Quotes from Gary A. Haugen

the poor don't have much in the way of money or possessions to steal—so it turns out that the most profitable thing to steal is the whole person.

Violence in the developing world is like grief in the developed world—it's everywhere, but we just don't see it.

God's people are his plan to respond to the needs of the oppressed in our world.

She had a certain guarded melancholy, no doubt, but no despair (44).

Violence is as much a part of what is means to be poor as being hungry, sick, homeless, or jobless. In fact, as we shall see, violence is frequently the problem that poor people are most concerned about. It is one of the core reasons they are poor in the first place, and one of the primary reasons they stay poor. Indeed, we will simply never be able to win the battle against extreme poverty unless we address it.

Facts are hard things - and either we deal with the facts, or the facts will deal with us

The Locust Effect then is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor.

There are more slaves in the world today (best estimate—27 million) than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. And there are more slaves in India today than in any other country in the world.

there is virtually no credible social science evidence to support the idea that violence in societies can be effectively addressed in the absence of the state exercising its monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force through law enforcement.

For the hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people who live outside the protection of the rule of law, they principal reason they suffer abuse is often not the absence of good laws, but the absence of a functioning public justice system to enforce those laws.

Without the world noticing, the locusts of common, criminal violence are right now ravaging the lives and dreams of billions of our poorest neighbors.

the problem is not the supply of food, but the inequities in the distribution system that rob the poor of the capacity to access the food.

high levels of criminal violence reduce a nation's economic productivity by 2 to 3 full percentage points of GDP—and

Sometimes the exacerbating factor is so acute that it can render the direct solution nearly useless—but solving the exacerbating factor is always inadequate in the absence of the direct solution.

You are probably not regularly being threatened with being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed. But if you were among the world's poorest billions, you would be.

Mark L. Schneider. Placing Security and Rule of Law on the Development Agenda. Washington, DC: World Bank (2009). 14.

We are terrified to see what fallible, arrogant humanity can do with the hard steel of the absolute standards of right and wrong.

the Harvard scholar Christopher Stone, now the head of the Open Society Foundations, summed it all up in his report to the World Bank: "In terms of social and economic development, high levels of crime and violence threaten to undermine the best-laid plans to reduce poverty, improve governance, and relieve human misery.

our God seeks active rescue for the victims of oppression: My

in Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson emphasize the importance of legal institutions (and other state institutions) that are "inclusive" through rights and incentives equally available to all people rather than "extractive" (that is, designed to extract resources from the many for the few) if countries are to experience sustained economic growth.15