Socialist prez of Bolivia seizes private land

The president of Bolivia is a socialist named Evo Morales. Like his good friend Hugo Chavez--and other socialist thugs--Morales has no problem simply taking property from private owners. He merely announces a stated reason that resonates with his socialist supporters.

You know it's 'theft by socialism' when the government starts issuing statements like "the land was serving no social or economic purpose." As in the following case:

A Bolivian court has upheld a government decision to seize a ranch from a U.S. cattleman and his family on the grounds they treated workers as virtual slaves.

The National Agrarian Tribunal rejected a challenge by Ronald Larsen, a 65-year-old from Montana who has owned the 58-square-mile (15,000-hectare) ranch nearly four decades.

[A government official] said the ranch would "revert" to Guarani Indians, traditional inhabitants of Bolivia. He said the ranch and an adjacent 15-square-mile ranch owned by another family would be cleared by authorities and divided among 2,000 Guarani families.

The Larsens have vehemently denied treating their ranch hands — all of them Guarani natives — as servants.

Larsen moved to Bolivia in 1969, began acquiring land and married a Bolivian. He told the Associated Press last year that he deeded the ranch to his three sons, all Bolivian citizens, in 2005.

After President Evo Morales took office in 2006, Larsen became a target of a government "land reform" law that deemed servitude grounds for confiscation.

Human rights groups said last year that several thousand Guarani lived in conditions of "forced labor and servitude" in the region, earning as little as $40 a year.

In 2008, Guarani leaders claimed 12 families on Larsen's ranch lived in servitude.

The government began the process of seizing his land in February 2009.

For four decades, he said, he has fed and clothed workers who would otherwise live in squalor, educated their children and provided them with free health care. He claims he was singled out as a relatively wealthy white American in a racially divided nation by an Indian president who grew up dirt poor.

The Larsens claim Morales was more interested in getting access to oil and gas deposits that are likely under the ranch — exploratory drilling began there last year — than in restoring indigenous lands.

The government has also confiscated ranches totaling more than 60 square miles from two white opposition leaders. The government said the seized land had been fraudulently obtained and met another main criterion for confiscation — that it served no "social or economic purpose."

There it is--that magic, all-purpose phrase beloved by socialists. If a socialist thug is running the government, he claims the right to take what you have by claiming that whatever you're doing with it "serves no social or economic purpose."

What's yours is ours, comrade. Because we say so.

Anyone remember that case where a Connecticut city condemned private homes and turned the land over to a private developer? Went all the way to the Supreme Court--which ruled that such an act was legal.

What's yours is ours, comrade. Because we say so.