What is Land Reform?

2 minute video by HuffPost discussion land reform.
"Land reform" is a very touchy subject because there are two types of land reform and most people can't tell the difference.
One is to spread the land to the poor; another is to concentrate the ownership even more to the big owners.
The former rarely happens but when it happened, it resulted in success, but it took such a long time that the majority of people don't realise what went well.
The latter happens much, much more often because big landowners have money and political power and mostly are connected with government officials, who would fight against it? Then the result ends in the failure but again, the majority of people won't know it was the cause of it.
In general, the former type of land reform never happens in the peace time.
One of those rare occasions was the one took place in Japan in 1946 under GHQ occupation, the result didn't come out as success until 1960s-1970s. Fortunately, MacArthur had no idea what he was doing. (He had very conservative ideology, but did exactly the opposite of his belief.)
MacArthur also built a foundation of progressive taxation which was a popular idea in the US and elsewhere at the time, but as soon as GHQ left, the Japanese government started cutting the taxes (for the riches, of course), so did the German government.
Then again there were many things going in Japan for that period, so the land reform wasn't the only one driving the economy, at least it didn't hurt.
Again, in general, when the social structure moving to more equal society, it produces a good result, and opposite produces the opposite result, such as in the US and most of the nations in the world today.
Inequality worldwide growing to a historic high (it was called Gilded Age in US, Belle Epoque in Europe, both in last half of 1800s) today and no end in sight.
The idea of land reform is almost always unpopular from both sides, rich and poor.
Poor people are always made to believe that government is there for their interest which is not true. Most people think land reform is a government’s way to sort economic and poverty challenges amongst the so-called poor people, it is not so. Government wishes to destroy all private land ownership and war is against private farmers in actual reality.

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The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

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