The reason Zimbabwe is horrifying, rather than merely awful and repugnant like other dictatorships, is spectacularly terrible land reform. It turns out that land rights are the absolute linchpin of a functioning agricultural economy.

This is not, as some would have it, a brief against land reform. There have been lots of good land reforms. And in fact, no matter how efficient giant white-owned farms may be, they represent an ongoing legacy of colonial injustice. But successful land reform is gradual, works hard to preserve property rights even as it passes them on to someone else (which means, among other things, compensating the former owners), and focuses on putting control of the land into the hands of those who worked it. If you have been following the horrors in Zimbabwe at all, you know that this is the opposite of how Mugabe has handled this redistribution, using violence to kick white farmers off their farms and hand them over to his cronies who have no idea how to run a farm. Since many of the disposessed white farmers bought their land in the post-colonial era, this has massively undercut the justice of the redistribution. Having destroyed the principle that a clear title represents a solid claim on the future output of that land, Mugabe can hardly be surprised to find that no one wants to invest any time or capital in making the land yield.

Property rights are neither sacred nor absolute. But they are very, very important. And we're in an era when the temptation to arbitrarily violate them "For the Greater Good" is growing stronger.

