The mother of all rights; without secure property, the Islamic world can't escape tyranny and stagnation

Reason, April, 1994 by Tom Bethell

In the end, it may not be possible to pinpoint the "root cause"--whether religious, ethnic, customary, or cultural--that gives rise to this crucial difference between the Islamic and Western worlds. But what we can certainly say is that the insecurity of property alone, for whatever cause, is sufficient to explain the great disparity of material wealth between the two societies. Human nature is basically the same everywhere, and it can be confidently predicted that wherever property is insecure, society will be impoverished and will be unable to attain the level of development reached in the West.

Both critics outside the Muslim world and liberal activists within it have taken aim at the lack of civil rights, especially for women, in these countries. But they have overlooked that property rights are among the most important of the civil rights that these governments fail to protect. Because we are not disembodied beings, civil rights in the absence of property rights don't get us very far at all.

Tom Bethell, Washington editor of The American Spectator, is writing a book on property.