Birds Eye Lesson in Land Reform

This is an impressive visual of the tragedy of the commons.  The interactive satellite photo compares  communal farmland to private farmland in Zimbabwe over the period of its land redistribution.  It’s significant to note is that this land reform only began around 2000, a few years ago.

Copyright Communists and the Commons

Another of the Forbes rich listers is spamming copyright offices around the world:

Bill Gates is an intelligent man who has done a great deal of good in the world. So when he gets caught out in a bare-faced lie this should matter to all of us; and last week, when he called the opponents of American intellectual property law a "communist" movement he was encouraging a mistake that could impoverish the entire world.

Read more on the war against copyright communists.  Also check out Creative Commons who is leading the movement of sharing creativity with their ‘some rights reserved’ copyrights and encouragement of things like the up and coming music sampling commons, Mixter.

Yahoo! has even put out a beta Creative Commons search engine, so tally up on how easy home recording is these days and if you’re feeling entrepreneurial, turn your Mac Mini into a recording studio and, to Gates’ spite, head for the communes.

Latin American Universities

When The Times survey came out, Mexico’s UNAM university sent out ecstatic press releases to the media that resulted in headlines such as UNAM leads Latin American universities.

UNAM’s actual rank was 195 out of 200.  Nonetheless, there claims are true.  Read more on the survey and the struggles of Latin American Universities here.

Here’s Someone to Watch

Well, don’t say it wasn’t expected.  Hugo Chavez is heading forward with his plans of land reform in Venezuela.  Apparently, Chavez has promised to put an end to ‘idle’ latifundios.  That is, estates of 5000 hectares (12,350 acres) that aren’t being used efficiently.  You can take your guess at what efficiently may mean.  Especially when the land in question is 6.6 million acres of private holdings.

The claim is that there is too much land in the hands of too few people.  As the government hasn’t enforced property rights in the past, there should be low expectations to see a drastic change in the future.  In one case, where the government ignored demands to remove a few squatters from private land, the number of squatters grew to several hundreds, now equipped with housing settlements and yucca crops.

The wisdom behind these acts is best summed up by Chavez’s motives to "tax farms into productivity."  Unfortunately, such wisdom is having a hard time being implemented since the government doesn’t even have a registry of land ownership.  Hey, there’s a policy that might work for a start—respect of ownership!