The Trial Of chacha manmohan s gandhi - Part 3: Take #2

The first post in this series referred to the charge levelled against Dr. Karl Marx at the LSE's Old Theatre - of "having wasted the time of humanity with his theories." 


In yesterday's post, the second of this series, I also pointed out that the entire "miseducation system" that chacha manmohan s gandhi has deliberately designed seeks to waste the precious years of youth in pointless - and intellectually damaging - pursuits. This delays their entry into The Market; it delays marriage by delaying the ability of young people to support themselves; and, what is worse, it corrupts sexual morality by keeping young boys and girls in college where all they do is "party." This is precisely what is happening in the USSA and elsewhere.


Now, time is of the essence. Life is measured in time. Productivity is measured in time. The wages of labour are paid according to time. Interest is charged according to time. Rents are also paid on the basis of time. It is therefore Time that is the most important "factor of production." Our chacha is wasting time - the most precious years of youth.


But it doesn't stop there.


Throughout India, our horrible transport system wastes time on a colossal scale. Our trains are the world's slowest; and as for our "notional highways," the less said the better. I do believe chacha has deliberately not built proper highways in order to FORCE our people to travel by train, which are his MONOPOLY. Modern buses on modern highways would have given the Indian Railways a run for their money. No one travels by train in the USSA because they have Greyhound buses and good highways.


And what about civil aviation? Our chacha has imposed such heavy taxes on "low cost" airlines that, once again, we are FORCED to travel by his unsafe and slow trains, his MONOPOLY.


I also believe our chacha has taken deliberate measures to ensure that the automobile revolution does NOT happen in India. He has done this deliberately in order to protect his cronies - like Rahul Bajaj MP, whose FUCKED-UP auto-rickshaws clog all the streets in all our cities and towns. Actually, Calcutta had an excellent PRIVATE tramway before the automobile was invented. Private tramways in all our small cities and towns would deliver the two- and three-wheeler industry a death-blow.


Further, our chacha has not pursued an "automobile policy" that seeks to ensure that all Indians have cars; rather, he wants all Indians to own motorcycles and scooters, thereby making their lives unsafe, especially when little children have to be ferried about. He is NOT protecting the people and their kids; he is protecting some bozos who cannot compete with duty-free second-hand car, bus and truck imports.


Amazing, ain't it? We fuckers have to sit "competitive examinations" all through our lives - CAT, IIT-JEE, UPSC et. al. But these cronies must be protected at all costs, and kept safe from competition.


One of the costs of such protectionism is human life - our lives. Over 200,000 people die on our unsafe streets and highways - and many times more are seriously injured. But our chacha, the great Central Planner, Chairman of the Planning Commission, would rather provide us with "food security." He seems to be unaware that billions of tonnes of fruit, vegetables and fish rot throughout India because these perishable commodities cannot reach markets on TIME.


Last evening, I had a great dinner off a roadside stall here in Pondicherry: dosas with fried chicken liver. Excellent! I told the vendor that he was engaged in true "social service" - and that the Pondicherry "Food Minister" was engaged in theft.


Since our chacha has also monopolised the teaching of History, I think he has deliberately kept the Babur Nama out of the curriculum, because therein this Great Mughal writes that he was horrified when, after conquering Dilli, he found there was "no cooked food available in the bazaars." He took immediate steps to ensure that this was rectified and Mughlai kebabs were available for the populace. 


Our chacha, the great History teacher, wants to parcel raw rice and wheat to all Indians! In the meantime, ask any street-food vendor in Nude Elly (or anywhere else) as to how much harassment he faces daily from chacha's khaki-costumed goons.


Theatre of the absurd, ain't it?


While we are all wasting Time, it is noteworthy that our great chacha himself has NO TIME TO WASTE. 


There is a lead editorial in The Hindu of today that points to the fact that our great chacha "has held only two press conferences and two interactions with editors in Delhi in the past seven years. As for interviews, he has allowed himself to be questioned by an Indian newspaper only once and never by an Indian [television] news channel."


In other words, these seven or eight long years of chacha's misrule have been a colossal waste of time - for the Free Press, a vital Institution of Freedom, to which I proudly belong, with a track record of 20 years of distinguished service.


Now, as the ancient proverb goes, "Time is money." 


Of course, chacha's fiat paper money loses value with the ticking of the clock. The inflationist-welfarist-Keynesian bozo!


