 in South Africa. But there's been a lot of South Africa's been in the news quite a bit. A number of different topics, you know, three really jump out of the headlines. One is this land confiscation. We're going to talk about that. The idea of confiscating the land of white farmers in South Africa. The second is the idea that there is white genocide out there is an idea that is spread by the alt-right and others on the right that are convinced that whites are dropping like flies all over the South Africa. So we'll dig a little bit into the numbers and see if that is true. And then the water crisis in Cape Town, supposedly Cape Town is going to run out of water any day now, I guess, sometime in the next few months. It's really going to be no water. The taps are going to go dry. A real drought in a major city, I don't think it's ever happened before. To talk about these issues with regard to South Africa, I've got Christo, and I'm not going to try to pronounce your family name. Okay, thank you for having me on your own. Thank you very much. Okay, my pleasure. And Christo is a researcher at the Free Market Foundation of South Africa, so a free market think tank. He has been a student at the Objectivist Academic Center and an Objectivist. He's on Facebook and Twitter and so on. And he writes quite a bit for the Free Market Foundation on issues related to South Africa. So let's start, Christo, maybe talk a little bit about this land confiscation. I mean, there was a lot of press here in the US, and I think it's somewhat misrepresented the issue because the way it was presented here is that Parliament voted to approve the confiscation of land of white farmers by the government with no compensation. So eminent domain, but no compensation. So let's first is, you know, let's go through the process because that's not accurate. What has actually happened and what is yet to happen? Right, so in our Constitution, in section 25, we have our property rights clause. And that's the focus of this whole expropriation without compensation thing. That's what we're calling it. At the beginning of March, the ANC, the African National Congress, that's in the majority party in our parliament, they and the EFF, the Economic Freedom Fighters, they introduced a motion to amend section 25 of our Constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation. I think constitutionally speaking, it's already in our Constitution that you can see land, that the states can see land if they provide enough compensation to the owner. But now the EFF have gained popularity in the country, they're more left-wing than ANC. And with our elections coming up next year, I think the ANC are trying to get as many votes in as possible. Land is a sensitive topic in African societies, especially with colonialism and land invasions and all that sort of thing. So the ANC is moving more left now. And in order to get some votes, they're telling people, well, you know, vote for us and allow us to amend the Constitution and we'll give you X, Y, Z. There's a constitutional review committee that's been appointed. They'll come back at the end of August and sort of brief parliament as to whether the Constitution needs to be amended or not. Just this last week, I attended a land summit in Johannesburg. It was attended by media and political parties and analysts. And two members of parliament from the ANC themselves said that it's not a given that the Constitution will be amended. They're investigating the whole thing, they're trying to see, you know, what the process will be, but we shouldn't all panic. I think the ANC is realizing from foreign investors that maybe this is not such a good idea, you know, that they need to be more careful. So they're backtracking in some areas. So we'll see. It's a bit up in the air, but at least they're, I can say they're softening a bit in their rhetoric. So we'll see. And we'll know that by the end of August? Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so let's go through this. So first, I mean, every Constitution pretty much out there allows for the government, unfortunately, to seize land with compensation. I mean, the American Constitution allows that through eminent domain. And it sounds like the South African Constitution allows it for the public good, the government can seize land as long as it compensates its owner. So I think from an objective perspective, we reject that idea wholeheartedly. Government should have no right to seize land under any conditions, even if they pay you quadruple the market price. It's not an issue of price. It's an issue of principle. Your land should not be seized. To what extent have as the government in the past tried to kind of buy farmland owned by whites in order to transition it to hand it over to blacks? I think in some areas of the country since 1994, since our first democratic election, the government has done it and it has been successful when they've handed over title deed. So they've given the right of the property to the black farmer. So he can actually use it and put the land to use. It doesn't help having land. If it's not actually under your name, then you can never be productive in it and you can never do anything with it. But I think part of why it's becoming such a hot topic now is because the process has been slow. And there's a lot of pressure on government to deliver services such as water, electricity and now people assume if you have a piece of land, you'll be affluent and wealthy and you'll increase your personal wealth and you'll be able to trade and all that sort of thing. So it's sort of a get out of jail free cart. If they give land, then black people will be necessarily better off without giving them the skills or the monetary aid or anything like that. So in some areas it's been good, but it's slow as government tends to be, which is why I think it's becoming such a hot button issue. So it's striking me that it would be good in places where the farmers have cultivated land. The land is owned by nobody, owned by the state and get a deed on it. I think that's an issue of justice and I think that's what's going on a little bit in Soweto right now with the mayor of Johannesburg. He's giving