{"id":102,"date":"2003-06-05T06:43:23","date_gmt":"2003-06-05T06:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:44","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:44","slug":"on_property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=102","title":{"rendered":"On Property"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a great quote, which will probably make steam come out the ears of the Samizdata<\/a> types:<\/p>\n

The crucial point to understand is that property is not a physical thing that can be photographed or mapped. Property is not a primary quality of<\/u> assets but the legal expression of an economically meaningful consensus about<\/u> assets. Law is the instrument that fixes and realized capital. In the West, the law is less concerned with representing the physical realities of buildings or real estate than with providing a process or rules that will allow society to extract potential surplus value from those assets. Property is not the assets themselves, but the consensus between people as to how these assets should be held, used, or exchanged. The challenge today in most non-Western countries is not to put all the nation’s land and buildings on the same map (which has probably already been done) but to integrate the formal legal conventions inside the bell jar with the extralegal ones outside it.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just finished reading De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else<\/A>. For the four people who read blogs and haven’t heard of this book, Hernando De Soto is a Peruvian economist who is very concerned with issues of development in the Third World, and who points out that there is substantial wealth in the underground economies, and that if there was a way to bring those econonomies into the mainstream, very good things would happen. <\/p>\n

Read this book!<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Property is not a physical thing, not a primary quality of assets but the legal expression of an economically meaningful consensus about assets. So says Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who says the solution to Third World underdevelopment lies in capitalism that integrates the 3rd World’s underground economies. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}