Brazil's not yet out of De Soto's "legal tangle"

■"In Brazil, Thicket of Red Tape Spoils Recipe for Growth: Former Emerging-Market Star Loses Ground to Asia, EU; Lufthansa's 24-Year Fight; Waiting All Night at Tax Office," by Matt Moffett and Geraldo Samor, Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2005, p. A1.

Good front-page piece in WSJ about how Brazil backtracks some in recent years under lefty Lula, not so much because he adds new rules but because, being a socialist, he's not aggressive in trimming them back. In a mercantilist-mindset like that afflicting Brazil's government bureaucracy, if you don't prune hard, the "legal tangle" described by Hernando De Soto as plaguing much of Latin America simply grows back even thicker.

So either Lula gets pruning or Brazil keeps dropping in international rankings as a good place for foreign direct investment.