From Hernando de Soto, the founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, the author of “The Mystery of Capital” and host of the documentary “Unlikely Heroes of the Arab Spring.”
All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction.
As countries from China to Peru to Botswana have proved in recent years, poor people can adapt quickly when given a framework of modern rules for property and capital. The trick is to start. We must remember that, throughout history, capitalism has been created by those who were once poor.
I can tell you firsthand that terrorist leaders are very different from their recruits. The radical leaders whom I encountered in Peru were generally murderous, coldblooded, tactical planners with unwavering ambitions to seize control of the government. Most of their sympathizers and would-be recruits, by contrast, would rather have been legal economic agents, creating better lives for themselves and their families.
The best way to end terrorist violence is to make sure the twisted calls of terrorist leaders fall on deaf ears.
“The Capitalist Cure For Terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal, 10/11/12-10/12/12
Capitalism is the best anti-poverty and anti-terrorist program ever invented.
