Bolivia Does the Marxist Thing

Bolivian president, Evo Morales is wasting no time in redistributing Bolivia's farmland to his nation's poor, indigenous Indians. These land redistribution schemes, though wildly popular with the poor, always make a bad economy worse in the end. Bolivia, long one of South America’s poorest countries, is about to become even poorer. When will people learn that reactionary socialism is exactly the wrong response to widespread poverty?

Apparently, Morales hasn’t given the disastrous land reform experiment in Zimbabwe (a policy responsible for changing Zimbabwe from being a net food exporter to a nation that can no longer feed itself without importing food) its proper consideration. Bolivia’s GDP per capita is currently $2900; look for it to drop to below $2500 within the next 5 years. These developments are particularly ignominious when considering how vigorous Bolivia’s economy was in the 1990s, a decade that saw the nation's GDP growth average 4% per annum.

Here's an excerpt from a relevant AP article:

Leftist President Evo Morales launched a sweeping land reform plan on Saturday by handing over roughly 9,600 square miles of state-owned land to poor Indians.

Full story here.