The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages

Amazon.com Review
The phenomenal success of Western civilization and the remarkable economic expansion fueled by modern capitalism, says Tom Bethell, depend chiefly on the institution of private property and the development of secure property rights, yet this simple, striking idea is misunderstood by elite opinion leaders in the United States and around the world. Bethell, a reporter for the American Spectator, offers a history of property as an idea and a reality around the world. His sweeping narrative will appeal to fans of David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yet, in many crucial respects, The Noblest Triumph (the title comes from British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's line that property laws represent "the noblest triumph of humanity over itself") is better than both, displaying a keener understanding of human nature and of how incentives shape behavior. In a chapter sure to inspire controversy, Bethell argues that the Irish potato famines of the 1840s were due primarily to Ireland's lack of stable property rights in the 19th century. Full of astute observations and written with real clarity, The Noblest Triumph makes a unique and welcome contribution to the debate over why some countries thrive while others languish.

From Publishers Weekly
Marx preached the abolition of private property; utopian William Godwin inveighed against property and marriage as evils; and British socialist Robert Owen, who subsidized a failed collectivist community in New Harmony, Ind., in the 1820s, taught that private property warped human character. In their wake, argues American Spectator Washington correspondent Bethell, the concept of private property has been tarnished. In a signal contribution to the debate over capitalism's future, he contends that economic prosperity and social justice are possible only when property rights are widespread?and protected by a legal system that holds all equal before the law. These factors, he maintains, explain the vast gulf separating the world's prosperous nations and underdeveloped economies. All over the Third World, he notes, most people are permanently at risk of eviction, seizure, squatters' or police-state depredations. It follows, he argues, that the solution to poverty is not expropriation of land and redistribution of wealth, but rather, creating an infrastructure that will secure title rights to land, homes and businesses, making private enterprise feasible. A shrewd analyst of the abortive Soviet experiment, Bethell offers a novel analysis of the mid-19th-century Irish famine, arguing that shortsighted Anglo-Irish landlords acted against their own best interests by denying tenant farmers long-term leases. Yet Bethell struggles unsuccessfully to fit undemocratic, economically booming China into his framework, and at times sounds like an apologist for China, disputing the U.S. State Department's designation of it as an authoritarian state.

http://www.amazon.com/Noblest-Triumph-Property-Prosperity-Through/dp/0312223374

Last edited by Nemo on Sun Nov 07, 2010 2:06 am; edited 1 time in total

Property.

Appropriate.

Productivity.

Prosperity.

Propriety.

Proper.

proper
early 13c., "adapted to some purpose, fit, apt," from O.Fr. propre (11c.), from L. proprius "one's own, particular to itself," from pro privo "for the individual." Proper name "belonging to or relating to the person or thing in question," is from late 13c.

(Just for all the "we all own everything equally" socialist lurkers out there.)

Pro: Independent, capitalistic, entrepreneurial, sex worker

:D

Ah yes, the world's oldest profession...

Oh, and profit and proficiency.

The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages

The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages

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