On Friends In The News

Today is market day, so the daily post will be up only by 1300 hrs.

Till then, read about some of my friends who have made it to the news today.

First on my list is Sanjiv Kumar Agarwal of the Good Governance India Foundation. He has filed a PIL in the Supreme Court on the Right to Property. The Supreme Court has now asked the Centre to file its reply to the petition. The news report says:

"The Bench issued notice to the Union law ministry seeking its response to the PIL, which challenged the constitutional validity of the 44th Constitutional Amendment, 1978, on the ground that it was violative of the basic structure of the Constitution."

A brief history of the "politics of the constitution" is available on Aristotle the Geek's blog, here.

Second: Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari are in the news for having released a report on their joint study of conditions in communist-ruled West Bengal, wherein they have concluded that conditions there are worse than Bihar and Jharkhand. The news report says:

In its conclusion, the report said “what we have just described as the five key diseases are perhaps not the diseases at all. They are symptoms. The key disease is somewhere else. It is the Left Front itself. The Left Front government is like gangrene. It cannot be cured. It has to be excised out.”

Lastly, there is an excellent feature on Rediff on the world's freest economies, based on the World Economic Freedom Index, where India ranks 123rd out of 179 countries in the list; and is placed under the category "mostly unfree."

The World Economic Freedom Index is the libertarian challenge to the World Bank's Human Development Index (in which, too, India is ranked very low). The HDI tells you what The State must do. The EFI stresses the fact that The State needs to Get Out Of The Way.

The world's most prosperous countries are not accidentally also the freest. Rather, prosperity is the effect, Freedom is the cause.

Till 1300hrs then, when I will be back with the first part of a series on credit creation, legitimate banking, and the Rule of Law.