Source: Brasil de Fato

Militarized police state and the incursion of market forces generate new tensions in the slums

By: Gláucia Marinho e Katarine Flor

The story reminded me of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy.

De Soto`s main thesis speaks to the means of introducing workers and small entrepreneurs in an informal  economy to a formal system of legal commitments and guarantees, unleashing, he says, “an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing (Wikipedia).”

I have always been drawn to this way of thinking — I suppose that makes me a liberal of some sort.

The problem with this model is that in real life, public agents — such as the military police who moonlight as members of militia groups — play a game of public-private arbitrage, subjecting those under their “protection” to redundant fiscal tribute to what…