Without markets, it would have been impossible for a country like Rwanda, ravaged by the war, to achieve the growth it has experienced over the past twenty years.
After an old red barn was given "heritage protection" by the city council, the owner demolished it anyway. Many townspeople cheered the defiance of the council's blatant violation of property rights.
Even if we find that property was privatized by violence back in the mists of the past, it is not the slightest proof that the abolition of ownership is necessary, advisable, or morally justified.
If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it — and its discovery would be rightly regarded as one of the great triumphs of the human mind.
Marxist G.A. Cohen is troubled by the freedom libertarians grant to property owners. But artificial limits are unnecessary when practical realities have so often intervened to limit property ownership by any one person.
As Zimbabwe's economy worsens, its government now insists residents start using easily-inflated local currency again. This is sowing the seed of another devastating episode of hyperinflation.
The fallacy that labor-saving machines create technological unemployment has not only been disproved by theory but also by the whole history of mankind.
Whether racially motivated or not, land expropriation in South Africa is just another episode of state-forced wealth redistribution — with disastrous effects.
