[fennecfoxen]

More broadly, as a pragmatic issue utterly divorced from the goal of “justice”, few nations achieve prosperity when confiscation is the norm, as prosperity usually involves planning and investments with multi year returns. If a nation wishes to repair inequalities through transfers, the less disruptive way to do it is through taxation. Seizing specific properties outright is an arbitrary and capricious distribution of the burdens, and a lingering political culture of expropriation will likely deter investment for a generation or longer.

It is also remarkable the extent to which these land confiscation programs focus on the nation’s farms, as if the leaders’ vision of a prosperous future was simply subsistence agriculture: two acres and a cow for every family. The proceeds of a program of taxation can be invested in health and education and infrastructure, the foundations of future prosperity. It’s hard to do that with seized land; few will be fool enough to buy it off of you.

On the other hand, a campaign of land seizures, fêting ethnic resentment, is much more effective at feeding the ruling party’s political power, so, there’s your tragedy.

[pythonic_hell]

I don’t agree with the policies around land without compensation but the economic prosperity that the people of the USSR and PRC experienced after instating those policies can not be denied.

[fennecfoxen]

You mean the prosperity of China, which is about one-third the prosperity of, say, South Korea, which started out in about the same place? Ah! I regret that it only seems impressive because the nation is very large.

Oh! But perhaps you mean those heady years of growth during the Great Leap Forward itself, where the nation became so prosperous that ~45 million people starved to death.

[FredPret]

Economic prosperity?! They had massive famines. Tens of millions died.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–1933