Preying On Our Real Rights

If there is to be a government, if we are to pay taxes to a State, then this small organization within a vast, free society MUST protect our lives and our properties. This is what all the great classical liberal political economists, from Adam Smith to Bastiat to Ludwig von Mises, believed. They also added that this government must NOT exceed this "negative obligation."

Our Socialist State thinks otherwise. It wants to make steel, run hotels and airlines, and so on. It wants to plan the economy. And when it comes to protecting our lives and properties, this State is always a predator. I have written many posts on Property. Today, let me comment on the fact that this State cares nothing for our lives.

Abhijeet Singh of Indians For Guns has circulated a note that says that the Union Home Ministry, which looks after matters pertaining to policing, is playing a very dirty game with our right to defend ourselves - to keep and bear arms. He writes:

We wish to bring to your kind notice that, in the guise of moving a minor amendment to the Arms Act, ostensibly to make police verification mandatory, the Ministry of Home Affairs has quietly moved to change other important aspects of the the law with the goal of undermining every citizen's legal right to keep and bear arms. Even though the Arms Act does not allow it to do so, the Ministry has formulated an "Arms Policy" which has in effect changed the law and how it is implemented, without seeking parliamentary approval or following proper procedures. The Ministry has sent a circular to all State/ UT Home Deptt.'s ordering that this new policy be followed strictly with immediate effect.

1) It is IMPORTANT to NOTE that while the Arms Act gives the Central Govt. the power to make rules, which MUST then be approved by parliament within a stipulated time period - there is NO provision for making policy without parliamentary approval. Why is it that the Ministry has not made the changes it seeks to make a part of this Amendment to the Arms Act? Is it because the Ministry fears that the parliament would not approve the changes it wishes to make and so an attempt to bypass parliament is being made?

2) The very basis of the new Arms Policy is the flawed assumption that “The proliferation of arms, whether licensed or illegal, vitiates the ‘Law and Order’ situation” – what is not made clear is how the Ministry has arrived at this conclusion. In fact the Ministry has admitted in parliament that it has conducted no study/ assessment linking firearms to rise in crime rate. Such statements are also a direct insult to the lakhs of honest law-abiding citizens who keep and bear arms responsibly, by equating them with common criminals.

3) The new Arms Policy requires a citizen to prove grave and imminent threat to life prior to grant of arms license. This is an attempt to illegally amend the relevant Sections of the Arms Act which clearly outline conditions under which arms license applications are to be approved or denied. Also, proving grave and imminent threat is impossible for an ordinary citizen and will lead to large scale corruption as well as denying honest middle class citizens the only means with which to protect themselves. This despite the Arms Act 1959 stating as one of it's primary objectives to make it easier for law abiding citizens to own arms for self-defence and sport. The arms license application criteria should be objective and any citizen who is not disqualified should be automatically approved. This is the only way to ensure the process is free of fear or favour.

4) The new Arms Policy directly changes the existing Arms Rules 1962, without following proper procedure – (a) by changing the relevant authority for issuing All India Validity arms licenses, which was previously the State Govt. and has now for all (non VIP) cases been made the MHA, Govt. of India. (b) by introducing a new class system within the law, by allowing State Govt.'s to continue to issue All India Validity arms licenses ONLY for a select ruling elite. Besides everything else, this sort of discriminatory policy is against the very spirit of the Arms Act as well as the Indian Constitution.

There is a need to go into the proper depth of causes or solutions this new Amendment to the Arms Act and Arms Policy aim to address. We strongly request that the proposed Arms Amendment Bill and the Ministry's Arms Policy be immediately referred to the Home Committee for detailed study, comments and suggestions.

Think about it: What this means is that if someone in Manipur or Kerala feels a threat to his life and wants to buy a gun to protect himself, he must go to New Delhi to apply for the license! The only people exempted from this are the VIPs. And all this is being done surreptitiously, behind closed doors, bypassing Parliament. Note that the minister in charge is a socialist lawyer. (The minister in charge of "miseducation" is also a socialist lawyer.) So, just as socialist economists are playing dangerous games with the economy, socialist lawyers are playing dangerous games with the law.

