Peter Leeson

Quotes From

“The New Comparative Political Economy” (2005)

• Privatization without price liberalization, or price liberalization without tight monetary policy, or deregulation without fiscal restraint, would all result in outcomes even less desirable than the current system.#
• Society functions best when the need for the policeman is the least.#
• Technological change [is] actually accorded too much attention in the economic theory of development. Technology does not work itself but must always work through an investment of capital.#
• The visible manifestation of underdevelopment is poverty and its immediate cause is lack of saved capital. The underlying cause, however, is the lack of credible institutions in the realms of politics, law, economics, finance, and society. This lack of credible institutions manifests itself in the inability to ward off predation by either private or public actors. Perhaps one of the most important empirical lessons we have learned from the transition from socialism and the problem of development assistance more generally is that efforts to supply the saved capital in terms of loans are counter productive except in areas where credible institutions which constrain predation are already in place.#
• Schooling is not the answer any more than technology transfer unless members of the indigenous population are secure in their knowledge that if they place a bet on an economic idea, they will be able to reap the rewards should that bet pay off.#