It is HIGH TIME this waster of time and money was shown the door - Exeunt! as The Bard would put it - and this vast sub-continent got down to the serious business of making money by saving Time, which is the only way Productivity can be raised, thereby raising all wages and incomes. 


We need a wholesale transport revolution. 


We need "street security" not "food security."


And we need Sound, Private Money, which will give all our poor people "financial security." Inflationism erodes the Capital of all. And welfarism is nothing but "capital consumption."


[This will be a 5-part series. Stay tuned for more.]

Conversation With A Young German

Hearing that I propagated "radical capitalism," a young German tourist entered into a debate with me. He said he stood for "social market economy," and when I inquired as to what kind of interventionism he desired, he said German farmers needed protection. Free trade would hurt them, he said. The German State must impose high tariffs on tomato imports, he argued. I replied as follows:

If this tariff is imposed, and Germans pay more to consume locally-grown tomatoes, they will have less to spend on other goods - like beer. Thus, the move will backfire. The farmer's gain will be the brewer's loss. Consumers will lose, too.

I added that the "international division of labour" means specialisation among all nations. Thus, if Germans import tomatoes from, say, Indian farmers, and specialise in engineering, they will benefit. But if they protect inefficient tomato farmers, then Indian farmers will lose - and they will be unable to buy BMWs from Germany. Protectionism is a Lose-Lose proposition, I told him. The whole world loses. The world would be a much better place if tariffs were abolished altogether.

He hemmed-and-hawed awhile, and then took the tack that my "radicalism" was something new - a belief in a "pure capitalism" that had never been articulated before. I advised him to read Ludwig von Mises' Liberalismus - the original German edition of his Liberalism: The Classical Tradition dating back to the 1920s (which you can buy here; the PDF file of the English version is available here).

I also told him about Adam Smith's "Three Duties of the Sovereign" dated 1776, and how these duties excluded the production of money, poor relief and even the making of law. The sovereign only had to defend his subjects from internal and external foes - and undertake "certain public works" that neither businessmen nor charities would invest in, like roads. Rather than making law, the sovereign had to establish an "exact administration of justice." In Smith's immortal words:

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings:

first, the duty of protecting the society from violence and invasion of other independent societies; 

secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice;

and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

Thus, these views are neither radical, nor new. And Smith's use of the expression "Great Society" is also noteworthy. This Great Society is not a nation-state; rather, it is internationalist and world-embracing. Smith's Great Society is exactly what Sir Karl Popper meant by "Open Society." I have myself written a recent column on Open Society, which you can read here. This open or great society has nothing to do with "narrow domestic walls." Classical liberalism was about all of humanity. Smith dreamt of "universal opulence."

The young German said he was planning to pursue an MBA programme in the USSA. I advised him against it, asking him to study Economics instead - at home.

Why are Germans so sceptical of the Free Market when they have seen the failure of East Germany? The answer probably lies in the fact that their schooling is provided by their State. It is in Germany that the Welfare State was born - under Bismarck. It is in Germany that "bureaucrat-professors" proclaimed themselves to be "intellectual bodyguards of the House of Hohenzollern."

But there is hope. The Euro will fail, soon, only because of Socialism - the "social market" my young friend so stoutly defended. "Social welfare" has failed in four EU nations: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain (PIGS). Soon, all of Europe will learn that welfarism is not "economically sustainable." We in India must learn this too.

Onions - And Kleptocrats

Onions are in the news because crop failure has resulted in high retail prices. Our The State responded by immediately banning exports. I thought this quite insane because, if crops have failed, there is not much to export anyway. Thereafter, it seems our The State woke up to its folly and abolished import duties on onions - which is the sensible thing to do, not just for onions, but for everything else as well. But then, after freeing imports (of only onions), true to form, our The State messed up - badly.

According to this report in Mint today, our The State has directed three State-owned firms to undertake all the onion imports required. This means that these State-owned companies will spend taxpayer money - without any concern for profit and loss. This is essentially a "kleptocratic" idea - for it will inevitably lead to gross corruption. Remember that the current CVC was indicted for corruption in a similar scam - he imported palm oil for the Kerala "public distribution system" to tide over a shortage.

