The importance of private property
5 billion of the world’s 7 billion people don’t have the documents to live in a particular place. To be precise, they don’t have the legal property rights required to reside, own assets or do business in their own or any other country. That’s 5 billion without any enforceable guarantee that they will not be expropriated or environmentally contaminated by powerful business, government, terrorists, or criminals. That also means they will struggle to have access to credit or the ability to raise capital since borrowers typically need to pledge some kind of property in exchange. Only 1 billion people living in the West, Japan, Singapore, and the like, and another billion in the westernized areas of developing and former Soviet nations have the documents to protect and leverage their rights.