The people of Zimbabwe are now starving, thanks to the Mugable regime's expropriation of farms owned by whites and his other runinous economic policies that attempted to override the laws of the free market.
They are reduced to eating anything they can find, including an elephant that died of old age (disturbing images).
Yesterday, the Red Cross warned the situation in the former British colony is 'critical' with 2.17million - one in four of the population - requiring urgent food aid.
In July 2007, the government of Zimbabwe attempted to impose price controls in an effort to stop galloping inflation that the government itself had created. The price controls were a predictable failure. Supermarket shelves were soon stripped of bread. By September 2007, desperate Zimbabweans were beginning to abandon their pets or slaughter them for food.
As I wrote in October 2007:
Mugabe and his government are rapidly managing to turn Zimbabwe from a poor nation to a destitute, starving nation. Their actions in seizing control of the property of white farmers and expropriating businesses are racist, selfish, foolish, and immoral. At the rate Zimbabwe's government is going, the consequences will soon be deadly. The people of Zimbabwe will pay a gruesome price.
And from March 2008:
Around the world, too many on the left still believe that unequal distribution of wealth is the primary explanation for intractable problems of hunger and poverty. They support policies such as heavily taxing the rich and redistributing some of that wealth to the poor. They do not realize that poverty is a symptom of deeper troubles, not the cause. A nation's poverty is a usually a symptom of bad governmental and economic policies, including laws that interfere with the free market and destroy incentives to produce. Corruption, violence, and lack of basic human freedom don't help either.
"This is what Robert Mugabe has done to us, turned us into a nation of peddlers and beggars," she said flatly, allowing her thoughts to then wander off into the future. "If he remains, we will just die."Zimbabwe started out as a prosperous breakbasket. Now, thanks to its forcible redistribution of wealth, it has turned itself into an economic basket case. A nation that once helped feed the world has no bread to feed its own people.
There is no surer way to make everyone poor than to take from the rich and give to the poor.
COMMENTS?