How to start a revolution without really trying

National Review, Nov 15, 1985 by Tom Bethell

Likewise in Taiwan. After the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, General Chiang Kai-shek's remnant retreated to Formosa under U.S. auspices and there a Joint (U.S.-China) Commission on Rural Reconstruction imposed the new property arrangement on the old Formosan aristocracy. This "defeat" was likewise accepted by the Formosans, and the rule of law established.

None of this would have worked if the Americans had attempted to establish collective farms, as in El Salvador. In all three countries property rights were assigned individually, titles were issued, and these titles were fully transferrable. (In Japan there was a ten-year delay before titles could be transferred.) Owners, that is, could sell their land to others who in turn could do what they liked with it. In Taiwan today, land is rapidly being converted from agricultural to more highly valued industrial use. Land-reform zealots are usually opposed to such permissiveness because, they believe, it will "dispossess" the peasants. One can only reply that where there are doctrinaire and-reformers there will always be peasants. Where there are property rights, peasantry will soon disappear.

How odd that the great guru of land reform, Wolf Ladejinsky, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who worked for ten years at the Department of Agricultural before joining MacArthur's staff in 1945, never understood why land reform had worked in Japan. In later years he traipsed disconsolately about Asia, conducting unsuccessful agrarian experiments in different countries, becoming (it seemed) increasingly disgruntled and radical. Shortly before his death he told a World Bank Seminar: "If we are to wait until the peasantry of India--or for that matter a number of other Asian countries--decide to take the law into their own hands and fight for an out-and-out radical agrarian revolution. I think we would have to wait for a long, long time."

But the Japanese peasants didn't take the law into their own hands. The law was given to them.