This documentary from Free to Choose Media, which features economist Hernando de Soto and will air on PBS October 8, looks fascinating and important. With any luck, it will make more people realize that the poor are not helpless victims in need of rescue, but entrepreneurial people capable of pulling themselves out of poverty when allowed to do so.
Here’s the blurb:
“This film project is crucial because it focuses on how two-thirds of the world lives and what these people aspire to. If we can only understand that most people just want to be like us, that is at least half of the game of putting up the right policies to help them achieve prosperous market economies. Films are very important, you can’t understand this unless you really see it.”
--Hernando de Soto
To those who watch television in the developed world, there doesn’t seem to be a better system on earth than the capitalist system. We are experiencing the longest economic expansion in modern history. Soviet Communism has been defeated.
But make no mistake, as we will demonstrate in this program, capitalism is surprisingly vulnerable. The moment of capitalism’s greatest triumph is the moment of its greatest crisis, its “Moment of Truth.” In fact, capitalism is not working for the vast majority of humanity that lives on the planet. Two thirds of the world’s population has been locked out of the global economy, forced to operate outside the rule of law, they have no legal identity, no credit, no capital, and thus no way to prosper. To unlock The Power of the Poor is to change the world. If we fail, these people will turn against capitalism as they have turned against other failed economic systems, and that could make for a very difficult, violent time.
Filmed on location from Latin America to Africa, The Power of the Poor will demonstrate how free markets, individual freedom and especially the right to property can transform the poor into the most powerful resource in the world. At its heart is the potential triumph of capitalism as a system.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Oh, but it is from the Free To Choose Network, so it might as well be from the devil ;P. Hmm, the word “extra-legal” might be great for Agorists.
Hernando De Soto… Great name. Looks like it will be well worth watching. It’s a shame that it has to be picked up by PBS (though I guess an argument can be made that it could change more minds there). I really think that the world needs a libertarian version of Current TV.
“I really think that the world needs a libertarian version of Current TV.”
or maybe the world should just go out and make something to barter with instead of watching TV at all : )
At least this will show that it is not unrestricted capitalism which keeps 3rd world nations in poverty.
Love Hernando de Soto. While I don’t think he is a radical libertarian, he is someone who approaches the world with an open mind and genuine desire to bring about wealth and health to the poorest parts of the world. His book, The Mystery of Capital, is one of the most important books of our age. In it, he doesn’t make a case for a libertarian society, but he shows irrefutably that the social construct of private property (as opposed to government-confiscated ‘public property’) is the must-have ingredient for a wealthy society with an ever-improving standard of living.