For Liberty, Against An Enemy

Last night, at a little past 10, I drove to my nearest booze shop to pick up some beer and it was closed. I asked around if there were any other shops open at that early hour, and was told to drive to Badarpur, Haryana. Someone else said, “Try the slums. You always get booze there.” But I gave up. Effective demand did not meet supply. The commonwealth lost.

Frankly, I see this “Wee Willie Winkie” policy of The Total Chacha State forcing shutdowns of all businesses in our cities as a massive tyranny; senseless too. Nowhere in the civilized world are cities forced to go to sleep. Indeed, they all say, “Cities Never Sleep.” In such cities, you get booze all night – but it costs more. And there is a full nocturnal economy at work – taxis, bars, restaurants, and so on, a very lucrative nocturnal economy at that. In Amsterdam, I was at the Late Night Bar till 4 am – and they were not closing. The city was wide awake, and brightly lit up, as I staggered to my hotel, smoking my last spliff.

Actually, in our cities, there are many people who work night shifts – taxiwallahs, rickshawallahs, railways personnel, airports, hospitals, chemists, petrol pumps, and many more. It follows that if all these Wee Willie Winkie rules were abolished there would be all-round gains for the commonwealth, because the city economy would now be a 24-hour economy. Such an economy would surely produce much more wealth than an 8-hour economy.

Liberty is all that we need.

Liberty!

However, a senior economist of Indian origin from the USSA, Kaushik Basu of Cornell, has a corny column in the HT today, where he discusses Marxism and Engels in glowing terms. He refers to the “marginal revolution” as having originated in the minds of Walras, Jevons and Pareto (??) – intentionally missing out on Carl Menger, the greatest of them all, founder of the Austrian School. He uses this mistelling of the history of ideas to laud mathematical economics - which every Austrian considers nonsensical. It is his conclusion that is noteworthy for its total wrong-headedness. He writes:

While Marxism as science has failed, it will be a pity if the idealism and the quest for justice that was the moving force behind the lives of Engels and Marx were also abandoned. As Hunt notes at the end of the book, Engels was “convinced that there was a more dignified place for humanity in the modern age. For him and Marx, the welcome abundance offered by capitalism deserved to be distributed through a more equitable system. For millions of people around the world that hope still holds.”

Kaushik Basu’s great ideal is redistribution – by The State. He wants to plunder the rich and spread the money around. He calls this “justice.” I call it theft. See my recent column against “social justice.”

I see this The Total Chacha State as the prime cause of poverty, and champion Liberty.

You decide.

(There is also an earlier post against Kaushik Basu’s nonsense, here.)

Finally, ET has a news report on the fact that over 50% of the recently elected MLAs are crorepatis (millionaires).

I find this a disturbing trend: that politicians get rich while the people stay poor.

This is what 60 years of étatism has bequeathed us. Now do you see why I champion Liberty?