deeds to people who already have squatted on the land, but it's government land. They're not stealing it from anybody. But what is being proposed now is literally taking the land from white farmers because they have too much and giving that land to blacks. So what is the justification given for that? Is it the whole issue of colonialism? It's partly that. I think it's also partly the inequality issue where you assume that because someone has land, therefore he is wealthy, it doesn't really matter what he does with it. I guess that's sort of a, I guess that's Marx's influence coming in. So just the land owner, the workers of the land don't actually get anything. It's the white owner of the farm who takes all the profits and that sort of thing. But with the economic freedom fighters now with them introducing this motion to amend the constitution. I mean, most left-wing party we have, they've said that the state will be the custodian of all land. So this includes houses, flats, urban property. It's not just agricultural land. Private land. They demolish basically private property completely. Which we're trying to bring to sort of public attention because it's not just a case of white owned farms. It's going to be no blacks, no black people, no white people can own land, which you know, black people, their land was taken by the British and the Afrikaners. So we're trying to sort of get them to see the gains we've made under democracy and the constitution and property rights and not roll back on all that stuff. So a couple of things. To what extent is the motivation of the AFF, is it a racist motivation? Or to what extent is it a Marxist motivation or is it a combination of both? I think it's a combination of both. Their leader Julius Malema, he was part of the ANC but he was kicked out. So he sort of decided to go full left wing to sort of, you know, you know, sort of assign to them that either they follow him or, you know, they're going to lose their base, their support. He's repeatedly said that, you know, that the white farmer must be killed. Europeans must go back to Europe. You know, he's, you said things for which one could be convicted of sort of hate speech and we do have a hate speech bill coming soon. So he might be, he might need to be a bit more careful with what he says. I don't think he realizes what he's doing. But I think for him it's a, it's a case of just honoring support and trying to grow his party. And, you know, there's a lot of left wing politicians. It's about political expediency and practicality and, you know, just getting support and the consequences be damned. But is there a sense among Africans that, is there a racist streak among blacks in South Africa that he is feeding off of? Because I think, I think that the media will tend to overhype that racist, that there's this racial tension between South Africans. The institutes of race relations, they do annual surveys on, on relations between different race groups. And for example, in their latest one, I think the issue of land was not either, or any of the top three of the most pressing issues for black South Africans. So I think that they do realize that it's, you know, because a white person has X, it doesn't mean that that's why they don't have X. I think that they are, they tend to be suspicious of the government, especially because the government isn't delivering, which is now why the ANC and EFF are trying to be more radical. I think that racial tensions are overhyped and that he, he's trying to tap into something and make more of it than, than there is. So it's, it, would you say that it's more the Marxist element, the kind of the leftist element, the racial element? Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it's easy for the government to blame, to have a target to blame instead of their own inefficiencies and inability to the, to deliver anything. Well, and they've been a statist government for, I mean, forever, you know, since they came into power, the ANC. So what is your, what is your expectation of what will actually happen with the, with the land expropriation? I'm, as an object of this idea, maybe it's, maybe it's, maybe it's false hope, but I am cautiously optimistic that come the end of August, that the review committee will come back and tell us it's already in the constitution. We don't have to radically amend things. Maybe they'll put in a temporary measure that'll have to pass constitutional master. And again, it's up to our constitutional court, which does sometimes tend to go on the more radical interpretation of the constitution. We tend to think of our constitution as guaranteeing that the state must provide, you know, basic services, they must provide education, health care, all that sort of thing. So I'm hopeful. It's been a transparent process so far. I think they realized that, that they couldn't scare investors away. And just now that Jacob Zuma was, was kicked out and Cyril Ramaphosa came in, we've seen an increase in foreign investment, the stock market is doing better, the random strength. And so I think the ANC realized they need to be very careful with what little progress that they're making now. There's also been talk that they want to, they want to move the elections closer to the beginning of 2019 to, you know, sort of make, sort of make hay while the sun is shining, so that they can get more votes. So we'll see. Is this president a significant improvement over Zuma? I mean, is, where does he come down? I mean, he's a former businessman at least, so he knows something about business. He has worked in business. I think he's, so where Jacob Zuma was more, you see, it's difficult because I think Zuma, he spoke the communist rhetoric, but he was in it for himself. So he was corrupt and he was a crony, but he looked after himself. He didn't use the state apparatus to, you know, to actually impose communism. Whereas Ramaphosa might be a bit of more of an ideologue. And, you know, that's a scary thing. Like an effective communist is a scary communist. You know, you'd rather have a corrupt communist than an effective communist. A lot of people are hopeful on him because he speaks better. He's more educated than Zuma, but that could be, you know, a false, sort of a false impression. So as always, we need to be vigilant and we need to hold him accountable. He is more pro-business, so we'll see. And Marxist is pro-business, that's scary. Okay, so you're cautiously optimistic. Now let's quickly review, you know, kind of the history of the last land confiscation in that part of the world, which is it was in Zimbabwe. And I think, you know, I had relatives in Zimbabwe when it was Rhodesia and they owned a lot of land up there. And what happened when that land was confiscated? So Zimbabwe used to be known as the breadbasket of Africa. They exported a lot. Now they have to import pretty much everything. When they kicked white farmers off their farms, you know, through force that resulted in the complete collapse of their economy. Their inflation is through the roof. