Victor the Apostate Windbag has some sensible thoughts on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez: "Chavez is no socialist, his land reform strategy… may have provoked the ire of the US and even absent landholders in the UK, but has, if we are honest, more in common with the land reform of Lincoln, than that of Lenin…"

He may, possibly, be going a bit far with "quite objectively, there is no better government on the Earth today than that of Hugo Chavez Frias". But the land reform thing is an extremely annoying point, and one well worth dwelling on.

Robert Mugabe’s land reforms in Zimbabwe are bad, not because they involve expropriating land from foreigners who stole it in the first place [*], but because they involve taking the country’s most productive land and giving it to corrupt murdering thugs to fuck up (and because said corrupt murdering thugs frequently murder the relevant foreigners).

Crooks like Mugabe have given a bad name to land reform. But it’s an essential step if we want to see market economies in the developing world: effectively, we need to replace the feudal system that prevailed in colonial Africa and South America with one based on individual property rights for the people.

[*] I find it hard to get terribly excised about what Robert Mugabe has done to wealthy Europeans, who either have or are eligible for developed-world passports anyway. The reason he’s one of the worse men alive is because of the appalling suffering he’s inflicted on vast numbers of poor Zimbabweans, who don’t have the same opportunity to flee.