This Socialist Democracy Is Parasitic

The big news today is that our MPs are going to receive huge salary hikes - of 200 percent. Each of them already gets 2 crore rupees (20 million) under the MPLADS. Then there are many perks and allowances - free phones, free air travel and so on. We are paying hugely for the functioning of this socialist Parliament.

But what is the work they do?

As per this report, which I had linked in an old post, Parliament met for just 32 days last year. On almost all these 32 days, proceedings ended in a "din." The same report says that Parliament passed 8 bills in 17 minutes without discussion.

Indeed, this report on what transpired in Parliament when the present salary hike was being debated says:

Amid the pandemonium, the Lok Sabha approved amendments in two laws without any discussion.

Perhaps it may be said that they represent their constituencies. But the entire country is a mess. Suresh Kalmadi has been "representing" Pune for many years now - and how. What about Sonia Gandhi's or Rahul Gandhi's constituencies? Do read an old post of mine titled "548 MPs but no Mayors."

Note that it is this socialist Parliament that votes on the Union Budget - all the expenditure on welfare schemes that cause "capital consumption"; all the deficit finance; all the borrowing.

Do our MPs "represent the taxpayer" - as the theory of democracy says they are supposed to - or do they represent the interests of all the "tax parasites" socialism and welfarism support?

Quite frankly, if we look around, we must arrive at the conclusion that no constituency and no taxpayer is represented. The entire socialist democratic exercise is all about tax parasitism.

So, what do we do?

One radical solution is to institute a "private law society" - on which I have a column available here. If we do this, we can live with Law - and without Legislation.

Secondly, we can institute local self-government at the level of city and town - and Mayors can look after our interests. Our urban habitat will then be well looked after, and we will be represented in the real sense.

Thirdly, we can institute laissez-faire Capitalism - and this means that the State (at all levels) will be divested of all economic powers. Further, this implies that the goal of "economic development" will be pursued via The Market. That is, the State will have no role in development.

India is simply too large a country to be run by a Central State. The socialists established this powerful Central State in order to practise Central Economic Planning. These erroneous and socially destructive ideas must be abandoned.

In other words, we must urgently re-think our political organization. If we fail to do so, we are doomed to endless parasitism. Endless central planning. Endless legislation. Endless corruption. Endless chaos. Endless capital consumption.

Civilization can be advanced only via capital accumulation. There is no other way. What our The State is practicing now, capital consumption, is the way to "de-civilization" - and it shows.

All the great gods of our socialists have failed - Nehru has failed; Gandhi has failed; Marx has failed; and now, even democracy has failed.

You can find a wiki on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed here. More and more Indians need to read this important book.

This morning, on LRC, I found a prize-winning essay by Tom Woods on Richard Cobden, the great English free-trader of the 19th century, who was also Bastiat's hero. I earnestly recommend this essay to all my readers. Apart from Cobden, free trade and peace, Woods also discusses the plight of the poor countries, the ideas of Peter Bauer, and the destructiveness of foreign aid as well as "import-substitution industrialization." Well worth a read.

This essay by Woods also happens to contain important insights into the nature of medieval political organization in Europe. This section is particularly noteworthy:

The truth of Cobden's statement that the spread of freedom owes more to other factors than to the work of cabinets and foreign offices is also supported by a study of the rise of freedom in the Western world. That rise of freedom occurred not as a result of the positive action of governments, but precisely because of the absence of a strong central authority in Europe. Following the dissolution of the Roman Empire, no continent-wide empire took its place. (The relatively short-lived empire of Charlemagne was far less expansive in scope than the Roman Empire had been.) "Instead of experiencing the hegemony of a universal empire," writes historian Ralph Raico, "Europe evolved into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other entities."

Jean Baechler has argued that it was the decentralized nature of European political life, beginning in the Middle Ages, that contributed to the development of liberty. The multiplicity of jurisdictions meant that the prince risked losing population (and his tax base) if he engaged in excessive taxation or interference in his people's economic lives. "The constant expansion of the market," Baechler writes, "both in extensiveness and in intensity, was the result of an absence of a political order extending over the whole of Western Europe." The expansion of capitalism "owes its origin and raison d'être to political anarchy."

Moreover, the very idea of sovereignty, according to which there must exist a single, sovereign voice, competent and forceful enough to make its will felt throughout society, was essentially alien to medieval political thought and practice. In his classic study of Cardinal Wolsey, Alfred Pollard described the decentralization of power that characterized medieval England – and, by extension, western Europe at large:

There were the liberties of the church, based on law superior to that of the King; there was the law of nature, graven in the hearts of men and not to be erased by royal writs; and there was the prescription of immemorial local and feudal custom stereotyping a variety of jurisdictions and impeding the operation of a single will. There was no sovereignty capable of eradicating bondage by royal edict or act of parliament, regulating borough franchises, reducing to uniformity the various uses of the church, or enacting a principle of succession to the throne. The laws which ruled men's lives were the customs of their trade, locality, or estate and not the positive law of a legislator; and the whole sum of English parliamentary legislation for the whole Middle Ages is less in bulk than that of the single reign of Henry VIII.

Therein lies the path forward - local jurisdictions, liberty, and markets.

Think hard about it.