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's sort of a Venezuela part of the situation. So it's when we make the argument... You would think so that people would learn the lesson from... You would think so, yeah. I mean, it's right, it's close. And I mean, they completely collapsed. They were literally starving there to import food. They were getting food aid from the US and Europe. This is the breadbasket of Africa, you know, once they confiscated the large farms. And yeah, I think people would learn. I'm sure you're aware that they've got a new president now as well. So we might... We'll see what happens in South Africa. Maybe we're all going to head north, whereas Zimbabwe in the future comes south. But when they're a country collapsed, maybe we're all South Africans are going to head north. Well, you know, if I trusted the new president of Zimbabwe, maybe I would have that hope. But I fear that the new president might not be as corrupt as Mugabe. That would take real effort. But I still don't think he's going to be that good, unfortunately. I mean, it's sad for the people of Zimbabwe. Okay, I want to talk quickly about this issue of white genocide, which comes up all the time among the alt-right. And I see it all the time on different right-wing news sites. Breitbart talks about this quite a bit. And then there was... I think of the name is Lauren Summers or something like that. She went to Southern Africa. She visited the farms and she told the horrific stories of the murders on the farm. So to what extent is this a real story? I mean, something obviously is going on. But to what extent is this a real story? To what extent is it blown up? Is there white genocide going on in South Africa? And we can link that up with the general crime rate in South Africa. Well, to that question, no, I don't think there's a white genocide in South Africa. The attacks that happen on farms are violent because I think that most of them are racially motivated. I don't think it's necessarily from farm workers on the farms. It might just be people who are desperate. That doesn't justify what they do, but they sort of see that they're poor as caused by white people. And so they act out of anger and that sort of thing. The majority of South Africans are black and therefore the majority of crime committed is black on black crime. And obviously that won't sell newspapers. So they don't really want to write about that and that sort of thing. But I definitely don't think there's a white genocide. We do have high walls and that sort of thing. But I don't think people barricade themselves in and there's no stockpiling of arms or that sort of thing. So I think it's learned out of proportion. We have more serious issues to deal with, sort of like the expropriation thing than we do to worry about that. We're going to know that different race groups are going to start fighting each other. Yeah, I mean, I've looked at some of the data and the statistics. And the stuff that they report is almost always distorted and wrong and taken out of context. And they report, for example, the 5.2, something like 5.2 farmers are killed every country and what that data is. But that includes black farmers and white farmers and all races. It has nothing to do with whites. It is true that there is a large proportion that is white, but that's partially because whites are wealthy and it's usually they're attacked and their property is stolen. It's also true that the police are probably incompetent and corrupt in South Africa and therefore they're not protecting people like they should. And I think some of the civil defense in South Africa was disbanded, particularly in the rural areas, which caused the rise in crime over there. But the fact is the crime in urban South Africa, particularly in Cape Town, but all over South Africa really in urban centers is far greater. As you said, black and black crime is far greater than it is in rural South Africa. And it's so high actually. It's one of the worst countries in the world right now. In terms of motors per 100,000, it's clearly in the top 10 countries in the world. It ranks up there with countries in Central America and other parts of Africa. It really is horrific. I always say in countries like that, I always say, the one job of government is to protect us. The one job of government is to police. That's the one job of going to protect us from murder of all things. Stop everything. Shut down every other department. Stop spending any money on anything else the government is doing and spend it on policing. And that's how you get rid of the murder rate. But no, that's not what they do. And particularly in corrupt governments like the government of South Africa, they spend way too much of the money on other stuff and not enough on the policing side. There was an interesting report came out last, I think two weeks ago about the amount of money spent on personal bodyguards for politicians. And that just goes to show you, well, they won't use the police. They'll spend billions of rand on private police. Talk about corruption. I mean, that their security is more important than the security of the people they're supposed to serve. They're servants, not our masters who walk around with bodyguards, but our servants who provide security for all of us. It's a complete inversion of the situation. Okay, great. Let's