What should a law that really protects all of us look like? Very simple: We have a right to defend ourselves and our properties. It is this right that becomes the law - the Constitution - and the State thereby established protects these rights. This is precisely how the US Constitution goes. According to the socialist lawyer heading the Union Home Ministry, only its personnel possess this right - and they will operate a MONOPOLY in providing security to all. And all this from New Delhi. Actually, this goes against the spirit of our Constitution, by which Law & Order is a subject of the states that make up the federation.

Thus, this socialist lawyer who is the Central State Police minister is preying on our rights. In the meanwhile, they are doling out completely useless rights - such as the "right to work" and the "right to food." Note that these useless rights transfer vast resources to bureaucRATS.

Who do the State Police protect? If you live in New Delhi, you quickly realize that the only people the State Police "work" for are the VIPs. They are always well guarded. Traffic is cleared for them. In the meanwhile, pedestrians are killed every day on the unsafe streets. It is this State Police that is hassling BlackBerry in order to spy on us - see my recent post on this. I also have another post defending our right to bear arms. They are supposedly "security agencies." The real question is: Whose security? Not ours, surely.

As Bastiat said:

The law is no longer the refuge of the oppressed, but the arm of the oppressor! The law is no longer a shield, but a sword! The law no longer holds a balance in its august hands, but false weights and false keys! And you want society to be well ordered!

Who will benefit from this Arms Policy? Obviously, only the bureaucRATS in the MHA - power crazy tax parasites. It is their intention that is evil and anti-people. This is harsh reality indeed.

Well, Bastiat also said something noteworthy on bureaucRATS:

I am a firm believer in the ideas of Malthus when it comes to bureaucrats. For their expansion in numbers and projects is fixed precisely by Malthus' principle that the size of the population is determined by the amount of available food. If we vote 800 million francs for government services, the bureaucrats will devour 800 million; if we give them two billion, they will immediately expand themselves and their projects up to the full amount.

Today, we have "public choice theory" that says bureaucRATS are "budget-maximizers." They are also "turf-maximizers." Public choice theory has tellingly proved that bureaucracy is not benevolent.

We in India have always placed full faith and confidence in our elite bureaucrats. This has been our biggest mistake. If we desire progress, if we desire security, if we desire knowledge of truth and justice - then vast acres of this gigantic bureaucracy must be shut down; summarily sacked.

On Bastiat's Relevance To Our Times

Today, I spent my time re-reading George Charles Roche's Frederic Bastiat: A Man Alone, a truly wonderful biography of this great Frenchman. Published by Arlington House in 1971, the book is now out of print, but I obtained it second-hand thanks to the Internet. In his foreword, Roche thanks Lew Rockwell, then his editor at Arlington House. When I first read this, I wrote to Lew asking about Roche - and he told me the sad news that George had passed away some years back. But this is a great biography, well worth republishing in India.

In this post I would like to focus on the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, and what Bastiat wrote on that occasion. Bastiat had witnessed two revolutions already, with another around the corner. Why, he asked, was France so prone to political upheavals. Why did social order seem so impossible. At the end of the chapter devoted to those dark days, Roche concludes with these words: "In the setting of another age in which social order is collapsing, we might well ponder Bastiat's question." Roche was probably writing about America in the 1970s - but I find this particular chapter a chilling reminder of our own times right now here in India.

