The Private Property Solution

"Normally it is said that if population trends continue, starvation will result, resources will be depleted, and the environment ravaged. But private property solves all these problems. It is in the thinly populated countries, where property is communal by custom or controlled by the state -- Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, for example -- that we have seen the worst of famine and environmental destruction. Countries that do not enjoy secure and transferable private property will certainly remain backward, however. That is because human nature is everywhere the same."

From The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, by Tom Bethell