Raw Material Inventory

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto:

“Capitalism can be the engine by which the poor, set free in an open marketplace, can raise themselves from poverty. We must give them the tools. We ignore them at our peril.”

“What a market economy is about, what a capitalist system is about, is people that cluster together spontaneously to try and divide labor among themselves in such a way as to be more productive.”

“… in other words, the legal systems are simply unfriendly to poor people. Legal complications are what history is made of. Simplification is relatively recent.”

“Two thirds of the world’s population, 4 billion people, are locked out of the capitalist system. They want to participate, but they can’t because participating means being able to make safe contracts with everybody, being able to get credit, having an indentity that will be recognized on a broad scale throughout the world, and having the possibility to organize production so that they can enter foreign markets. They can’t, so what they’ve done is created their own legal system, what we call the extra-legal system.”

“These people are the engines of growth. It’s these people that produce the wealth. These people have assets.”

“We forget that most of us didn’t have access to them [the formal, legal tools of capitalism] until the 1850s…”

Capitalism is the engine. Inclusion is the key.