Hernando de Soto’s Dangerous Mind
This article at Cato on Hernando de Soto was inspiring:
On April 1, 2004, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist who has devoted his life to bringing real property rights to the world’s poor, became the second winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. That prize is awarded every other year to an individual who has made a significant contribution to advancing human freedom.
The prize is a rare honor, but then de Soto is an extraordinary individual. It’s not every economist that finds himself the target of terrorist bombings and assassination attempts. Because of his scholarship and activism on behalf of the world’s poor, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, de Soto was repeatedly targeted by the Marxist terror group, the Shining Path.
It’s not hard to understand why Marxist radicals found de Soto’s ideas so dangerous. They threatened the monopoly the political left (Marxist and non-Marxist) held over solutions to the problems of the world’s poor. For years, statist development experts had sought top-down solutions, operating under the implicit assumption that poor people in the Third World were largely incapable of entrepreneurship. De Soto utterly rejected that patronizing viewpoint, and, beginning in his native Peru, focused on the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries. As an author and an activist, and later as advisor to Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, de Soto worked to bring impoverished Peruvians out of the shadow economy, and unlock their potential for wealth.