one more South African story that I think will cover it. And that is the water crisis in Cape Town. So tell us a little bit about how Cape Town, Cape Town, by the way, for those of you've never been, probably one of those beautiful cities in the world. It has Table Mountain right above it. It has this beautiful bay. It has fantastic beaches on a number of different sides. It's, if you go south of Cape Town, you can get to the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, the whole area is spectacular. Cape Town, in particular, is a gorgeous, gorgeous city. Tell us a little bit about why, how this city has come to a situation where it has no water. So we can follow this back to the property rights thing because it's mismanagement of water resources and it's only come about, I think last year, in the last year, it came about that, okay, well, Cape Town is going to run out of water, but no one owns the water. So who's going to take responsibility for it? But then the local government, the Democratic Alliance, they're the second biggest party in the country and they run the Western Cape. They won that a few years ago and they're, you know, they're the administrators there. So they started implementing water saving measures and, you know, installing meters in people's houses to make sure that they, you know, use, you know, the allotted amount and, you know, so a few fascist measures, but, you know, let's not, we won't stray that far. But I think it was a case of, there is a draw. I'll say that much. There is a natural element of it. It hasn't been the case that people, you know, necessarily just wasted water. But I think that the fact that no one owned any water resources meant that no actions could be taken, nothing could be implemented. And now they've managed to delay day zero, which was, you know, the day that Cape Town taps have run dry. That was supposed to be the, I think the end of April, but now it's been sort of postponed indefinitely. So you also wonder how dire it really was, whether that was just the local government sort of trying to scare people. But for now they're doing, okay, I haven't been to Cape Town for a few months, but I know that when you go, you can only use certain, you know, amounts of liters of water today. And you have to take a two minute shower. And I mean, for a huge tourist city such as Cape Town, it's very bad for the economy and for jobs and growth and that sort of thing. So I think they're managing the situation. I don't see a big resolution necessarily unless they start desalinization, such as they did in Israel. And we've touched on that as well, but a lot of, I think a lot of people in South Africa, especially academics, politicians and students are pro-Palestinian. So they've sort of told us, don't follow the Israeli model because, you know, I've actually heard that Israel sent some delegations down with office of technology, desalination, other things. And nobody would even meet them because the politics, they are so left-wing, so anti-Israeli, so pro-Palestinian that they wouldn't even take a meeting. And the Israelis have tried several times to offer technological solutions to problems in South Africa. I mean, here's Israel who goes through droughts all the time and today has no water problem. They have, you know, they could probably, they could teach California a thing or two because they've used technology to eliminate nature as a variable in a sense, to make sure that there's always enough water. But Cape Town is going to be, I think the first modern city to actually see water actually disappear from the tap, so real tragedy. And again, an issue of property rights, it's the same issue with the land confiscation. The same reason I think there's poverty in South Africa. You know, it's a lack of property rights, it's a lack of capitalism. It's the fact that, you know, under apartheid we had, we had statism and since the ANC has been in power, we've had the same kind of statism with the socialism being worse. You know, it's just tragic. Such a rich country that South Africa is, there's absolutely no reason for the amount of poverty that exists there. Yeah. Yeah, I think South Africans are used to sort of state control and state intervention. So when you offer them an alternative, such as objectivism, they sort of stop and then they take a breath and they're surprised that there might be an alternative. So in a way, it's good because you shock the system. Yeah, we need to shock the system more. Absolutely. We need expose them to more free market ideas and ideally to objectivism. Let me just say because I was in South Africa under apartheid that I thought it was awful. I mean, apartheid was disgusting. It was it was ugly. It was just horrible. And, you know, I'm glad that's gone. And, you know, I've also on the show in the past praised Nelson Mandela, not as an economist and not as a purveyor of economic freedom, but for transitioning South Africa to democracy without violence, which I would have expected. I would expect the place to explode. And apartheid was so ugly. The way the whites behaved under apartheid was so disgusting that you would have expected a violent response that I think Mandela gets a lot of credit for having a peaceful transition. So that's the one sense in which, you know, I think in spite of the bad that's happening in South Africa today, I would take it over apartheid any day. I think the ANC, they could actually tell a much better story about what they've achieved, you know, with more freedom in the country. But they wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't credit freedom with the gains that we've made. It would be more a case, well, they've given it to people instead of people doing it for themselves. Well, that's right. Because if they if they attributed to freedom, people would say, well, we want more, you know, if it works too well, how come we don't have more? All right, Crystal, thanks a lot. Really appreciate your time. It's 2 30 in the morning in Joanna's book. So go get some sleep. Thank you for joining us today. Really. All right, we're going to take a quick commercial break, and then we'll be back. And I'll be talking about Ben Shapiro.