France has seen many bloody revolutions and instituted many republics. But right to this day she struggles for Liberty and remains deeply socialistic - the "sick man of Europe," many call her. In 1789, they cut off their King's head. But failed miserably in their goals. Chaos ensued - not the promised "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Ten years later, in 1799, the inevitable "strong man" was called in - Napoleon Bonaparte - and this dictator ushered in an era of endless wars and suffering. After Napoleon, the French "restored" the Monarchy, placing on the throne Louis XVII, a brother of the king they had beheaded. After he died, yet another brother, Charles X, ascended to the throne - but this absolutist was a complete failure, and was forced to abdicate in the Revolution of 1830. Bastiat was then a young man, a gentleman-farmer and a private scholar - and he even participated in this Revolution, leading a group of some 600 men to storm the garrison occupying the citadel of the town of Bayonne, quite close to his estate. But no blood was shed; the garrison opened their gates and welcomed Bastiat and his friends in - to an evening of wine, liqueurs, and song. It seems that everyone was quite fed up of the monarchy and the nobility then, and yearned for constitutional government and bourgeois rule. So along came Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King," and this time it was the rising bourgeoisie of France who ruled - and the young Bastiat cheered. However, the French failed yet again to establish good government. By 1848, it was clear that bourgeois rule was corrupt to the core - because the State was deeply involved in business. Hence the Revolution of 1848 - and Louis Philippe had to flee France. This time, Bastiat was older and wiser. He had spent more than 20 years in quiet study - and was quite an intellectual giant. Some of his books and articles had been published - and he was well known as a free trader and an enemy of all protectionists. Roche says this on the difference between the Bastiat of 1830 who welcomed bourgeois rule and the Bastiat of 1848 who was by now in the thick of things right there in Paris:

The young gentleman farmer had always been a man alone in the developing pattern of his life, but what truly set him apart from his times was his growing realization that government, no matter who ran it, no matter in whose interests it was run, could only be a harmful force let loose in human society whenever it exceeded its negative obligations to protect life and property.

The Revolution of 1848 that threw out Louis Philippe now proceeded to institute the Second French Republic. This time, the government was headed by an aristocrat-poet and great orator, Lamartine, with the socialist Louis Blanc as a sort of second-in-command. Roche quotes Alexis de Tocqueville's impression of Lamartine as an "absolutely unprincipled politician":

I do not know that I have ever... met a mind so void of any thought of the public welfare as his... Neither have I known a mind less sincere... When speaking or writing he spoke the truth or lied, without caring which he did, occupied only with the effect he wished to produce at the moment...

Lamartine now proceeded, much to Bastiat's dismay, to institute various measures and programs suggested by the socialists led by Louis Blanc. Among these were the National Workshops where any unemployed Parisian could find paid work to do. This was what the socialists meant then when they called for a "right to work" - a right that Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi also believes in, what with his NREGA ditch-digging. At their height, the National Workshops "employed" more than 1,20,000 people - and the Treasury was going broke. All hell broke loose and these had to be abolished. There was another Revolution in just four months - but that story can be told some other time. Today, let me record Bastiat's words on the occasion, and the extremely important question he raised:

... while the French people have been in advance of all other nations in the conquest of their rights, or rather their political guarantees, they have nonetheless remained the most governed, regimented, administered, imposed upon, shackled, and exploited of all.

France is also, and necessarily, the one nation in which revolutions are most likely to occur.

And what remedy is proposed? To enlarge the domain of the law indefinitely, that is, the responsibility of the government.

But if the government undertakes to raise and regulate wages, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to assist all the unfortunate, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to assure pensions to all workers, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to provide workers with the tools of production, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to make interest-free credit available to all those clamouring for loans, and cannot do so; if, in words that we regret to note were written by M. de Lamartine, "the State assumes the task of enlightening, developing, increasing, spiritualizing, and sanctifying the soul of the people," and it fails; is it not evident that after each disappointment (alas, only too probable!), there will be a no less inevitable revolution?

Once we start from this idea, accepted by all our political theorists, and so energetically expressed by M. Louis Blanc in these words: "The motive force of society is the government"; once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the State is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything. If we are happy, it has every right to claim our gratitude; but if we are wretched, it alone is to blame...

Thus, there is not a single ill afflicting the nation for which the government has not voluntarily made itself responsible. Is it astonishing, then, that each little twinge should be the cause of revolution?

Wise words, indeed, of a great classical political economist - who, it must be noted, was entirely self-taught, having dropped out of school.

I hope these words will resound throughout India. This benighted nation needs to think.

