On The Evil Professor KN Raj - Take #2

Chandra has a post on the death of the famous Indian economist KN Raj, who studied under Harold Laski at the LSE, played an important role in India’s early central planning, and, in the field of Economics education, helped set up the Delhi School of Economics and also served as Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University. Chandra has provided many links to glowing obituaries on KN Raj, and the one I read is this from Mint, based on a PTI report, that quotes all the great and famous, including Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, on the "undying legacy" of the man.

I have in my library Peter Bauer’s only book specifically on India, with the unsexy title Indian Economic Policy and Development, published in London in 1961, shortly after the Nehru-Mahalanobis Second Five-Year Plan was launched, that began “heavy industrialization” here on the lines of the Soviet Union. This book was republished in India in 1965 by Popular Prakashan, but has never featured in university curriculum here. It should.

The sixth chapter in this extremely important book is titled “The Politics of Indian Planning” and here Bauer quotes many eminent Indian economists of the day, including KN Raj.

Bauer specifically alerts us to the fact that these sycophants of Nehru were leading India towards totalitarianism and ruin.

KN Raj was then Professor of Monetary Economics at the Delhi School of Economics and wrote a memorandum titled The Second Five Year Plan; Investment Magnitudes and their Implications. Bauer says “his proposals include extension of state trading, nationalization and physical controls, the institution of compulsory loans and the maintenance of labour armies.”

Bauer provides a long quote from this memorandum, from which I offer a brief extract below:

… the government should be prepared to go outside the field of basic industries and services, where, precisely because they are basic, it is difficult to use them for the purpose of making profits. State trading in the commodities indicated above [foodgrains, cloth, sugar, vegetable oils, kerosene] will not be adequate for this, since they are, by and large, essentials; greater scope for making profits can be found only if the government enters the field of luxuries and semi-luxuries. One possibility to be explored in particular is the nationalization of plantations, covering tea, coffee and rubber…. Another possibility closely bordering on this is the nationalization of sugar factories.

Actually, "essentials" are highly suitable for raising government revenues (not "profits") - as in the case of salt monopolies used for such purposes over millennia.

Raj then goes on to talk of compulsory loans from the public to the government, and the setting up of labour armies.

The portion on compulsory loans from this Professor of Monetary Economics is also worth quoting:

In the borrowing programme of the government, greater accent must be placed on compulsory loans and non-transferability (except under special conditions) of the securities offered; for, the merit of expenditure financed by borrowing from the public over expenditure financed by creation of money is only in so far as it exercises a restraint on private expenditure.

Other economists quoted in this chapter are Professors VKRV Rao, BN Ganguli, DR Gadgil and, of course, the great Mahalanobis himself, whose portrait proudly hangs in the LSE. Professor Gadgil was the Director of the Gokhale Institute of Economics & Politics in Poona. Both VKRV Rao as well as Ganguli served as Directors of the Delhi School of Economics, and Rao was also Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University.

So, Chacha Shah Alam, you can keep Delhi upto Palam, and you can keep your propaganda arm, Delhi University, too.

Students: Drop out and save your intellects. Ask Vipin Veetil for advice on this subject. Another student of the DSE, Nandita Markandan, who attended my seminars, once cried on my shoulders and said, “I wanted to study Economics, but they only teach me Mathematics.”

There is no mathematics in Ludwig von Mises Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, PDF here. No graphs or charts or pretty curves either. Only words: "logical economics." But each word weighs a ton.

Indeed, in Chapter 26 titled "On the Impossibility of Economic Calculation Under Socialism" there is an entire section under the heading "The Differential Equations of Mathematical Economics" (Page 710) which will instruct you that the mathematics taught in the DSE is not "economic calculation"; on the contrary, it is SCIENTISM, the pretence of science, the "abuse of reason."

Drop out, and study real economics - at home.

And stay far, far away from the LSE.

Professor Harold Laski, the "star" of the LSE, unleashed an army of evil men such as KN Raj upon India. Laski was also Chairman of the British Labour Party, and he personally spoke of the desirability of using strong measures that would discourage the British workers from spending their money on the movies, and spend it on more "socially worthwhile" things instead. Someone in England ought to make a movie on this monster.

In Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, a book-length interview with the philosopher, there is a part where Hayek, who was a minor figure in the LSE at that time, is quizzed about Laski. Hayek says that after the purges of Stalin, Laski denied ever having supported his evil regime! Harold Laski was, says Hayek, an "inveterate liar."