … In short, government officials own the use of resources, but not their capital value (except in the case of the “private property” of a hereditary monarch). When only the current use can be owned, but not the resource itself, there will quickly ensue uneconomic exhaustion of the resources, since it will be to no one’s benefit to conserve it over a period of time and to every owner’s advantage to use it up as quickly as possible. In the same way, government officials will consume their property as rapidly as possible. It is curious that almost all writers parrot the notion that private owners, possessing time preference, must take the “short view,” while only government officials can take the “long view” and allocate property to advance the “general welfare.” The truth is exactly the reverse. The private individual, secure in his property and in his capital resource, can take the long view, for he wants to maintain the capital value of his resource. It is the government official who must take and run, who must plunder the property while he is still in command.

For these reasons, you could have predicted correctly throughout capitalism’s history, or determine from the data now, that Saito’s pessimism about the consequences of free-market capitalism is misplaced. 

More because of privatization than despite it global per capita daily food supply has increased from 2,181.25 kcal in 1961 (the earliest year for which reliable global data are available) to 2,959.11 kcal in 2021. And similarly, that annual climate-related deaths have declined from 1.27 million in 1900 (the earliest year for which reliable global data are available) to just 86,500 in 2023. And so on

It is time for the likes of Saito to quit idolizing coercive government power and start subjecting it to at least as much scrutiny as private capital.

This article was published at The Daily Economy on 11/19/2024.

NBC News | Human Freedom

Americans Can Now Visit China for up to 10 Days Without a Visa

“China said Tuesday it was expanding its visa-free transit policy, allowing Americans and other eligible foreign travelers to stay in parts of the country as long as 240 hours, or 10 days, as officials try to attract more overseas visitors.

China’s National Immigration Agency announced the measure, which is effective immediately, on its WeChat account, saying passport holders from 54 countries are eligible. They include countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia, as well as the United States and Canada.

Previously, travelers could stay in China visa-free for as long as 72 to 144 hours depending on where they visited, as long as they continued on to a third country or region.”

From NBC News.

E&E News | Energy Production

BLM Approves Geothermal Project, Moves to Ease Permitting

“The Bureau of Land Management issued a decision record approving the Cape Geothermal Power Project in southwest Utah, which would have the capacity if fully built to generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power about 2 million homes.

The Interior Department also said it is proposing a new categorical exclusion that would streamline the process to evaluate and approve ‘geothermal resource confirmation operations’ of up to 20 acres. These could include drilling wells that would be used to to confirm the existence of a geothermal resource, the agency said.

The goal is to ‘accelerate the discovery of new geothermal resources throughout the West,’ and particularly in Nevada, which the agency says is ‘home to some of the largest undeveloped geothermal potential in the country.'”

From E&E News.