All Posts Tagged With: "Hernando de Soto"
Must a Formal Legal System Come Before Prosperity?
Capital Letters It was disheartening to read John Stossel’s uncritical endorsement of Hernando de Soto’s diagnosis of the causes of poverty in Third World nations as their lack of street addresses and legal titles to property (“Why Do the Poor Stay Poor?,” March 2011). The error of these claims in De Soto’s The Mystery of [...]
25May2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Do the Poor Stay Poor?
Of the six billion people on earth, two billion try to survive on a few dollars a day. They don’t build businesses—or if they do, they don’t expand them. Unlike people in the United States, Europe, and Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc., they don’t lift themselves out of poverty. Why not? [...]
24Feb2011 | John Stossel | 9 comments | ContinuedSowing and Reaping Devastation in Haiti
Pictures and accounts of Haiti’s earthquake devastation remind me of a November 1987 National Geographic photograph of Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic–the two nations “share” the Caribbean island Hispaniola. The photo showed a heavily forested Dominican Republic and a barren Haiti. The caption noted that Haiti was once heavily forested. I bet some of [...]
19Apr2010 | T. Norman Van Cott | 6 comments | ContinuedSowing and Reaping Devastation in Haiti
Haitians bear the responsibility for the state of Haitian property rights. If not the Haitians, who else, pray tell?
15Feb2010 | T. Norman Van Cott | 13 comments | ContinuedGovernment Must Keep Track of Derivatives?
Regardless of what caused the crisis, government efforts to regulate derivatives will only lock in undesirable aspects of the current market and ensure that politically connected players reap artificial gains. It is absurd to ask politicians to promote financial integrity and sound accounting. They are the worst violators of these principles on the planet.
17Jun2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 8 comments | ContinuedThe Economics of Property Rights
Property rights play a critical role in a wide range of economic institutions. From understanding why owners are generally better stewards of property than renters to finding ways to resolve environmental problems, property rights are at the center of the analysis. It is unsurprising, therefore, that economics offers important insights into property rights. The economic [...]
1Mar2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 21 comments | ContinuedEurope Meets America: Property Rights in the New World
When Europeans arrived in the Americas and began to claim the rich lands they encountered, they brought with them an equally rich European tradition of property law and justifications for establishing property rights. Today these are often mistakenly lumped together into the law of conquest, sometimes in an attempt to cast modern titles into doubt [...]
1Jan2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | ContinuedWhy the Poor Need Property Rights
Early in the morning the streets below my flat would become a beehive of activity. Small stands were scattered everywhere, cramming every available inch of sidewalk. Small bundles of bananas, packets of tomatoes, or potatoes were for sale. Newspaper vendors grabbed the busy corners. Hawkers with every imaginable product had set up business. As the [...]
1Oct2002 | James Peron | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
Taking things for granted isn’t always a bad idea. Anyone who checks the morning paper to see if the sun will rise in the east is wasting his time. But the role of property has been taken for granted, with awful results. Economics textbooks may discuss incentives to invest, but they seldom, if ever, make [...]
1Jan2002 | William B. Conerly | 0 comments | Continued-
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