What I find most entertaining is that two top-ranking IAS officers have been named in the above report for having taken this decidedly kleptocratic decision. They are cabinet secretary K M Chandrasekhar and commerce secretary Rahul Khullar. The report says Chandrasekhar is "personally monitoring the situation, [and] earlier in the day asked the commerce ministry to 'speed up' onion imports to augment domestic availability." And as for Khullar, he is quoted as saying, “I met CMDs of three public sector companies MMTC, STC and PEC and asked them to look around for import contracts (for onion).”

I find it hilarious that a cabinet secretary - the senior-most IAS officer in the land - should think that his job lies in "personally monitoring" the onion trade. Is he getting "tweets" from dealers all over the land? And who is he trying to kid?

After all, there is an IAS officer in Delhi who runs all the booze shops. Does he "personally monitor" the trade? Ask any hapless consumer and he will tell you that his favourite brand is often unavailable at his local shop.

Only competing private traders can be possessed of the "knowledge" required to solve the onion shortage problem. They will each seek to "buy cheap and sell dear" - and by their combined actions, conducted under conditions of open competition, they will wipe out the shortage and flatten retail prices. Since import duties on onions have been abolished, it is these private traders whose private capital and energies should have been unleashed. Instead, these top-ranking IAS baboons have ordered "public capital" and "public enterprise" to monopolise imports.

Indeed, if imports had always been free, the current crisis would never have arisen, because all these private traders would have found it profitable to begin importing long ago. Each one of them, with his "personal monitoring" of onion prices here and there, would be alert to wide differentials far earlier. Here again, the idea that a central mind can better perform market functions fails. And it fails in a critical area - thinking ahead. Always remember these words of Mises:

The social function of the entrepreneur is to make provision for the uncertain future.

Our "centralised mind," after all, woke up only after lots of news reports and even public outcry. They also claim to be "thinking ahead" - at least for the five years of their five-year plans. But if you look into anything that is being monopolistically planned - like roads, electricity and water - you will find a shortage. Like Bajaj scooters in the bad old days. And on the other hand, if you look for anything that is being free traded, like scooters today, you will find abundance. I had thought that, by now, our knowledge-based administrative elite would have learnt something that would affect their philosophical position on the market-state debate. Yet, it is plain that they think like communists.

Thus, it seems quite apparent that the IAS is part of the problem - the problem of "knowledge failure" that characterises our The State. Their precise role in our system of government lies in rendering knowledge-based policy advice to the representatives of illiterates. However, it is obvious that they themselves are suffering from "acute economic illiteracy."

To these accursed kleptocrats, I offer some words of Pascal that Peter Bauer was fond of quoting: "Struggling hard to think clearly is the first step to moral conduct."

Chacha's Advisor - On Food For The Poor

Kaushik Basu, formerly of Cornell University in the USSA, and student of Amartya Sen, is now Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. Today, Mint is carrying a brief report on a paper he has penned on the "food problem": the fact that grain is rotting in government godowns while poor people are (supposedly) starving. I say "supposedly" because we are not receiving any reports of starvation deaths - and such reports haven't appeared in many decades. Allow me to quote the opening paragraph of the article on Basu's paper:

The government has been pulled up by the Supreme Court for allowing foodgrain to rot in its godowns while the poor go hungry. The judges have ordered the food to be distributed free. In response, the Prime Minister has said it’s impossible to supply free food to the 37% of the population below the “poverty line”. Who’s right, the politicians or the judges? Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser at the finance ministry, has in this paper said that it’s perfectly possible to feed everyone in the country and the problem is the faulty food procurement and distribution system.

Methinks the only "perfect" way to feed everyone is via The Market. To me, there is NO ROLE for our The State in the business of food. If you visit our urban slums, you will find many vendors of food there - vegetables, fruit, fish, meat, snacks, tea and so on. Why should our The State be called in to waste truckloads of scarce tax revenue on this? And waste it is, for Basu is quoted as saying:

In the case of India, the release has fallen well short of procurement. The statement by a senior member of this government that, when it comes to hoarding, it is the government of India that leads the pack is not off the mark.

Why should our The State "procure" grains at all? Basu does not answer this question. Instead, he calls for "better procurement policy" and "better distribution policy" - including food coupons. Disastrous ideas, I think. I believe in a "policy-less government."

