On Misgovernment And Miseducation

One of the many serious implications of my post of yesterday, on NREGA, the "work" that chacha manmohan "produces," is that patently wrong commands are being issued to the bureaucracy. They are being asked to "work" so as to "produce work." They are not being asked to map lands and produce title deeds. This is "misgovernment."

Our IAS bureaucrats are trained by the very same State they serve. Senior IAS officers train their juniors in an atmosphere of "intellectual incest." I have an earlier post on how Barun Mitra of Liberty Institute and I were horrified to meet the professor of Economics at the IAS Academy - a total Marxist. This is "miseducation" - of their own "servants."

Misgovernment and miseducation go together. So when I read that the socialist lawyer and CONgressman Kapil Sibal, chacha's minister for human resource destruction, plans to open 7 "Ivy League" universities, my advice to the youth is to stay very far away from these. Stay very far away from the bureaucracy too. With socialism, welfare and interventionism, bureaucrats are trained in racketeering, not administration - and the fault lies entirely with depraved politicians. As well as with their "miseducators."

At a time of misgovernment and miseducation, Ludwig von Mises' Bureaucracy becomes essential reading (PDF here). The book tells you of the "limits of bureaucracy." It tells you of the vital differences between "bureaucratic management" and "profit management." Socialists rely on bureaucracies to intervene in markets. This is the root of misgovernment - because it leads to bureaucratisation of areas better left to profit seekers.

Here is a quote for the young and idealistic:

It is evident that youth is the first victim of the trend toward bureaucratization. The young men are deprived of any opportunity to shape their own fate. For them there is no chance left. They are in fact "lost generations" for they lack the most precious right of every rising generation, the right to contribute something new to the old inventory of civilization. The slogan: Mankind has reached the stage of maturity, is their undoing. What are young people to whom nothing is left to change and to improve? Whose only prospect is to start at the lowest rung of the bureaucratic ladder and to climb slowly in strict observance of the rules formulated by older superiors? Seen from their viewpoint bureaucratization means subjection of the young to the domination of the old.

Our great chacha manmohan is one of these aged bureaucrats - and a long-time miseducator.

Evidence of widespread miseducation comes today from one of the younger generation's brightest - the best-selling author Chetan Bhagat who, in his ToI column on "values,", says we live in times of "confusion." He then writes:

Values cannot be unpredictable, they are consistent, even in volatile times. The past decade was spent by Indian society in a muddled set of values. It is hoped in the next 10 years we do a 'values clarification', especially for the new generation.

He goes on to pose his key question:

Leaders, opinion makers and all of us in our dinner table discussions should continue to bring up this single question: What should an average Indian live, work and strive for in his life?

Well, Chetan, the "average Indian" is a meaningless concept. We are all unique. So we all "strive" for different things. To be able to strive in all the separate ways we want to, what is required is Liberty. This ought to be our highest "political value." The key to liberty is the Inviolability of Property. There are no "collective values."

The story of independent India has gone so horribly wrong only because we did not value Liberty. Rather, we placed full faith and confidence in what is the opposite of liberty - The State. When the Americans were freeing themselves from the colonial yoke, they were fortunate to be guided by Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a brief pamphlet on Liberty published in 1776. The opening para tells us where our Generation 1947 went wrong:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society is NOT the State. With Liberty, we can get our society going - that is, by the peaceful and voluntary means of market exchanges. We need to think of a Free Economy as our sole means of survival and progress rather than turning to our The State for some "solution" or the other. The State must be asked to lessen its role - lessen its taxation, stop borrowing, end its welfare schemes, end interventionism, end miseducation and so on.

Liberty is the political value to uphold.

My advice to our youth is: first, stay far away from the socialist bureaucracy; and second, study deeply of the literature of Liberty. Also study the Economics of the free market - that is, Austrian Economics.