To conclude: The year 1848 was also the year in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. In the 160 years since, Bastiat was entirely forgotten - he died in 1850 - and Marx and Engels ruled the minds of students in much of the world, including India. In his Foreword, Roche gives thanks to Leonard Read, founder of The Foundation for Economic Education, for "rescuing Bastiat from the ash-heap of history." Read was a friend of Ludwig von Mises, and he started FEE probably because of his influence. If you read Mises' works, you often find favourable references to Bastiat.

In my own case, as I have recorded in my foreword to The Essential Frederic Bastiat (PDF here), I studied Economics formally in Delhi University beginning in 1974 - and I first heard of Bastiat in the early 1990s, and that too, from a dentist! I trust my reader now understands the reasons behind my deep animosity to State education. It is The State that has intentionally and deliberately mistaught this vital subject. I hope my readers will now read Bastiat - and dump Marx. Marxism destroyed much of the world. Bastiat can help save it.

On Emperor Bozo's Capital

It rained in New Delhi, the capital of socialist India, and, as this news report says, there was "chaos on the roads." The precise word used in the opening sentence is "traumatic." The second para of the report reads as follows:

The skies opened up around 8 am and, within an hour, many roads were water logged, creating problems for commuters on the first day of the week.

Of course, roads disintegrated - and pot holes emerged everywhere.

Actually, it NEVER rains in Delhi. Delhi can be very hot and very cold - but never is she wet. The Mughals had a saying about the city - "Allah holds a chhatri over Delhi." Chhatri means "umbrella." Thus, the occasional shower in the hot season has always been most welcome throughout Delhi's long history - except now, under socialist rule. There are cities where it rains almost every day - and everything continues to work pretty fine. But not in Delhi.

There is an interesting tale about the white hot Delhi summer in the Babur Nama - the diaries of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur. After his small army defeated the might of the Lodis at Panipat in 1526, and marched victoriously into the city, the summer heat made everyone quite faint. Some of Babur's top generals actually requested their leader for permission to quit and return to cooler climes. Babur allowed them to depart and even composed a sarcastic poem on their inability to stand the heat.

The British moved their capital to Delhi only in the early 20th century, because of that great aristocratic idiot, Lord Curzon. They built an entirely new city - New Delhi - and it was unmatched in imperial grandeur. Curzon was the ultimate imperialist, after all. While in Calcutta, Curzon had divided Bengal along communal lines - and the political upheaval that ensued still remains with us today. It is rarely noted that the Indian Muslim League was founded in Dacca in 1906 - just a year after Curzon's partition of Bengal. Just as Aurangzeb sowed the seeds of Mughal decline, it was Curzon who sowed the seeds of the end of the British Raj.

Thus, in 1947, these bozos of the CONgress came to occupy Curzon's grand buildings. Yet, there is much more to running a vast empire than architectural splendour; and, in any case, the architecture is entirely British. Sir Edwin Lutyens built the grand buildings atop Raisina Hill. Nehru's preferred architect was Le Corbusier, the "brutalist." Chandigarh is a classic example of this brutalism - as are the DDA flats for the middle classes in Delhi.

Yet, the bozos of the CONgress themselves never occupied any buildings of brutalist design. Nehru preferred to take over the residence of the Commander-in-Chief - and Teen Murti House is a grand, palatial residence; quite beautiful. Sonia Gandhi occupies 10, Janpath; Manmohan Singh lives in a Lutyens' bungalow on Race Course Road. This British-built VVIP enclave in New Delhi never floods up during the (occasional) rains; nor are there any power cuts here; and the roads never ever have pot-holes. But the splendour is not theirs; it is entirely borrowed. And, if you step outside this privileged zone - then, not just the rest of New Delhi, but the whole of urban India is "chaos." And life is "traumatic."

But those who have lived long enough in Delhi to get a feel of its long history - like me - know that this is a capital city that has seen many mighty rulers bite the dust. In and around Delhi, there are the ruins of at least seven such kings - there is Tughlaquabad, from where the monetary madman Muhammed bin Tughlaq ruled; there is Qutab; there are tombs of the Lodis; there is Siri; there is the Purana Quila; there is the Lal Quila; and there are many more. It is in Delhi that you are warned of the fact that mighty empires can collapse - and often have.