Frankly, I am sick to death of this paternalism our The State exhibits - and anyway, it is quite phoney. Our The State is actually inflating the currency - hurting everyone, especially the poor. To my mind, our The State needs to be drastically cut down - and the Ministry of Food as well as the Food Corporation of India must be abolished. And many more ministries besides. Once we have the budget under control, once we have taxes cut down, once we have nullified the public debt (and contracted no further debt) - only then can The State be made to perform its basic function of building roads. Basu is quoted in the last para of the report as saying:

Basu points out that we have, in the name of caring for the aam aadmi [common man], created a system where neither poor consumers nor poor farmers benefit. Worse, the present system creates wrong incentives that “hold back large segments of the population in agriculture, who actually deserve to move out to industry and manufacturing”.

Well, the division of labour cannot proceed unless there are good roads between areas of agricultural production and the markets for the produce, which are invariably in cities and towns. There is no other way. And there is no money for roads because of all this foolish spending. Basu knows that this spending on "food security" is foolish, for the report says:

On 1 April, the stock of wheat and rice with the government was 202% of the minimum needed under the buffer stock norms, at a time when price rise was forcing the poor to cut back on food. Basu points out scathingly: “If the reserves are never to be used, they may as well not be there.”

So let us get down to basics: Human beings "economize." They spend scarce resources on their most pressing needs and leave lesser needs unsatisfied. The State must do the same.

But just think about it: What if Roman Emperors had decided to "feed the poor" instead of building roads? What would have happened to their Empire? What would have happened to trade between all the regions? What would have happened to the Treasury?

So I agree with Basu where he says:

“If the reserves are never to be used, they may as well not be there.”

Yes, put an end to this "food security" nautanki tamasha (theatre of the absurd), this ugly joke on poor people in a poor country without any physical infrastructure whatsoever. With an infrastructure of roads, with cheap second-hand cars imported duty-free, and with ECONOMIC FREEDOM, the poor will feed themselves very well. Indeed, they will clothe themselves, house themselves and even enjoy recreation - just as they all possess mobile phones now. Adam Smith believed that the "system of Natural Liberty" would lead to "universal opulence." There is no other way. Their only hope lies in The Market. Let our The State build roads - and if they cannot do so, let us stop paying taxes altogether, abolish The State, and build the roads ourselves.

PS: For more posts on Kaushik Basu, including some critiques of his Hindustan Times columns, search this blog under his name.

Ground Zero: Scene of a Crime

On the bus to Halebid, Belur and back, I also looked closely at the agriculture here, around Hassan, Karnataka. The soil is rich, dark brown, and very fertile. Water is abundant. Greenery abounds. I saw many fields of tall, healthy maize, but I also saw a host of cash crops - there were banana orchards, coconut groves, patches of vegetables, chillies, and many crops that I could not recognize. There were many fields of flowers - sunflowers as well as marigolds.

I have travelled the area extensively some years ago, lecturing in many small towns, and I had begun a travelogue called Malnad: Where Money Grows On Trees. Farmers here are extermely prosperous, growing cash crops like coffee, pepper, arecanut (supari), vanilla, styvia and what not. The agriculture around Hassan is not that rich, but it is doing quite well. There are no signs of distress.

Thus, everything is hunky-dory here. Pakistan is far away; there are no terrorists or Naxalites; agriculture is prosperous; the land is beautiful with many historical treasures; the weather is extremely pleasant; the people are enterprising and hard-working; there is complete internal peace - but even here they have made a total mess of things. Thus, this is a "scene of a crime" - a crime committed by The State. This is not even "benevolent neglect" - the colonial policy that succeeded so well in British Hong Kong. This is plain and simple "dereliction of duty."

The bus to Belur went down BM Road for quite a while and then, at a fork without any traffic safety arrangements whatsoever, took a sharp right. It must be difficult to cross the road here. A small township has grown up around this meeting of roads, for this is how urbanization always proceeds - along transport connections like rivers and roads, or the sea - but the civilian administration seems totally devoid of this basic knowledge. I do not think they possess the hard knowledge required to design safe roads, signage, crossings and the like. I watch the traffic constable from my window armed with a walkie-talkie and a whistle. He cannot do much when the system has failed. The police seem unable to handle their basic role in peacetime - which is to preserve order on the streets. We are all horribly unsafe in India. This essential knowledge must be imported.

