A Well-Deserved Prize ; Award Winner Helps Poorer Countries Follow Path of Property, Liberty, Prosperity

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Congratulations go out to Hernando de Soto for winning this year's Friedman Prize for Liberty, which the libertarian Cato Institute gives for outstanding achievement in advancing freedom throughout the world. The prize is named after Nobel economics prize laureate Milton Friedman and was awarded at a May 6 ceremony in San Francisco.

Growing up in his native Peru, de Soto was dismayed that his country was so poor while other countries were more prosperous. But he brushed aside the trendy Marxist analyses that blamed the situation on colonialism and capitalist oppression and noticed some important differences between lesser and better developed countries.

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A Well-Deserved Prize ; Award Winner Helps Poorer Countries Follow Path of Property, Liberty, Prosperity

In Peru, for instance, property was not secure and just starting a business meant wading through oceans of red tape. By contrast, in more prosperous countries -- such as Hong Kong, Chile after Gen. Pinochet's economic reforms and the U...

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