On Roads, Baboons, And Naxals

Today, the lead editorial in the Express is on road safety, as is the lead article in the ToI. Indeed, the callous indifference to road safety exhibited by our The Chacha State should prompt us to seek solutions outside the State Police. One easy solution is to treat all road accident injuries as torts. It is tort laws that make people careful not to injure others. With torts, the victim is compensated. Today, the victim gets nothing – and rumours suggest that the State Police get a lot.

Yet, it is not just the State police who are grossly incompetent: as far as highways and expressways are concerned, our IAS baboons are no better. A report in Mint says that The Chacha State will allow real estate development along expressways. This means that those who build roads here in India know nothing about their subject. They are as incompetent as the State Police.

There are three types of roads: first, those that provide access to properties; second, those that connect these access roads to highways; and finally, right on top, come highways and expressways, which connect one place to another, but do NOT provide access to any roadside properties. By this definition, we have no highways at all in India, for all our highways are lined with properties. All our "notional highways" are basically "access roads." But it seems like our Bozos-on-Top do not want to learn anything. Note that if there are properties along expressways, safety will be hugely lowered.

As far as the real estate industry is concerned, the best our Chacha State can do for them is to vastly simplify the procedures for obtaining property titles. This article in Mint today is a shocker, detailing the screwy procedures our IAS-wallahs have put in place now. Away with these morons!

What can we expect from the IAS-IPS baboons? The editors of Mint seem to be expecting a lot. Today, they too have joined the call for crushing the Maoist-Naxalite-PCPA rebellion with armed force. Easier said that done. And war only improves the health of The State while destroying the lives and finances of the sheeple. The bozo cops who cannot deliver a single working pedestrian crossing anywhere in this vast territory will obtain BIG BUDGETS to fight this war. And once the budgets are granted, these bozos will want to perpetuate their "work" – as in the case of Siachen. The editors of Mint have quoted Mancur Olson on free riding. They should also consider William Niskanen and his theory of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat.

Speaking of “public choice theory,” which is still not taught in India, here is a wonderful tribute to James Buchanan, one of the key thinkers of this school, on his 90th birthday. Buchanan’s key insight is that “State failure” is more rampant than commonly understood, while “market failure,” which is taught, is extremely rare. As the article says:

Buchanan insists that we should always look upon "politics without romance," that we ought never to forget that all the fine campaign phrases and soaring promises issued by politicians too often disguise the selfish, sometimes sleazy, reality of political activity.

Buchanan concludes that the USSA needs a new Constitution.

So do we. A Second Republic.

So let us not give more powers and budgets to The Chacha State. Rather, let us systematically strip them of all their powers. Let them be forced to accede to all the demands of the rebels. There is this other report in Mint on Bastar, which begins thus:

In a moment of rare frankness, the senior Indian Administrative Service official described how, on one of his official trips to rural Maharashtra, he saw a poster printed by Naxalites in the northern Gadchiroli region, making 40 demands of the government. “Would you believe it? I agreed with 39 out of the 40,” he said. “I just disagreed with one: armed rebellion.”

They all say that there are a few good men still there. This must be one of them.