Robert Mugabe, the lunatic dictator of Zimbabwe, saw large industrial farms owned by white people. First, he decided that it was wrong for white people to own huge farms. Second, he decided that the solution to the problem was to take the land from the people who know how to work it and give it to the poor black people that in his mind it was taken away from. So he did it. He took the land from white people and gave it to black people. Of course, because he is a politician, the program was full of graft and corruption. Cronies, relatives, sycophants, military officers, etc. got the land, along with some poor people.
None of them had any idea whatsoever how to run a large farm, and here we get to one of the most important false assumptions of socialism, that all people have equal skills. Socialists , for example, assume that a big problem poor people have is access to capital, access to education, access to all kinds of things like health care. So they come up with government programs that have no basis in reality. They believe you can just give a piece of farmland to anyone and the new owner will work the land productively. Of course, this isn't reality. Look at Zimbabwe.
They believe by having affirmative action, for example, that by making access to higher education easier for minorities it will solve the problem of minorities being under represented in colleges. And, yes, sometimes it works., but all too often it fails and we see the college dropout rate of minorities too high and the resultant destroyed lives from the shame and crushed self-esteem of failure.
When it had absolute power, the PRI socialist party of Mexico just appointed people to positions of power based on politics. A result was that Mexico, an oil rich country, had problems with oil production and gasoline refining due to all the incompetence and corruption of the government owned companies. I don't know if this is still true today.
But that is what socialist do. People are given positions of power or things like farmland and admission to a college based not on their ability but on the concept that you can just give someone something and they know what to do with it.
