while enriching themselves in the process.
Weeellll, it looks like they got the "enriching themselves" part right, anyway...
http://slate.msn.com/id/2112792/De Soto's vision of the Third World is instinctively appealing. He sees industrious, entrepreneurial slum-dwellers, toiling with boundless ingenuity, yet living in homes and owning businesses that are theirs only by de facto possession and jury-rigged local agreements, not by de jure deed and title. De Soto calls all this informally held property "dead capital," because it can't be leveraged to produce growth—it can't be mortgaged, because it lacks a proper title to guarantee it as collateral. He says there are gobs and gobs of this dead stuff out there: $9.3 trillion worth, by his estimate, skulking in the ghetto.
Mindful of the fact that "the single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house," de Soto's plan is, quite simply, to make homeowners out of the world's poor squatters. Neighborhood by neighborhood, slum by slum, he wants to formalize the vast extralegal world by dotting it with individual property titles. Once that's done, he promises, the poor will have access to credit, loans, and investment, as their dead assets are transformed—voilà!—into live capital.
In various parts of the Third World, newly legalized squatters on the outskirts of cities are discovering that a property title supplies little of the benefit de Soto projects. Government studies out of de Soto's native Peru suggest that titles don't actually increase access to credit much after all. Out of the 200,313 Lima households awarded land titles in 1998 and 1999, only about 24 percent had gotten any kind of financing by 2002—and in that group, financing from private banks was almost nil. In other words, the only capital infusion—which was itself modest—was coming from the state....
In the nine months or so leading up to the project kickoff, a devastating series of slum fires and forced evictions purged 23,000 squatters from tracts of untitled land in the heart of Phnom Penh. These squatters were then plopped onto dusty relocation sites several miles outside of the city, where there were no jobs and where the price of commuting to and from central Phnom Penh (about $2 per day) surpassed whatever daily wage they had been earning in town before the fires. Meanwhile, the burned-out inner city land passed immediately to some of the wealthiest property developers in the country. (Prominent among them was this guy, Cambodia's richest thug.)Davos fat cat: (takes deep swig of cognac) "You know, this De Soto guy might actually be on to something. If we give the squalid peasants
title to their pathetic little shanties,
that'll make it easier for us to steal them!"
The unrepentant lefty twist on this would be to incorporate entire villages and shantytowns as cooperatives, with
communal land ownership. "United we stand..." Besides, the notion of individual land ownership is anathema in most indigenous cultures. The American Indians thought
they were swindling the
English: "Some fool of an Englishman gave me all this stuff, and all I had to do was sign one of their papers that says that they now own the land. Own the land?! Are they insane? No one can
own the land..."
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