When YOUR God Fails

India is not just a constitutional "socialist democracy"; she is also a "constitutional bureaucracy." There is an article in the Constitution of India that establishes the All India Services. The IAS, IPS and the Forest Service are all creatures of this socialist democratic constitution. And if the country is a god-almighty mess, surely the bureaucracy must take some responsibility for this failure. In the original scheme of things, it was only to be expected that democracy would bring into office the representatives of illiterates. Knowledge-based policy advice was supposed to come from the officers of these services. But what is their "knowledge"?

The training academies of the bureaucracy teach State-Worship. These people worship centralized power, socialism, central planning and all the rest of the rubbish. It is no wonder that more than 20 years since the Berlin Wall was torn down and East Germany (also a "democratic republic") disappeared from the map, as did the Soviet Union, our fellas still cling on desperately to the "socialist" tag. Their last hope lay in Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi - but today, to most people, it seems quite apparent that Chacha has failed. All his ideas, from NREGA ditch-digging to "right to miseducation" to "right to food" are seen by most sensible people as bogus. To the trained economist, they are but means of "capital consumption" - which is the pathway to "de-civilization." The pathetic condition of all our cities and towns - and New Delhi is a "failed city" in my honest opinion - shows clearly that our civilization has been destroyed. The root cause: socialist democracy, an ideology that involves State Worship. It is their "Mortall God" - as Thomas Hobbes calls the State in Leviathan - that has failed.

Classical liberals like Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat NEVER worshipped State power. Indeed, they considered it dangerous and raised the call for Liberty. That is, Liberty from the State. Adam Smith was a staunch Whig and the Whigs wanted to restrict the powers of the State. They wanted "commercial liberty." They wanted freedom in religious matters. If there was any "god" in their minds, then this god was in The Market. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was but the hand of God. And as for Bastiat, the devout Catholic - he saw God's hand in the "natural order" of trade, commerce, and peaceful exchange. Bastiat, in his brief essay titled "The State," defines this beast as "that grand fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." No State-Worship here. No worship of Power.

Yet, it is all this "power" that has failed India. We in India do not see "anarchy." On the contrary, we are an "over-governed" nation. It is a sorry fact that all this over-government has established nothing but corruption and chaos. In all this chaos, all that works for the real benefit of the people is The Market. And our bureaucRATS hate this social institution. This is because of their faulty training and indoctrination - which is socialist and statist. This is the prime cause of the "knowledge failure" we see all around us.

Today, 21 years since the Soviet Union imploded, the Supreme Court of India has stepped in to protect the socialists. Yet, the news from New Delhi these days is only about the failures of socialist democracy and bureaucracy. It rained in Delhi - and all the streets were water-logged. For weeks now, there is news every day on corruption in the administration of the Commonwealth Games. To top it all, it seems that the principal "political parties" of this democratic tamasha - the Congress, the BJP and the Communists - are all in disarray. The great God of socialist democracy seems to have also failed. Note that these are the political parties who swear by the Constitution. It is a Constitution that protects them, not us. It is a Constitution that empowers them, not us. And what are the intellectual and moral qualities of the personnel of these political parties, or even their great "leaders"? The less said, the better, I think.

Where do we go now? my reader might ask. I offer the story of one of my travels in Germany. I visited the quaint and extremely pretty ancient town of Esslingen once, just outside modern Stuttgart. It is such a beautiful town that the Allies deliberately refrained from bombing it. In the middle of the town square stood the grand old building of the city Mayor. This, to me, was the political institution of the market economy. This is "civil government."

From Esslingen, I was taken directly to a castle some hours away where the Hohenzollern rulers used to live. The castle had been built high up on a mountain, and it looked quite forbidding, even from afar. When I toured the castle, I saw that it was elaborately fortified, with cannons all around. Inside, in the museum, most of the artifacts on display were memorabilia from various battles that these rulers fought. This, to me, was The State - an institution devoted to war, to inflicting pain, to imposing taxes, and to other predatory schemes like monetary inflation. And the Germans know a lot about monetary inflation.

Citizens of Indyeah - think!

Constitutional socialist democracy and constitutional bureaucracy have both failed this nation. We must therefore think of an alternative future - and I hope this blog gives you much to think about.