For Young India, Against The Fuddy-Duddies

The top headline in the ToI this morning reads:

BJP should get younger leaders, says RSS chief

Why? Have the aged failed?

I would tend to think so, looking not only at the BJP but also at the Congress, their government led by a man with white eyebrows and white eyelashes.

This old man is also a stark failure. The lead editorial in Mint today is titled “Unease in the bond market,” referring to this old man’s mammoth 4.5 trillion rupee government borrowing programme aimed at funding government expenditure, not capital assets. The edit refers to the “huge increase in money poured into politically attractive social sector schemes.” This is the same old tired Congress recipe of rural employment generation, State education, cheap rice and all that crap. The editors call for a return to “fiscal sanity.” Sanity? Is Chacha insane?

I think so. Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi is borrowing our hard savings to fund these expenditures. This is “capital consumption.” As any economist of the Austrian School will tell you, this leads to “decivilization.” Our totally wrecked civilization, wherein every city and town SUCKS, is being further destroyed – to bring about a happy world of happy villagers, all employed on the rolls of The State, all their intelligent children brainwashed into statolatry by Congress teachers. This is the rural uptopia Chacha and all the Gandhis idealize.

Libertarians like me – and there are quite a few around – are calling for unilateral free trade, sound money, private property and the rule of law. We champion Economic Freedom. We also want a civil government based on the principle of “subsidiarity” so that mayors can effectively run cities and towns independently. No more centralization. This is an entirely new recipe for an entirely new dish. Topping the dish is an excellent roads and highways network, built as TOP PRIORITY.

But we were talking about youth and age.

Why are all these overaged fuddy-duddies ruling the roost? Surely, this must be the most important question our youth need to ask.

The culprit is bureaucracy. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in an eponymously titled volume, bureaucracy means “the rule of the aged.” In a bureaucracy, you start young, right at the bottom. Since promotion is strictly by seniority, by the time you reach the top you must be aged. Mises says bureaucracies "sacrifice youth to age." You can see this in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, which is bureaucratically run: every Pope is invariably aged. In India, you can see this in the IAS-IPS types; but it is even more visible in the centralized, hierarchical political parties like the Congress, the BJP or the Communists – the entire political elite of this country is overaged.

If young people join these centralized, hierarchical political parties they will lose their youth serving the overaged.

So be warned.

PS: Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy has been published in India by Liberty Institute. I played a small role in its publication. Get your copy now.

Of course, the Mises Institute has made it available online. For a free download click here.