Is it really true that third world problems can be solved by creating capital and is the missing law the causer of poverty. I think that pure freedom can lead to a stabel economy. This freedom does not mean there can’t be property and capitalism, but governments must give their citizens freedom of trading and a stabel law to live with. Capitalism is not an Bad thing if you use it right.
This documentary is about a man called Hernando de Soto, who is a major economist and thinks he has found the problem causing poverty in societies all over the world. He wrote the bestselling book ‘The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else’ with the main tenet that people in developing countries lack such an integrated formal property system, leading to only informal ownership of land and goods. He argues that the start of economic success of American and Japanese capitalism relied on a clear system of property rights which was created during the times of the ‘frontier’ in America and in post-WWII Japan. The lack of such an integrated system of property rights in today’s Third World Countries makes it impossible for the poor to make their now informal ownerships into capital, which de Soto claims would form the basis for entrepreneurship. Farmers in much of the developing world remain trapped in subsistence agriculture. As such, he argues that this informal ownership should be made formal, for example by giving official papers for the land they now live on.
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