Today, Delhi is the capital of the socialist Emperor Bozo. He sees nothing. He knows nothing. And his greatest desire is to teach!

Ban these Bozos!

On Austrian "A Priorism"

Comments to a recent post of mine expressed confusion about the a priori method of the Austrian School of Economics. So I have decided to devote this post to explaining what it is all about.

The central tenet of the Austrian School is that Economics is a "science of human action." This action is purposeful and goal-directed. The individual who acts, weighs means and ends - that is, his action is all about preferring one thing and setting another aside; about giving up what he values less for what he values more. And all values are necessarily "subjective" - in the sense that only the acting individual's mind gives value to anything. Value is not "intrinsic" in goods; rather, it is the mind of the consumer that gives value to anything. Austrian Economics is all about this individual's mind. Let us now proceed a little deeper.

A science of human action based on the acting individual's mind attempts to first uncover the "laws of thought" that guide human action. These laws of thought are general and universal - that is, they operate in all human minds. Austrian economists discover these laws of thought through the method of "introspection" - they first look into their own minds. Then, assuming that all human minds are possessed of the same "logical structure," they predict how other human beings will act under certain conditions. These predictions are "qualitative" and not "quantitative" - there is no mathematics or statistics involved - but since all human action is guided by the same laws of thought, they apply with "apodictic certainty." This is the basis of the Austrian School's claim to Science. This is a "logical science." And the methods used are NOT those of the natural sciences like Physics. Let us proceed with a small example.

The illustration accompanying this post shows two intersecting curves of Demand and Supply. This is the standard method by which these basic ideas are taught in classrooms worldwide. This looks very "scientific." Further, these curves can easily be expressed mathematically - which makes everything look even more scientific. These curves are a product of two highly influential British economists, Alfred Marshall and Francis Edgeworth, both of whom wanted to render classical political economy "scientific" by injecting mathematics into it. Marshall taught Keynes at Cambridge - and Keynes took these curves even further from reality by proposing the concepts of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply." Today, Keynesians throughout the world teach Economics to young students using such curves. How does the Austrian School look at Demand and Supply?

To the Austrian economist, the Law of Demand and the parallel Law of Supply are both "laws of thought." If you examine how your own mind works in such situations, you will surely discover these laws in operation. This is basically because of the Principle of Self-Interest - which forms the basis for both these laws. So, if prices go down, you will demand more; if prices rise, you will demand less. And things will be the other way around if you are a supplier. The Austrian economist will teach his students these laws as laws of thought, without employing pretty diagrams. Without mathematics.

Note that in the real world, we can never "observe" the full form of either of these curves. In the real world of individual human beings acting in markets, all we can really observe are the points where these curves intersect - where actual exchange takes place. Thus, there is nothing scientific at all about these curves.

How do Austrians "prove" their theories based on a priori axioms? Very simple. These are proved correct by the very same human logic that made them - and not by measurements, observations, and experimentation as in Physics. Thus, the Law of Demand is correct because to think otherwise would appear absurd and illogical to all human minds. In the natural sciences, particularly in Geometry, there are many such a priori statements that are accepted to be true without measurements and observations - like "no straight line can enclose a space" or "an object that is red all over cannot be green all over." That is, a priorism is a perfectly valid form of scientific reasoning.

The Austrian School has, from its very beginnings, been concerned with methodological issues. The acknowledged founder of this school, Carl Menger, who discovered "marginal utility" (but with the "subjective" element) in 1871, wrote his second book, in 1883, on method. These ideas have been most fully developed by Ludwig von Mises. To all who wish to study Austrian Economics I earnestly recommend Mises' magnum opus titled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. I am happy to report that this book is available in India from Flipkart.com and you can order it here. The first 100 pages are on method.

