What Exactly Is Going On?

There have been official allegations that “horse trading” is going on as the Congress, now bereft of Communist support, attempts to forge together a governing majority.

It is scientifically more precise to call this “vote trading”.

And the “going rate” for the vote to one MP has been quoted at Rs. 25 crore. (250 million).

Dismissing these allegations, spokesmen of the Reichwing Congress have called it an “insult to MPs” – but political economists have been analyzing vote trading for decades now.

Of course, these economic analyses of government failure in a (liberal) democratic setting are still not taught at the Delhi School of Economics. But the subject – Public Choice – is over 30 years old. Click here to download the pdf file of Gordon Tullock’s The Vote Motive, that too, the 30th anniversary edition. Scroll down to Chapter 5 entitled “Logrolling” – and this is the polite term Tullock uses for vote trading. Note that these are analyses of western liberal democracy. In our centralized, socialist democracy, vote trading is much, much uglier. And this is how “government failure” occurs – while the professors at the DSE teach their students about “market failure”. Bah!


Let us now turn our attention to Sonia Gandhi, in whose name these votes are to be purchased. What is she doing today?

The news is that she is addressing a public rally in Ongole.

"Where the fuck is that?" my reader will surely ask.

Well, here is the map. It is somewhere in the Maoist-Naxalite areas of Andhra Pradesh. It seems a highly urbanised area, with lots of little, little towns with stranger names.

She will be there for 60 minutes (obviously landing by helicopter) and over 2500 policemen have been deployed.

This is “Indian Politics”. And we know what is "Indian Economics" - the shit the professors teach.

But is this politics?

There is no Mayor of Ongole.

Ongole must be the pits.

Yet, we Indians very much have “government” – but nothing works. Not even New Delhi, where 2500 policemen (or more) guard the “political” personnel of the “government”.

Important words have lost their meaning.

Confucius said that “when words lose their meaning, the people will lose their freedom”.

This is how we Indians have lost our freedom – and our teachers are much to blame.

I will close with some lines from the opening para of Thomas Paine’s little pamphlet that fired the American revolutionaries in 1776, Common Sense:

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which might be expected in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” [Emphases in the original.]

Let us pledge not to suffer fools gladly.

Then, maybe someday soon, we can be free – from the “government”!