De Soto on the Importance of Property

If you take a walk through the countryside, from Indonesia to Peru, and you walk by field after field--in each field a different dog is going to bark at you. Even dogs know what private property is all about. The only one who does not know it is the government. The issue is that there exists a "common law" and an "informal law" which the Latin American formal legal system does not know how to recognize.

We have been working for eight years and have created a system that recognizes it. And we have been making it work in Peru. And we are about to finish titling 120,000 informal properties in Peru. We are now working on a report of our efforts: "Transforming Poor People's Land into Wealth," or "The Only System for the Titling and Registration of Informal Property." We are already moving from the theory of private ownership to how to create It.

Read all of the Reason magazine interview with the innovative Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto here.