It is easy to be compassionate with other people's money. That is what must be said of the "panel of experts led by CONgress chairperson Sonia Gandhi" who have decided that the people of India need "food security." These experts are calling for "universal entitlement."
In the meantime, inflation has peaked with the WHOLESALE price index rising by 10 per cent last month. Our central bank has thus raised two key rates yesterday. Read this "quick edit" in Mint.
In the meantime, our prime minister Chacha Manmohan attended the G-20 meeting where he attempted to seriously tone down the language on cutting deficits. There is an excellent and brief post on this meeting on the Natural Order Blog which calls this "Mad Hatter Economics." These Mad Hatters who run the whole world have in mind a completely insane strategy to fix the problem of government spending gone wild. As Cris Lingle puts it in the post cited above:
Their declared preference for reducing debt is to combine spending cuts with increased taxes.
The correct approach would be to lower the burden of government on the private sector by less public-sector spending with tax cuts & deregulation.
In other words, Chacha and his Boss Sonia want to INCREASE the share of our The State in the total economic pie - a pie produced entirely by the private sector. They want to increase the burden of taxes on this productive portion of society - in order to feed their hordes of dependent "tax parasites," most of them bureaucRATS who will get tonnes of freshly printed rupee notes to purchase and distribute foodgrain.
Why does Boss Sonia want to do this? Because she is devoid of ideas by which elections can be won. She wants some way to "bribe" voters into voting for her corrupt, socialist party - and she thinks "universal foodgrain entitlement" is the way to win votes. How I hate the "incentive structure" in mass democracy.
Just as man does not live by bread alone, he also does not live by foodgrain alone. There must be subzi with the roti - and perhaps some daal too. What sense does it make to give everyone cheap grains when the cost of everything else is rising at a truly astonishing rate.
To conclude: This is a government gone crazy. It is veritably the Mad Hatter's Tea Party we are witnessing in India today.
I suggest a "universal" Campaign for Sound Money.
The next bill would be a Right to Vegetables with all the good justifications, likely to be followed by Right to Daal.
ReplyDeleteI am still waiting for a reservation policy on food..just like the reservations in the education and the public industrial sectors. If "Education" is a "Right", then "Food" is one too, right?
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