RON BAILEY LOOKS AT PROPERTY RIGHTS AND POVERTY, and offers advice to the Friends of the Earth:

Amusingly, while the FOE report insists on all kinds of rights for the world’s poor, including environmental, human, political, collective, legal, and women’s rights, there is in the report not a single mention of the word “property,” as in “property rights.” While FOE is to be commended for its support for restoring stolen land to poor people around the globe, it just cannot bring itself to permit individual poor people to own land. Consequently, most of the “sustainable development” schemes endorsed by FOE involve collective ownership of land and natural resources. (By collective ownership, FOE most emphatically does not mean corporate ownership.) Collective ownership by a defined group is better than government theft, but it limits the options of the joint owners who are subject to the tyranny of generally conservative majorities who stifle entrepreneurship. Evidently, FOE would prefer that poor people sit around voting all day rather than getting rich. Think church vestries or condo association meetings.

Ack.