Hernando de Soto to speak at UNC
Hernando de Soto is no Rothbardian.
He writes of social contracts, of voluntary taxation (meaning the coercive kind we have now), and of the indispensable role of the State in defining and securing the private right to property.
But unlike so many development economists, he sees the solution to world poverty as secure property rights for the poor, based on a principle of homesteading.
In his book, The Mystery of Capital, he illustrates the distinction between property-as-possession and property title as the basis for the entrepreneurial generation of wealth. The world's poor have the former; they need the latter.
Austro-libertarians will take issue with much of his writing, including his assertion than only Marxism presents a credible theory of class conflict -- apparently DeSoto doesn't realize that Marx took the structure for his model of conflict (working class versus capitalist class) from classical liberal class theory (productive class versus political class) -- but DeSoto's bottom-up emphasis on the creation of wealth is a breath of fresh air in a field dominated by top-down models of "development".
DeSoto will be speaking at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, next Tuesday, October 26th. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the web page for this event.
Comments (5)
While I like much of what DeSoto says, but it is certainly wrong to say that only Marx did good class analysis. Marx did good history, but bad analysis. For some worthwhile class analysis, see Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis. Hoppe, Hans-Hermann..
Published: October 21, 2004 3:45 PM
Think of it as baby steps...DeSoto may not be a Rothbardian, but I'm hoping he'll be a step up from people like one of my professors, who told her students that private property is just an "interest" that rich people want the government to protect so they can hold on to what they own at the expense of the poor. The opinion that more socialism and redistribution is not the answer to third world poverty is a breath of fresh air at UNC.
Published: October 21, 2004 6:11 PM
Skye,
Proudhon was not a systematic thinker; he was a visionary but with little theory to back up his visions.
When he said 'anarchy', he meant 'no state'. However, he did have in mind a specific social structure composed of many communes, all of them organised according to principles laid down by Proudhon. (There is an entry in his diaries where he said that anarchism would only work if he was in charge of its organisation! It was not for nothing that the chapter on Proudhon in George Woodcock's classic, "Anarchism", 1962, was entitled The Man of Paradox.)
Why people, if left free to make up their own minds, would choose to live in his communes, Proudhon did not explain. Neither did he explain how his communes would fare if they had to compete in a non-coercive, non-violent way with other types of social organisation.
Proudhon was a gifted writer of polemics ("Property is theft") who was among the first to denounce the anti-freedom bias of other 19th century socialists, including Marx (whose "The Poverty of Philosophy" was a blistering attack on Proudhon's "The Philosophy of Poverty").
Although Tucker called himself 'a scientific anarchist', his ideas were derived from Proudhon and especially the American Josiah Warren, another adept of the 'co-operative community' that was at the heart of nineteenth century individualist anarchism. In the tradition of the Utopian Socialists, Warren experimented with an exchange system based on the principle 'labour for labour'. He did this in his Time Store, later his Village of Equity, in Ohio, and still later his Utopia commune -- all of them experiments in small-scale barter economies with 'labour notes' and no attempt at capital formation.
The individualism of these authors is beyond reproach, but their social and economic thought was so primitive as to be virtually irrelevant in any other setting than a small autarkic community. (If the scale is small enough, even full-blown socialist central planning can work, as isolated patriarchal families have demonstrated throughout the ages.)
Published: October 21, 2004 6:50 PM
I don't have the knowledge to criticize/analyze de Soto's book. However,I have learned much general history by reading it and discovered new sources to go to,,,for that I am grateful. Other Mises Inst writers are a goldmine for beginners (72 years old)like me. Thanks.
Published: October 22, 2004 12:09 AM
did he said the he wante to the
Published: January 6, 2006 1:39 PM