Aug. 21, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:51
4173 The End of South Africa. Prepare Yourself.
South Africa has moved forward with plans to expropriate white-owned farm land, with little to no compensation or due process, in a move which will doom the country to future catastrophe. Stefan Molyneux looks at historical examples of similar situations and outlines the disastrous consequences of President Cyril Ramaphosa's foolhardy endeavor. Human Intelligence (IQ) | The Experts Interview Serieshttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMNj_r5bccUyYzJ5G1GgvfM59JEpDkteX&South Africa Coverage Playlisthttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMNj_r5bccUyG-NzFt-U9cwU3ey7KxQ1ZYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It is at hand and the ripple effect of that collapse will be felt worldwide as millions and millions of people will flee starvation and chaos and corruption looking for any safe haven from the hell that has been created for them.
The issue at hand at the moment, the tipping point, the straw perhaps that breaks the camel's back, is land seizures, otherwise known as theft.
Now this has been a thorn in the socialist mind of South African leadership, well, for decades really, and it is a tale told by communists full of sound and fury, signifying collapse.
Because what the communists and the socialists and the leftists do is they look for any discrepancy in outcome.
Some group is making more.
Some group is making less.
Some group has more land. Some group has less land.
Some group has more savings.
Some group has less savings.
Some group are more engineers.
Some group have fewer engineers.
And then they say that the only conceivable possible explanation for any discrepancy in the outcome between groups It's bigotry.
Racism, sexism, you name it, it is evil bigotry and that is the only possible cause.
Now, it's not true.
There are many causes for discrepancies between groups outside of racism and the interesting thing is that to call all discrepancies between ethnic groups racism is in fact racist because in general it blames whites for all statistical discrepancies and outcomes between ethnic groups which is false.
There are many other and better explanations and in particular Intelligence differences on average between ethnicities, which is well documented and I've talked about many times on the show, had the experts on to talk about.
We'll put an entire list in the description to this video and in the notes to the podcast so that you can go through this and understand it.
But that is the actual explanation and to claim otherwise is a form of vile bigotry and racism.
What has happened? Well, in 2017, the South African government found that whites, who are 9% of South Africa's population, own 72% of the country's private farmland.
That's the way it's described, but that's not the way it is.
Now, the way it's described is you say, wow, 9% of the people own 72% of the farmland.
That seems horribly unjust and unfair.
That must be fixed. It's predatory.
They must have stolen it. They must...
Okay, first of all, the farms...
They're not just owned, they were created, you see.
South Africa, like Africa as a whole, kind of dry.
And these farms that were created by mostly the Dutch farms called the Boers...
These farms were created, they have complex irrigation systems, significant amounts of technology, they require extraordinary high levels of intelligence and competence to operate and transferring them is not particularly easy and it has been tried many many times in South Africa.
The farms were acquired through enclosures, they were acquired through trade, through treaties, and sometimes they were acquired through conquest.
The right of conquest is recognized by just about every tribe I've ever read about in South Africa, so complaining about it hundreds of years later seems a bit precious.
And, I mean, there was an indigenous population in South Africa.
When the Bantus came down, where are they now?
See? It only seems that you can use guilt against people who have that kind of So this is where this leads, and it never stops.
So the South African government has now begun the process of stealing, of seizing, of expropriating, of taking white-owned farmland.
And there are reports that the South African government has filed legal paperwork trying to steal two farms and offering a mere one-tenth of their estimated farmland.
Now, I want you to understand this, because this is the government coming to your house and saying, we are now taking your house, we're going to kick you out on the street, and we're going to pay you one-tenth the value of your house.
If your house is worth $500,000, they're going to be paying you $50,000.
Good luck with all of that, except it's far worse.
The farmers who have been farming there, I mean, just to get a sense of the perspective and the time frame we're talking about, a lot of the white farmers in South Africa have been farming that land.
It has been family land for longer than America has been a country.
So they're going way back.
And each farm, each, in particular, the white farms in South Africa, feeds 3,000 people.
Feeds 3,000 people.
The ANC's leader, the African National Congress's leader, also said that, well, we can just take land anyway without compensation if it is, quote, in the public interest, which of course is a big phrase for I wish to punish my enemies and reward my friends the basic process of politics as a whole.