To conclude: I was rather upset when a fellow on Facebook commented that I claimed to be possessed of a "monopoly of truth and knowledge." In actual fact, in India, it is The State that makes this claim, and actually operates a monopolistic higher education system to which all other shades of opinion are denied entry. People like me have always been "competing" - and competing hard - through every means possible outside the formal classroom. The masthead of this blog says "Austro-Libertarian Opinion." If you now feel that there is something worth knowing about the Austrian School of Economics, I hope you will study these ideas and discover for yourself their scientific worth. And then, as the famous John Lennon song goes, "I hope someday you will join us."

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.

On The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

Here are some questions that all honest, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of India must ask themselves:

1. Should we blindly trust The State?
2. Should we blindly trust the State Police to look after us and protect us?

If the answer to these questions is a loud "No," then we must face up to the fact that, in India, we are faced with the peculiar situation that they have all the guns, and we have been systematically unarmed.

We are defenceless.

They have all the guns.

And, to top it all, the Central State Police Ministry is seriously attempting to make gun ownership even more difficult for us.

The new arms policy requires a citizen to prove grave and imminent threat to life prior to the grant of arms license.

Think about it: The criminal, the terrorist, the Maoist - they do not require gun licenses at all. They simply buy illegal guns in the black market and use them. There are numberless factories in India that produce crude guns - and these are quite popular, and cheap.

But if a regular citizen wants a regular gun, the procedures make it impossible; there is a huge amount of corruption; and these legal guns and the ammunition required are horrendously expensive.

Ten terrorists killed hundreds in Mumbai recently - because the citizenry has been unarmed.

The State Police could do nothing to prevent this two-day slaughter.

How can we protect ourselves?

For quite a few years now, I have been a member of Indians For Guns. This group, led by Abhijeet Singh, champions our right to keep and bear arms. I am in full support of their endeavours. You can visit their website here; their Facebook page here.

"A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone" is a saying I strongly believe in. In the field of personal security, as in all other fields, I strongly believe in self-help. I believe in private security; I believe in private guns.

Today, there is some good news for people like me: A group of MPs from many parties, led by Digvijay Singh, former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, a veteran CONgressman who has been in the news for strongly criticizing the State Police in their handling of the Naxalites and Maoists, has called upon the Prime Minister and opposed the new arms policy being touted by the Central Police Ministry. Read the news report here. This is a most welcome development. The report mentions that Digvijay Singh is the patron-in-chief of the National Association for Gun Rights, India. Finally, we seem to have some "good politics." By good politics I mean a politics that is for the citizenry, and against the powers and privileges of the State and the State Police. Our current Central Police Minister, P Chidambaram, plays politics of the opposite sort. Chidambaram seems to be in the pockets of the "security establishment."

There is one part of India where all the citizens have the right to keep and bear arms, and that is Coorg, in Karnataka. I visited this district and lectured far and wide. One of the colleges presented me with their emblem: Two crossed machetes with a rifle going through them! It is noteworthy that there is complete peace in Coorg. No terrorism. No Naxalites. And no police atrocities either.

As an economist, I would like to add that our State Police today are nothing but an ugly MONOPOLY. Further, the political theory that the State Police monopoly should be our only provider of security is nothing but COMMUNISM. Free societies cannot be thus. And Indyeah must aim to be a free society.

The first economist in the world to say this was Gustave de Molinari in France during the 19th century. Molinari was a close associate of Frederic Bastiat and the editor-in-chief of their Journal des Economistes. His brief essay on the "Production of Security" - with a foreword by Murray Rothbard - can be found here. It is well worth a read in these troubled times, in this troubled country - a country in which the State Police are largely seen as predators, not protectors. I strongly recommend this essay to readers of my blog.

On Capital, Retailing, And Memories

A column by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha of Mint set me thinking. He seems to have done some number-crunching and has come up with interesting information on where the Indian economy stands as compared with, particularly, China, whose economy is said to have overtaken Japan's recently. This para is particularly noteworthy:

The average Indian earned $255 in 1980, while the average Chinese earned $313. Thirty years later, there is a yawning gap between the average incomes of Indians and Chinese: $1,124 and $3,999, respectively. India keeps company such as Bhutan ($2,042), Djibouti ($1,369), Pakistan ($1,067), Senegal ($1026) and Zambia ($1,317); even Sri Lanka ($1,806) is ahead of us. China is in the same range as countries such as Macedonia ($4,560), Peru ($4,949), Thailand ($4,402), Bosnia and Herzegovina ($4,302), Jamaica ($4,601) and Ecuador ($4,328).

