Nick Szabo  🔑

It's comical that some liberal American pundits will now pretend to care more about land reform in #SouthAfrica than black South Africans do, merely because @realDonaldTrump tweeted about it and therefore he must be a racist & wrong.

"Land reform" that splendid communist euphemism for theft.

I’m not familiar with the history of land title claims in South Africa but if you believe in Natural Rights, any land possessed via aggression rather than a sale ought to be nullified. Rothbard discusses this in Ethics of Liberty. Do colonial invasion/rule count as aggression?

Statute of limitations. Laches. We are talking agressions that allegedly happened centuries ago. Time limits for recovery are a universal aspect of humane property law, otherwise practically all titles everywhere would be the subject of multiple disputes.

In the case of ZA, most land title is post-Boer-War; I think my titles in NJ and http://CA.US  went back well farther. In ZA the bans on non-white land ownership extend much more recently than that, to now-living people, and all titles are legitimate to dispute.

A title dispute isn't legitimate unless there is a legitimate claim, i.e. a legal heir to an illegally displaced landowner. That is certainly not what is going on here in any way shape or form, and the confiscations are in no way, shape, or form legitimate.

A post-feudal non-nomadic plant-agriculture-and-buildings land title may not be a legitimate structure to impose on land used by nomadic herders; if it's imposed by a minority-race-only government only permitting members of the minority to own land, it can hardly claim that. 1/

Saying "My grandpa helped the king steal this land from your tribe" doesn't give white farmers a moral position to claim that black farmers or the new government can't do the same to them, even if it does give them legitimacy in disputes with other Anglo or Boer tribe-members. 2/