Politics - India's Bane

Pritish Nandy has an interesting blog post today titled "The Disgrace of Politics." He begins with these words:

No one knows how to misgovern better than those who rule over us. None of our problems are all that difficult to resolve. They look complex because they are tangled in self serving politics. Cut out the silly politics and they can be solved by a half wit. Contrary to all the rubbish we read, India’s actually an easy nation to govern. Our people are simple, trusting, ready to listen. Till you push them to the very edge. But who will they listen to? The people who rule us are mostly venal and self serving; they are more busy sharing the spoils of office than running India. That’s the problem.

So we have a solution - the only one, perhaps - and that is: Get rid of our The State. Say "NO" to socialism; say "NO" to democracy too. Let us live in a "natural order" of Private Property, Private Money and Private Law. Let us run our cities and towns ourselves, without "politics." We can hire a team of "city managers" to run cities under an elected Mayor - so we do not create a bureaucracy. And in our cities and towns, when we elect Mayors, let us disallow all our centralized, socialist political parties. Let there also be "company towns" - where a private company runs things - as in the cities of the Honourable East India Company. Then, let all cities and towns compete for citizens.

In the meantime, institute unilateral free trade and set all citizens free to seek survival in a Free Market. Politics is cut out. Let all goods and services currently provided monopolistically by our The State - like electricity, water and roads - the bijli, sadak and paani everyone is crying about - be provided by competing private firms. So, more politics is cut out.

The Lesson: More activities for our The State = more Politics. Conversely, more and more activities done by The Market = less Politics.

Thus, get our The State out of "education."

Get them out of "welfare."

Step-by-step get rid of our The State.

I would like to add a word of caution here: What Pritish Nandy calls "politics" is not the "public actions of free people" that this Greek word denotes. Politics in India is all about centralized, hierarchical political parties - and these are more like criminal organizations who conduct all their affairs in secret. We are fortunate in India that we have a lot of "free politics" - in journalism, among NGOs and so on. Our bane is the centralized political party - which is almost always a criminal gang.

Anyway, I liked Pritish's column. Well worth a read.

Someday, something's gotta give.