In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state.
Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.
Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2.
The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system.
Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.
My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.
Everybody?! The communist propaganda was very careful to underline that they only took from those "who had too much" to give to those "who needed" for the "betterment of everybody".
Too bad if you (dirt poor and uneducated) went to fight in WW1 to get some land and then spent the years after WW1 working that land like crazy to buy more land because you believed that gave your children a better chance in life than you had.
Because that's what happens when you don't have principles (like "private property is sacred") and you replace them instead with nebulous beliefs that sometimes it's OK to steal from others, as long as they have more than you do and you get some of that booty.
That was just propaganda. They took priate property away from everyone that had something. Even if you had two cows, they took that away and made it state property. The process is quite nicely illustrated in the Morometii sequel that came out last year:
That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.
The people digging in my grand parent's garden to find&take their hidden winter children clothes and provisions were 100% Romanians, locals from that tiny village, previous lazy losers freshly empowered into dedicated tools of the communist regime.
It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production.
I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
Land reforms and redistribution never work. It just disrupts the current social order, pisses off people from which the land has been taken, pisses off people who didn't get as much as their neighbor and eventually, roughly within 50 years, leads to similar social structure as before the reform. Only with different social class becoming the owners. The old aristocracy gets displaced by new oligarchic aristocracy. This has happened all over Eastern Europe.
The actual solution is capturing of the rent as the land value increases. The increase on land value is due to society contributing, but the beneficiary is the landlord sitting on it. Tax the consumer, not the producer of the value. Tax land, not labor and business.
The aristocratic power law society has to be broken in order to fix the system. Bolsheviks didn't understand this. Or they did and they organized the coup just to become the new bosses.
Without this understanding our society will still be very primitive and suffer from revolutions and aristocracy cycles. At least in ancient times they understood basic ethics in terms of ethics of ownership and how destructive debt was on a society. It seems like today we are blessed with all these new technologies but live more and more in some medieval dark age dystopia.
The oligarchs are generally former Communist managers who cashed out as the Soviet Union crashed. So really not that different from William the Conqueror etc.
