Leading Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, took 100 economists to every continent of the world to study the causes of national poverty. Their findings are documented in de Soto’s book “The Mystery of Capital.”[1] It identifies the central cause of national poverty as corruption in the legal system.
Third world people were often found to have considerable assets. But they were unable to borrow against assets at reasonable interest rates to expand their businesses. Banks, for example, wouldn’t accept title deeds as security because even if the deeds proved to be legitimate a corrupt judge might be paid to ignore them.
This is a wake-up call to common law countries like Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America. It took Christian judges nearly two thousand years to build our common law using Jesus’ golden rule that we should treat others as we would want to be treated.[2]
Legal values based on the golden rule permeated our culture and governmental systems and made justice difficult to corrupt. That provided a strong foundation for prosperity and freedom without requiring anyone to become a Christian.
Against powerful and sometimes brutal opposition, our forebears used Jesus’ love-based values to develop a system that very gradually reversed tyranny and poverty. With that evidence for encouragement, any nation willing to adopt the same basis for legal values should expect to enjoy justice, freedom and prosperity much more swiftly, because global communication is deepening the desire in people everywhere.
Most of the world’s immigrants, for example, are drawn to our shores by glimpsing our justice, freedom and prosperity over the internet. They come because most nations are tyrannized – if not by dictators, certainly by disease and poverty.
Their hope will be lost – and so will ours – if we keep electing politicians who sign UN “treaties” that replace our love-based legal values. Such “treaties” oblige us to adopt the brutal humanistic legal values favored by the 56% of regimes that get a vote in the UN but refuse to give their own people an honest vote.
Humanism has provided the legal values of choice for bloody revolutionaries since the French revolution in 1793. Yet many politicians happily subvert our system with humanist values to further their deluded internationalist dream of world peace.
[1] Hernando de Soto, “The Mystery of Capital – why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else” a Black Swan book, 0 552 99923 7
[2] The Rt. Hon Sir Alfred (Later Lord) Denning, “The Changing Law” p 99-122. It is a small, easy to read, outstanding work. Everyone interested in the sources of justice and freedom should read it. Now out of print, but available through www.amazon.com
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