# Liberty for Latin America * Author: [Alvaro Vargas Llosa](https://www.amazon.com/Alvaro-Vargas-Llosa/e/B001IU0X6C/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B00VE68IQW * Reference: [[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VE68IQW]] * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW) --- What good does it do to change institutions that make the government an instrument of privilege and predation if those changes are reversed by a culture unwilling to trade the security of a given situation, however dire, for the uncertainties and adjustments of free choice? That is exactly what happened to Argentina in the 1930s: after half a century of substantial free-market capitalism, it chose the opposite path. Growth cannot be sustained if, once the productive capacity of a nation is liberated from institutional constraints, citizens, lacking notions of saving and investing with a view to the future, squander their surpluses. — location: [103](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=103) --- a free institutional environment will foster a system of opportunity and reward that encourages those basic human instincts of survival and personal gain through social cooperation — location: [116](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=116) --- The encomiendas, large grants of serf labor handed out by the state as a reward for military victories or other reasons, were perhaps the greatest symbol of privilege. The symbol reflected the dominant idea that wealth was not to be produced but appropriated, and its appropriation entailed a form of status. — location: [269](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=269) --- The absolutist monarchy of unified Spain consolidated the latter type and, through the fusion of law and religion, strengthened the “idealism” and “unreality” of the legal system. The spheres of political authority and of the church were so intertwined that they became almost indistinguishable (kings even appointed bishops). — location: [283](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=283)This relates to Jared Rubin's book & thesis on the role religious authorities play in legitimizing and perpetuating rulers. --- Until the late nineteenth century, only 1 or 2 percent of the Latin American population were allowed to vote, whereas in the United States there was already by the middle of the century eight times that rate of popular electoral participation. — location: [413](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=413) --- The Latin American legal system that has been in place since the advent of the republics has been described as suffering from idealism, paternalism, legalism, formalism, and lack of penetration. Idealism entails a disconnection between the law and real life. Paternalism stresses authority over freedom. Legalism binds all social relations under comprehensive legislation. Formalism breeds a proliferation of requirements for legal permissions. — location: [468](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=468) --- But the inflation of laws translated into their debasement, just as the inflation of money debases a currency. — location: [479](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=479) --- The republic, which had come about as the result of the struggle against the institutions of colonial rule, in fact consolidated the five principles of oppression that constituted the legacy of both the pre-Columbian and the colonial worlds. Just as had been the case in the remote origins of the state, political power was now, if in more sophisticated ways, the instrument by which a powerful ruling class satisfied its desires and ambitions at the expense of the rest. — location: [488](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=488)Do most states result from increasing personal freedoms and less power with fewer restrictions, gradually over time? --- The rise of the people at the beginning of the twentieth century was not so much the physical rise of the masses as the subsuming of all individual identities into a body politic that now acquired the legitimacy of universal representation. — location: [524](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=524) --- Interventionism in the Caribbean and Central America propped up governments that were as corrupt as the enemies they struggled against. — location: [1022](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1022) --- The effect of interventionism has been twofold. On the one hand, authoritarian, corrupt, and mercantilist institutions were reinforced. On the other, American actions in the region caused many Latin Americans to direct their resentment toward the other values that America purported to stand for. — location: [1032](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1032) --- Rich countries did not develop because of industrialization. On the contrary: industrialization followed development, which in many Western nations was already under way in the old agrarian economy. Manufacturing, as Peter Bauer has said, is not a “cause” but a “symptom” of development. — location: [1067](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1067) --- There was a period in western Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when fierce negotiations, power struggles fought with bare knuckles, took place as different groups of people exercising what might be called entrepreneurial leadership lobbied to extract various sets of property rights and freedoms from the political authorities. What turned out to be decisive for the rise of capitalism was that those struggles gradually and painfully enfranchised more and more people, securing rights and freedoms for all. — location: [1256](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1256) --- In England and the Netherlands, the movement was toward full, universal rights; in France, toward a much less healthy mixture of mercantilism and property rights; and in Spain and Portugal, the countries that conquered Latin America, toward a system bearing against the individual. — location: [1308](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1308) --- The social institutions that we associate with free-market capitalism, from property to merchant courts, from common law to the use of money, were born out of the free intercourse of people making private decisions and contracting with each other, not out of government policies. — location: [1368](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1368) --- Even the capitalist corporation, which is essentially a web of contracts among people vested with property rights and dreams of creative endeavor and progress, was not a cold, politically engineered design but a spontaneous, deeply humane institutional development born out of the convenience of reducing transaction costs by integrating activities. — location: [1370](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1370) --- What might have seemed from a late-seventeenth-century perspective an inferiority on the part of early American settlements vis-à-vis Latin America’s massive colonial structure, namely small-scale systems of self-government with people who had fled religious persecution, was in fact the seed of capitalism in North America. — location: [1447](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1447) --- research has rediscovered the history of civic associations, fraternal orders, friendly societies, and religious groups in nineteenth-century America and Britain that provided the safety nets we tend to associate with governments today: medical care, unemployment insurance, education, and even law and order. Other “public goods,” such as turnpikes, also resulted from people cooperating with one another on a private basis. — location: [1491](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1491) --- after centuries of high capital formation under a climate of incentives for private enterprise in general, this very unhealthy increase in interventionism has not been able to unseat the United States from world supremacy or to destroy the capitalist engine driving the country forward. — location: [1527](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00VE68IQW&location=1527)High taxes alone can not stop growth from happening. It depends on how taxes are used relative to the counterfactual. If taxes are used for highly product've poproses then there is no problem. The thing is that the people with the capital can individually (as part of a society) determine that much better than a few people in a room. Another consideration is that the government could have used it for value-added uses but ones that are far inferior to what the private market would do.