Republic of Disutility

There is a full page government advertisement in The Times of India of March 31 on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in which the banner headline reads:

TOWARDS A REPUBLIC OF WORK

But work is disutility. We do not work for the pleasure of expending energy and effort; rather, we work for the results, the output – from which we derive satisfaction. Frederic Bastiat clarified this point long, long ago.

Now, this huge advertisement, and the NREGA, are financed from taxation. In other words, we the citizenry have 'worked' to create the necessary wealth. All this money is being spent by politicians and bureaucrats – who do no useful, productive work – in order to 'create work'. Note that they do not create any useful products or services. They just create more and more work – with nothing to show for it. Like the Myth of Sisyphus.

In other words, people who actually work finance a scheme by which people who don't work get money in order to create work for the workless. Work is maximized – but the results of this work are zero. This is analogous to the Gandhian charkha, by which work is maximized, but not output.

Look at it another way.

What if those who actually work in order to produce wealth refused to pay their taxes? What would happen then? Well, in that case these citizens would either spend their money or save it. If they spent the money, they would create work.

If my taxes are refunded and I blow up the refund in all the bars of Goa, I would create work for bartenders, waiters, brewers and the snack food industry. If I save some of this refunded tax, then my banker would lend out the money to viable business ventures that would also create work. That is: The same amount of work is created if the taxpayers did not pay taxes, but spent the money themselves.

But there is an added advantage in this latter case: the work now created is 'useful' in the eyes of the citizen-taxpayer. Henry Hazlitt makes this point brilliantly in his classic Economics in One Lesson – a book that is over 50 years old. If you have a teenaged child studying nonsensonomics in school, but it for her - and read it yourself. Economics is the only engine of survival - and this teaches a child that in ONE LESSON!

There is nothing more foolish than maximizing work. We maximize the output, not the labour.

Work is disutility – even for the poor. The motto of Goa is "susegaad" which is loosely translated as "relax". There is an establishment near my house called the "Relax Bar" but I have never seen it open in two years because the owner is always relaxing, I guess. But that is Goa.

This also applies to the Assamese, whose motto is "lahay lahay" meaning "slowly, slowly" – they are also very relaxed people.

The great dissenting development economist, Peter Bauer (later Lord Bauer of Market Yard) commented long ago that many poor people of the Third World live lives of "needlessness": all their needs are supplied by nature, and they do not have the motivation to work. Lord Bauer said that if we want them to work, the best thing to do is unleash the activities of traders. The traders would offer these needless people some "incentive goods" – like, say, a radio. Hearing the music from the radio, and wanting to possess one, the Assamese might energise himself to work. As more and more incentive goods are offered, more and more people actually take on the disutility of effort in order to obtain valued results.

A Republic of Work, indeed.

We might as well call it a Republic of Disutility.