COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ZERO HEDGE
“South Africa's
President Vows To Redistribute White-Owned Land And Businesses”
This has been expected and feared by many since the end of
the old South Africa.
South Africa has been economically successful enough to be
included in the BRICS group of promising future economies.
Clearly, any change of this nature will throw all that
overboard.
There is a fundamental - perhaps insoluble? - problem in
South Africa.
The inequality, which is a normal part of all economies, is
made strikingly visible by the ethnic identities of the two extremes there.
I don't know that one can imagine a long-term solution to
such a situation: a few million relatively prosperous to extremely wealthy
white people living with tens of millions of poor blacks plus the demands and
pressures that come with democratic government.
I know some prosperous whites left, but it is not so easy.
Many of the wealth-generating assets - great farming estates to rich mineral
deposits - are not portable, and there is no one really in such an economy to
sell them to so that you can leave.
Quite a terrible situation to find yourself stuck in.
And, of course, South Africa is also one of the world's most
violent advanced places, with horrific murder and rape rates.
The wealthy still live in heavily armed enclaves, just as
they did under the previous regime.
