The mother of all rights
SANDTON - Ecomomist, Yuri Maltsev gave a presentation at Primedia House on the links between property rights and economic growth.
Maltsev was the economic advisor to president Mikhail Gorbachev and the first recipient of the Free-Market Foundation luminary award. He is renowned as one of the few economists in the West with direct first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of the Soviet economy and Soviet government policies. He is a professor of international economics at Carthage College in Wisconsin, USA and a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace.
A humorous and charismatic speaker, his presentation defended free-market property rights. He said secure property rights were the only way of successfully achieving economic growth and that property rights were society’s last line of defence between freedom and tyranny.
He said, “If you are stripped or deprived of property that makes you a slave because you don’t have choices. What is freedom? Freedom is choice. And you can only make choices if you have property rights.”
Maltsev said that property rights was the mother of all rights, and there would be no freedom of speech, freedom of press or political freedom without economic freedom.
“I came from a country where property rights were destroyed and that led to the immediate destruction of the whole country. The destruction of property rights mostly leads to mass murder.”
He described the Land Redistribution Act in South Africa as an invasion of the property rights of citizens.
Maltsev also disapproved of initiatives such as nationalised health care and unemployment benefits.
