chrislbecker.com

About an hour ago (+-15h30) the Presidency issued a statement clarifying his land reform speech of earlier this week (blogged about it here). It turns out that the source of Jacob Zuma’s “innovative” new plan for land reform is Trevor Manuel’s much hailed National Development Plan.

I went to check and, yes, those mafia-like, agriculture destroying paragraphs are a copy and paste job from (mostly) pages 226 and 227 of the NDP. This is the same NDP casually identifying agriculture as “the primary economic activity in rural areas” with the “potential to create close to 1million new jobs by 2030, a significant contribution to the overall employment target.”

Hopefully, the obviousness of the implied economic illiteracy behind these land reform proposals can be the beginning of the end of the undeserved admiration for that wildly overrated document that is the NDP.

In June, I wrote about the dangers of the NDP.

The National Planners have taken – in Hayek’s words – to the pretense of knowledge, the idea that they know how to run a system far too complex and emergent to ever be centrally directed. Central planners believe that they can plan for end results only because they ignore the laws of economics, and neglect the humanity of the people they relegate to input factors in their grand scheme of things.