The Mystery of Capital Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

Institute for Liberty and Democracy ^ | 2000 | Hernando de Soto

[gcruse]

its not yet clear whether they will be able to establish societies that will not, in the end, crush the entrepreneurial spirit of innovation or confiscate the goods that capitalists have earned.

In the end, without intervening revolution, we're all socialists.  Once a voter realizes he can vote himself money from the other man's pocket, socialism is inevitable.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Along similar lines, Fukuyama put out a decent book a few years ago called "Trust".

Although I haven't read De Soto's book, it seems they have similar themes.

One of the sub-themes of Fukuyama's book is that Asian entrepeneurs tend to keep the business in the family. So a hardworking father hands over his shipping company to his spoiled, drug-addled son and a once thriving company goes down the drain.

In the West, we tend to have larger spheres of trust due to contract law, etc. and so businesses are passed on to people based on their business acumen rather than on family or neighborhood connections.

It could be that Christianity, by being a univeral religion, got people to trust others outside their family or neighborhood groups so long as they shared the same religious beliefs.

So it might not be so much the morality taught by Christ, as the universality he taught that ultimately led to the success of Capital formation in the West.

After all, the Confuscianism of the East is not a bad set of prinicples to guide one's life by, but there is a strong undergirding of "family comes first" and "blood is thicker than water".