Short video explaining the link between Economic Freedom and Standard of Living. So simple, yet difficult to achieve...

HT: Division of Labour

How do we keep the elephant from becoming extinct? Easy! Let people shoot them, eat them and sell the ivory. Get over your squimishness. The elephants NEED you to support this!!

Below is a graphic (HT: Carpe Diem) comparing the elephant population of Kenya and Zimbabwe from 1970 to 2011.  You can see they run counter to each other. Why? It is the result of how each country dealt with the problem of "The Tragedy of the Commons"...Kenya banned hunting of elephants and Zimbabwe gave ownership rights to the elephants to local communities. It may be distasteful to many the way they went about saving the elephant from extinction but they, well, saved the elephant from extinction.  Please read the excerpt below and at least consider the effectiveness of this approach. The elephant population needs you to help them survive!   

Source: Carpe Diem

 The following is from Defining Ideas (HT: Carpe Diem)

In the 1970s, Kenya had about six times as many elephants as Zimbabwe, and today Zimbabwe has three times more elephants than Kenya (see chart). What happened that caused the dramatic reversal in elephant populations in the two African countries?


Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) explain in their excellent article "Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community":

"Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in 1973 to just 16,000 in 1989. Poaching took its toll on elephants because of their damage to both cropland and people. Today Kenya wildlife officials boast a doubling of the country’s elephant population to 32,000, but nearly all are in protected national parks where poaching can be controlled.

In sharp contrast to Kenya, consider what has happened in Zimbabwe. In 1989, results-oriented groups such as the World Wildlife Fund helped implement a program known as the Communal Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources or CAMPFIRE. This approach devolves the rights to benefit from, dispose of, and manage natural resources to the local level, including the right to allow safari hunting. Community leaders with local knowledge about wildlife and its interface with humans help establish sustainable hunting quotas. Hunting then provides jobs for community members, compensation for crop and property damage, revenue to build schools, clinics, and water wells, and meat for villagers.

By granting local people control over wildlife resources, their incentive to protect it has strengthened. As a result, poaching has been contained and human-wildlife conflicts have been reduced. While challenges remain, especially from the current political climate in Zimbabwe, CAMPFIRE has quietly produced results with strikingly little activist rhetoric.

Between 1989 and 2005, Zimbabwe’s total elephant population more than doubled from 37,000 to 85,000, with half living outside of national parks. Today, some put the number as high as 100,000, even after decades of legal, trophy hunting. All of this has occurred with an economy in shambles, regime uncertainty, and mounting socio-political challenges."

The Tragedy of the Fishies and Bunnies...See how you can keep these critters alive!! (hint: give their hunters private property rights)...

This video uses commercial fishing as an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. When property rights are not clear, or don't exist at all, then when people compete for an economic resource they have no incentive conserve the resource, and every incentive to pillage the resource as much as possible.  Property held "in common" will become subject to over-exploitation.  It is a zero-sum game---if I don't get it, then you will.  If acceptable ownership rights are established and enforced (the most important part) then all parties have an incentive to not pillage the resource, which ensures more will be available in the future. 

This way of thinking has many applications. Can you think of a resource held in common currently that could benefit from private ownership?  (HT: Division of Labour for the video)

Here is a link to an interactive game to teach the lesson of the Tragedy of the Commons. This one is called "The Tragedy of the Bunnies"...Get there quick to save the little fluffy things!!! :)

Private Property Rights---BORING!! Well, not so much for people without them...They would like just a little of what rights you enjoy today...

In the span of two days the articles linked below have shone a light on how the lack of enforceable private property rights in developing countries have harmed large groups of people.  This is a widespread problem in Africa and other developing countries and it is commonly cited as a (the?) major, over-arching reason why it makes it so difficult for these countries to experience significant economic progress for the masses.

WSJ: Tullow Oil's Ambitions in Uganda Entangle Company in Land Dispute
NY TIMES: African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In

Here are a few excerpts that illustrate the issue/problem. Notice the commonalities:

""The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave."" WSJ 

""Sekou Traoré, 69, a village elder, was dumbfounded when government officials said last year that Libya now controlled his land and began measuring the fields. He had always considered it his own, passed down from grandfather to father to son.""WSJ

""A battle is brewing over oil-rich land licensed by Uganda's government to Tullow Oil PLC, entangling the U.K. company in a conflict between nomadic livestock herders and indigenous communities.  In recent days, Uganda's army had begun enforcing an order from President Yoweri Museveni to remove the herders. They were forced off the land with about 10,000 head of cattle and not provided with an alternative place to settle, according to security officers in the Bulisa and Hoima districts. "" NYTIMES

""The legal spat echoes similar conflicts over land and resources in other developing countries, from Africa to Asia. Governments sometimes sell land to companies where local farmers have lived for generations, with or without any record of property ownership."" NYTIMES

""Like many other indigenous people in the area, Mr. Alisemera said he inherited his land from his ancestors. Yet with the discovery of oil and an influx of cattle herders, his hold on the land is threatened. Many herders have acquired title deeds in an effort to bolster bids for compensation if they are asked to leave."NYTIMES

From our Euro-centric point of view, it seems like a relatively simple thing to do.  Advanced economy's of the developed world have mastered the art of establishing and maintaining private property rights to the extent that we hardly give it second thought and it is woven into the fabric of our economic DNA. How come we can do it, but much of the rest of the world can't or won't?  Ownership rights give one a sense of security and it allows you to benefit (ok, profit) from that ownership.  Ownership rights privide the incentive to maintain and improve the asset for (1) your own private benefit, which in turn improves the community you live in and (2) makes it more attractive to someone else who may want to acquire ownership in your asset at a fair market price.  Without property rights that are enforced by the rule of law, then the incentive to do these two things, in large part, disappears.

Hernado de Soto, in his great book "The Mystery of Capital--Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else"", gives as keen an insight on this issue and is considered an authority on the subject.  He sees private property as a generator of physical and financial capital that one can parlay into more physical and financial captial.

""...But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment....""

""The poor inhabitants of these nations —the overwhelming majority— do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work.""

In the US and other developed countries this confiscating of property with no due process rarely happens.  While not perfect, we do have the institutions (the legal system) to help us fend off land grabs, from the government or other elites, that are so common in developing countries.  Until private property reforms are made and enforced by an independent legal system, places and incidents like the ones described above will have very limited progress. 


So, if you own a house, car, business, or other physical/financial asset and you don't fear someone can arbitrarily take it away from you, then you should thank the private property rights our major institutions (executive, legislative, judicial) still protect...many in the world envy you right now...