So, there's one piece of land that they say, well, it got assessed for 13.8 million dollars in 2011.
That's 200 million rand because, well, the rand used to trade parity to the US dollar, but now, of course, with corruption and malfeasance and debt and a 37% exclamation mark unemployment rate, it's lost its value completely, well, significantly, let's say.
So, yeah. It was assessed for 13.8 million dollars, 200 million rand.
The government wants to take it for 20 million rand or 1.38 million dollars.
Now, they're also saying that they're going to offer this and take the land without the benefit of a court's judgment regarding the land's value.
You're supposed to be legally guaranteed that a court is going to determine the value of your land.
Now, under apartheid, of course, from the post-Second World War period into the 90s, well, first of all, the population of blacks under apartheid rose 800%.
And birth rates in Africa as a whole, South Africa, among the blacks are very, very high.
So it is a challenge when you convert extra wealth into more babies.
That is a challenge for economic growth as a whole.
But under apartheid, So most of the land was, of course, created, founded, cultivated, and resulted in the ownership by white South Africans.
And what they did was, after the regime, after the apartheid regime fell in the 90s, well, the ANC said, well, we want to transfer at least 30% of the land to blacks.
And they got about 10% transferred, but it is a big problem.
And so... The majority of the agricultural land is still owned by whites.
And this is something that drives people who don't understand the other explanations for disparities of outcome between groups.
It drives them nuts. But for the average population, it's not an issue.
You understand? If you're living in some urban center in South Africa, whether you're black or white, and there's massive amounts of crime, there's massive amounts of corruption.
Unemployment is huge, rampant.
Housing is dilapidated.
Public services are declining or decaying.
And according to a 2016 Institute of Race Relations survey, less than 1% of South Africans think that land ownership is one of the country's, quote, serious unresolved problems.
Less than 1% of South Africans think that land ownership is not even the most important, it's just one of the...
Important issues. Unemployment, public services, housing, crime, way higher.
So it is an invented issue designed to inflame and race bait and create racial tensions and cause problems, and it is going to be a complete and absolute and total disaster, as we saw before in Zimbabwe, which we'll get to in a moment.
And the transfer of land through other mechanisms has been tried many, many, many times before, and no one has ever analyzed as to why it has particularly failed pretty much every time it's been tried.
So after apartheid, the South African government bought land and then offered compensation to South Africans, the blacks in particular, whose property they said had been seized after 1913.
And they said, well, you can have the land if there's evidence that your land was forcibly seized after 1913.
You can have the land back, or you can have money.
And the vast majority of the blacks said, we don't want the land, we just want the money.
Now, of course, the money is probably gone, the land lies fallow, and so on.
In the 90s, black South Africans also received grants and subsidies to buy land.
And what happened?
Well, a lot of overcrowding, poor land use, and the land often ended up lying down.
Fallow. Then the government said, oh, we're going to help black citizens buy into large-scale farming.
And those who said, great, you know, I'll let the government help me become a massive farmer, well, they ended up in debt and scarcely able to compete.
Under President Zuma, the government started buying up land.
For redistribution.
And they did this through leases rather than outright property transfers.
Didn't work. And we've seen this before in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe was a very rich country relative to the rest of Africa.
Robert Mugabe grabbed land in 2000.
And grabbed land without compensation.
What does that mean? Well, international investors kind of notice when land is being grabbed without compensation because it means your property rights are not secure.
Now, investors can invest anywhere.
So why would they go to some place where the government can just up and take your stuff?
I mean, it's crazy.
So what happens is, with the increased uncertainty in the market, you have to have much higher returns to price in that uncertainty.
And if you can't get those higher returns, you simply won't invest.
So the international investors, the business community, just don't want to do business there.
So in Zimbabwe, 4,500 farms, of course they were mostly white-owned, were stolen, ripped out from under people's feet, and they were given to 200,000 black Zimbabwean families.
4,500 farms stolen and given out, redistributed to 200,000 black Zimbabwean families.
And it was a mess. It was a mess.
So, in the less than 20 years since, out of the 4,500 white commercial farmers, fewer than 300 remain.
The coffee and tea business has collapsed.
There used to be 500 coffee companies in Zimbabwe.
Now, there are three left.
