misesman:

thecheekylibertarian:

Chief Raoni crying when he learned that the President of Brazil approved the Belo Monte dam project on the Xingu indigenous lands. Belo Monte will be bigger than the Panama Canal, flooding nearly a million acres of rainforest & indigenous lands. 40,000 indigenous and local people will be forced off their lands (as well as millions of unknown species & plants).

Anyone who’s heard me discuss economic development knows that I do not like Brazil (nor do I like Latin America in general as an economist, but that’s a rant for another time). This is a pretty good summary of why. Brazil’s impressive ‘development’, warranting its inclusion in BRICS as an up-and-coming country (as an economic power), has been driven primarily by heavy ISI strategies and generally large government, which allowed human development to lag embarrassingly behind economic growth (I never harp on income inequality, except in Latin America, in which case, it is the largest gap in the world and is caused almost exclusively by corruption and clientelism (whoa, I just realized that I wrote about that exact issue today on my LA Politics exam)). At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you miraculously created a competitive government-owned oil company (Petrobras or PBR) or a solid aeronautics industry; property rights and, in turn, human rights, are destroyed through big government and its ability to transcend accountability and responsibility. Violations of indigenous peoples’ rights are almost always at the hand of the government… Less than 100 years ago, the US government separated ‘mixed’ Native American/Whites from their families, to prevent cultural assimilation with the ‘uncivilized’—my mother was actually afraid to record her ethnicity on any kind of government documentation until recently. Not to mention the government shoved all of these people into Oklahoma, which has got to suck, in and of itself (I apologize to any followers hailing from the desert).

Government at its worst.