Obviously, there is something very wrong with India's economic policies - but before we get into that, let us look at another statistic Niranjan offers:

There is another way of looking at the issue of a large economy with very low average incomes. Twenty-two million Australians produce almost the same value of annual output as 1.2 billion Indians do. In other words, the average Australian produces nearly 55 times more than an average Indian. That is a rough indicator of the large gap in the output per worker in the two countries. Indians need access to capital, credit, skills and markets to climb the productivity ladder. It is bound to be a long and arduous journey.

In the portion of the text above that I have italicized, Niranjan, a trained economist, has hit the nail on the head - we need Capital, without which we cannot "climb the productivity ladder." However, this certainly need not be "a long and arduous journey." If this nation is short of Capital, it can import it, offering higher returns than available in saturated, developed markets. Towards this end, anyone from abroad who wishes to invest in India, and India's future, should be welcomed - but our The State inevitably obstructs them, as in the case of retailing. There is also the issue of importing second-hand Capital goods from abroad - which our moronic The State is strongly opposing. Actually, most of the machinery used in Nehru's steel plants was imported second-hand. Actually, many of our low-cost airlines operate second-hand aircraft. I see no reason why all our poor entrepreneurs should not be able to access second-hand Capital equipment. This is the fastest way to climb the productivity ladder. Machines are good for us - and Gandhi was wrong, as always.

Let us now turn our attention to retailing - an area where foreign Capital is being denied entry because of obstruction by The State. Now, retailing is an area where there are enormous productivity gains to be made. As Peter Bauer's pioneering field studies in Africa and Asia showed, the distribution chain which "breaks down bulk" - from wholesale to retail - is extraordinarily long and inefficient in poor countries. If foreign retailers are allowed to inject much needed Capital in this vital area, huge efficiency gains can be made all around. Ultimately, let us never forget that it is the poor consumer - the forgotten little man - who will gain the most. Real estate and construction will benefit hugely - and our cities and towns will gain as well.

Why is The State blocking all this? From what I could gather, it seems the excuse being paraded around is the health of our kirana stores - the little shops which now form the lowest rung of the distributional chain. Theoretically, this is nothing but Luddism - a very Gandhian mental disease. But I do believe that, as usual, our The State is being hypocritical. Allow me to explain why I think so.

The other night, while I was "under the influence," and my mind was silently raging against all the economic repression unleashed by this socialist The State, my memory was suddenly jogged and I recalled a great big multi-storeyed building on the outer circle of New Delhi's Connaught Place called "Super Bazaar." In the 1970s, this Super Bazaar was the great socialist supermarket - and, of course, it was run by an IAS officer. I am sure it made losses. Funny how they never thought about the kirana wallahs then.

Even today, in New Delhi, this socialist The State runs many retail shops that actively compete with the small businessman - like Kendriya Bhandar.

And as for Goa, where I now live - most of our provisions are bought from a government supermarket - a co-operative - that occupies prime space in Chaudi, our nearest market town. This government supermarket is hugely popular, and the small shopkeepers here also manage to survive quite well, just as they do in New Delhi, or in London, where almost all the "corner shops" are owned by Indians and Pakistanis.

So, when Niranjan writes that our climb up the productivity ladder is "bound to be a long and arduous journey," I must insist that the only reason it appears so is because of State intervention. Remove this intervention - and we will be on an escalator. We will progress fast and smooth.

As I often say - Rukawatein Hatao, Garibi Apnay Aap Hutt Jayegi.
Translated: Remove the obstacles, and poverty will vanish on its own.

This Socialist, Gandhian, Luddite. Interventionist The State can never be an agent of "development." It is only when this The State is totally removed from the economic arena that development will occur.

Chew on that, folks.