Mint today is carrying a detailed interview with Hernando de Soto, and it is worth reading the full four pages. He records his impressions of Bhateeja Rahulji Gandhiji, who asked him, “How can we help the poor?” As if The State is a charity organization!
De Soto also talks of the futility of cash transfers like the NREGA and the fruitlessness of a biometric ID card system when property titles are not in place. Most importantly, he says that the success of guerrilla movements lie precisely in that they provide services that governments do not.
Our country is rapidly falling into the clutches of these armed guerrillas. We need to heed de Soto’s clear message.
The conclusion I draw from this interview is that our Indian Administrative Service (IAS) baboons must be entirely sacked. There ought to be nothing novel to the Indian district administrator about the importance of property titles. Philip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India makes it clear that, for the first district officers in Bengal, “Locke was their prophet.” It was John Locke who, in 1690, said that “where there is no Property, there is no Justice.” This quote is illustrative of how the Honourable East India Company’s district collectors operated:
In India, by accepting the revenue for a plot a collector automatically bestows a title; gradually it comes about that the Collector of Land Revenue spends only a few minutes a week on seeing that collections are coming in to his subordinates, but many hours deciding disputes.
Under the IAS baboondom, the district collector has become a “district spender” – the bestower of political largesse all around, all the money financed by inflationary means, as it still is today. (And IAS baboons head the central bank.)
Revenue is no longer collected; titles are no longer awarded. The entire administrative system has collapsed. Mason, who was an ICS district officer himself in the 1930s, gives an account of how the rot set in, after CONgress governments took over the provinces in 1935:
India was a poor country which could not afford luxuries and a [British] district officer had concentrated on essentials – public order, the swift administration of justice, the prompt payment of taxes moderately assessed, the maintenance of accurate land records which would prevent disputes. Those had been the four first things. But by 1939, the emphasis had changed and rural development, co-operative banks and village committees were inclined to come first…. The district officer must add to his innumerable duties the maddening and infructuous business of answering parliamentary questions, the host of subjects included under the head of Rural Development….
That was why to some at least of the service it seemed that it was time to go. Rule of the old kind was running down; districts were being administered in a new way, which might be better, but was not the British way. A district officer might find, perhaps, when he had time to look, that a peasant had been brought into headquarters a dozen times before his case reached even the first formal hearing, or that someone had been forced to spend all he had to defend his holding against some fabricated claim, simply because the land records were not up to date. As to Rural Development, most British officers would have agreed that a great deal of what was proposed was admirable if the villagers would do it themselves, but they were skeptical about trying to change habits from above – and much of the effort put into the attempt seemed to them wasteful and incompetent.
This is why the descendants of the HEICS and the ICS are learning lessons that were taught by John Locke in 1690 from a Peruvian economist in 2010. Disgraceful!
Twenty-four policemen were killed in West Bengal yesterday by rebels because they represent a bad government. There is no Justice in India because there is no Property. The unjustly treated will naturally try their utmost to overthrow bad rulers.
The IAS must go. Barun Mitra of Liberty Institute and I visited their Academy in Mussoorie in 2001. India had been “liberalizing” for over a decade. But the professor of Economics at this important Academy was a Marxist! He handed me a copy of Piero Sraffa’s mathematical tract On the Production of Commodities by the Means of Commodities – and I handed it right back, knowing well the difference between Economics and bullcrap.
Barun and I later called on the Director of the Academy, Wajahat Habibullah, IAS, and I told Wajahat that his choice of Economics professor was most peculiar. He replied that Marx may have been wrong in his Economics, but his Politics was right. Methinks Kishanji, the Maoist leader who claimed credit for the killing of these 24 cops, would agree with him. Ideas have consequences.
I conclude with some words on the East India College at Haileybury where HEICS officers were trained. According to Mason:
At Haileybury, everyone had learnt that political economy was a matter of laws, that money and goods would move by themselves in ways beneficial to mankind. The less any government interfered with natural movements, the better.
Haileybury, set up in 1805, shortly after the wisdom of Adam Smith had dawned on the English people, was a college where primary focus was given to teaching the rudiments of classical liberal political economy – then not taught in either Oxford or Cambridge. India benefited hugely from this knowledge. Men like Munro were much loved by the people of South India for the system of property titles they created from scratch – and the Justice that naturally followed. Even today, children in Salem are named after Munro – they call them “Munrolappa.”
It is an excellent thing that Hernando de Soto has taught the basic principles of good government to our Total Chacha State. I just hope they ACT upon it. For Kishanji and his merry men are waiting in the wings – with GUNS.
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