The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism

[Chris]

Hernando De Soto is founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, and author of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (because of the legal structure of property and property rights).

He argues The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism

...But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.

I know something about this. A generation ago, much of Latin America was in turmoil. By 1990, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had seized control of most of my home country, Peru, where I served as the president’s principal adviser. Fashionable opinion held that the people rebelling were the impoverished or underemployed wage slaves of Latin America, that capitalism couldn’t work outside the West and that Latin cultures didn’t really understand market economics.

The conventional wisdom proved to be wrong, however. Reforms in Peru gave indigenous entrepreneurs and farmers control over their assets and a new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow—spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.

...

[Alyosha]

I'll bet he's an atheist. There is no coming back with all the free market solutions in the world at our disposal. As a religious person myself I understand the idea of forsaking earthly goals for heavenly ones.

Until we get that not everyone is a secular humanist or cares about materialism we will continue to make a muck of things.

[Chris]

Don't know that he is an atheist. Here he's just arguing that unless people are free to make a living and support family and such there will always be strife and terrorism. The way people are able to do that is to have stake in the game, to own the fruits of their labor and use them to generate the wealth needed to live decently with dignity. I don't think he would argue that's all there is.

[Philly Rabbit]

The cure for terrorism is to get out of the middle east. This guy doesn't realize (or wont admit it) that the sole presence of the U.S. there IS capitalism being oil and its price on the world oil market. Why does he think the 911 terrorists hit the World Trade Center? Because of western capitalism and global corporations and U.S. military presence protecting America's oil interests on Muslim holy grounds that are being desecrated by western democratic secularism and capitalistic global greed by their very presence there.

George Bush 43 could have easily payed for his Iraq war with Iraq's oil instead of charging the bill to the American taxpayers but he refused to do it because he was so worried about world oil prices taking a severe climb on Iraq's oil customers and America's trading partners.

[donttread]

The cure for terrorism is to get out of the middle east. This guy doesn't realize (or wont admit it) that the sole presence of the U.S. there IS capitalism being oil and its price on the world oil market. Why does he think the 911 terrorists hit the World Trade Center? Because of western capitalism and global corporations and U.S. military presence protecting America's oil interests on Muslim holy grounds that are being desecrated by western democratic secularism and capitalistic global greed by their very presence there.

George Bush 43 could have easily payed for his Iraq war with Iraq's oil instead of charging the bill to the American taxpayers but he refused to do it because he was so worried about world oil prices taking a severe climb on Iraq's oil customers and America's trading partners.

Corporatism. Our presence there is the very definition of corporatism vs Capitalism. We are there to help Exxon/OPEC control the market and to thwart the price competition which is the hall mark of capitalism

[Chris]

Well, the OP is not arguing for greater corporatism (collusion of government and business) but less.