And, of course, what happened was agricultural production collapsed, which meant that Mugabe had to run to the West hat in hand and saying, some mysterious famine is striking my people.
Can I get some food aid?
And I have huge sympathy for the people there.
They don't want this as an issue.
It's being pushed by divisive and hateful and racist politicians.
But the facts are the facts.
You know, let's just say 15,000 farmers decide to stop farming in South Africa.
That's 30 million fewer meals every day.
What's going to happen? Now this, of course, this is a violation.
What's going on in South Africa is a violation of Article 17 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And I quote, one, everyone has the right to own property alone as well in association with others.
And two, no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Now, there's a principle, a moral principle, thou shalt not steal, in play here.
But there's another principle, too, which is, it's nice to be able to eat 70% of the land that was stolen or transferred or otherwise rejigged and redistributed now lies fallow.
70% of that land now lies fallow.
And for a while, the government in South Africa stopped redistributing land because people just sold it back to whites.
And there's nothing in a free market system that says that blacks can't get control of land, that they can't buy land.
They were given huge amounts of land.
I mean, in a free market system, if you can put a resource to better use than a competitor, you tend to be able to buy them after a while.
Like, if I'm running an apartment building and I'm charging 500 bucks a month, Per apartment in rent, and you've found a way that you can charge $1,000 a month per apartment in rent, then you can offer to buy me out, because you can make more money from the resource.
Resources in a free market tend to accumulate to those who can best maximize their productivity.
That's the way it works. That's the way it worked in Ukraine, when the communists came rolling in and stole all of the farms from the most productive farmers, gave it to everyone else, and food production collapsed.
The Holodomor, millions of people starved to death.
Same thing happened in Cambodia, when they took all the people from the city, scattered them out to the countries and said, now be farmers!
Starvation, starvation, starvation.
Under Chairman Mao, collectivization of farmland resulted in mass starvation, where people were literally eating the bark of trees.
They were ripping open their pillows and trying to eat the feathers.
That is how brutal it was.
And once the government seizes land, steals land, in a sense with or without compensation, it's still a violation of property rights.
And it's the old saying, your reputation can take a lifetime to build and one moment to destroy.
What happens to people's perceptions of the protection of their property?
What happens to all the other farmers in South Africa when they look at this massive giant bloody crane of the state seizing and ripping people off their ancestral farms?
They have a bond with this land that most of us mobile urban dwellers can't comprehend.
How far back, how deep it goes and how much loyalty they have to the farming and to the community and to the people that they feed.
The reputation of South Africa and its government can be destroyed like that.
And it's in the process of being destroyed.
And how long does it take to recover from the destruction of your reputation?
A long, long time.
So what's going to happen?
Food production is going to collapse.
They're going to beg for foreign aid.
They're going to beg for food aid.
And people are going to flee to Europe.
And they are fleeing an entirely man-made disaster.
A disaster based upon race-baiting, upon a complete misunderstanding of basic economics, on massive hatred, on a lack of understanding of the basic reality that there are intelligence differences between ethnicities.
Can't ever judge individuals, but as a whole, when you zoom out to society as a whole, it's a big problem.
And Here we are see rolling out again and again, as we see so often in human history, it was my desperate, desperate hope that the internet was going to allow us or give us the capacity to stop these kinds of problems.
To use reason and evidence to prevent these kinds of catastrophes from continually emerging across the human landscape.
Throughout history, disasters accumulated without the capacity to stop them because communication technology was still so primitive.
And the gatekeepers and those who controlled the free flow of human information and human wisdom too often restrained information from spreading.
Now we have this amazing medium where we can talk to each other reasonably and try and solve problems before they accumulate into massive catastrophes.
And it has been my desperate hope, lo, these many years, that reason and evidence and knowledge and facts and wisdom can prevent these kinds of catastrophes from occurring.
We couldn't stop them in the past.
Can we stop them now?
I don't know. You can share, you can talk, you can attempt to instruct people in the truth and reality and facts of what is happening on the ground.
Or we can be politically correct and we can allow millions of people to descend into starvation and chaos and war and flight.
And the dominoes can be set in motion from Africa to the rest of the world.
I beg you, please, talk about this stuff with people.
Share this information. Let us for once in human history strive to solve problems without untold human suffering.