Of course, I was looking around at the beautiful scenery with the eye of a Property man. I saw at least 5 big lakes around which there was no property, and many hills too. A grand casino might look fine on a hill, what? In Goa, they don't give terra firma to casinos, and they must operate on ships in the water. Hassan can compete. Kathmandu gets loads of Indian tourists because of its casinos.

However, the planners in New Delhi have no vision of real estate development. I saw many hills despoiled by rows of huge windmills. These are no solution to the severe power crisis Hassan and the whole of Karnataka faces. They are an example of State subsidy and destruction of real estate value. They symbolise the folly of centralizing power and authority. These windmills and the space centre in Hassan are signs of "science" under socialism. Indeed, under socialists there is always science; there is never any "technology" - which requires The Market. We had IITs right through the bad old days of socialist autarky, but we never had phones, and we never had cars. Think about that - and how Capitalism has improved life in recent years. Raise a toast to Capitalism.

I suggest more. Many years ago, Liberty Institute organized a "Walk for Capitalism" around Delhi's Connaught Place. I participated enthusiastically, shouting "Khulla Bazaar" and "Mukt Vyapaar" and "Jai Vyapari", carrying a placard saying "Taxation is Theft." The walk was a great success and widely reported. I hope you folks reading this try to organize such walks for capitalism in your own city and town. We must inform our The State that most ordinary folks believe in Capitalism.

Evil, Corrupt, Anti-Poor

I have even worse news on the Total Chacha State's doings today. These evil rulers of ours have banned cotton exports - so that cotton mills can increase their profits by buying their principal raw material cheap. It is alleged in this column that mill-owners have paid for this favour. Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi and the CONgress are corrupt to the core.

Note that cotton farmers are among the poorest in India. In the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, there has been news of cotton farmer suicides for many years now. I recently drove through cotton-growing areas of North Karnataka - the Hubli-Gadag area - and was struck numb by the sheer poverty there, as compared to sunny Goa.

Now, these poor cotton farmers should be possessed of the Liberty to sell their crop to the highest bidder - in this case, overseas buyers. Banning cotton exports hurts cotton farmers badly. It also ruins their export markets permanently, because they will be viewed as unreliable suppliers.

Thus, all the Chacha-Sonia talk about being "pro-poor" is pure bullshit. NREGA ditch-digging enriches the bureaucracy, not the poor. As does miseducation. As does cheap rotten cereals. All these policies are in the interest of fat cat IAS baboons, who get to spend all the (fiat) money. Inflationism, which funds all this sham welfare, is also a means of making poor people poorer.

Chacha and Sonia talk endlessly about "helping the poor" only to legitimize this colossal loot in the eyes of the gullible. When it comes to brass-tacks, this Total Chacha State always acts to entrench poverty. The machinery of the Total Chacha State works non-stop to make the poor poorer, by trampling on their Liberty to buy and sell.

Freedom to trade by land and sea is the only way by which all this corruption can be ended and the poor farmer can climb out of poverty - on his own.

Freedom to trade by land and sea was one of the clauses of the Magna Carta. The Englishmen of 1215 AD gheraoed their King and made him sign on the dotted line that he and his State would not interfere in their Liberties. We need to do the same in India. Sharad Joshi should amass his troops upon Raisina Hill and get Chacha to sign a Magna Carta for all Indians. His farmers' organization, Shetkari Sanghatana, is already very big among onion and cotton farmers. I hope he will now enlist ganja farmers in his mission too.

Liberty!

Recommended read: The chapter on the Magna Carta in my Natural Order: Essays Exploring Civil Government & the Rule of Law, free e-book here.

Calling Cobden

Kudos to Mint for their editorial “Back to the farm is a bad idea” – the first editorial ever written in the mainstream press against Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi’s NREGA. From now on, Mint should be seen as the nation’s leading financial daily. ET must be abandoned – their editor has just called for a new State-owned company, to manufacture telecom equipment, of all things. Incorrigible? Anyone remember ITI?

Anyway, hats off to Mint. Too many editors are but shills of the regime. Mint has showed it is something different.

The editorial is first-class. I myself said the same in different words recently. However, one sentence in the edit did not quite jell with me:

Farmers point out that NREGS effectively puts a floor under rural wages, leading to labour shortages during harvest time.

Theory indicates otherwise. What NREGA actually does is subsidize landlords by “topping up” the income of farmhands. They stay back on the farm. If this topping up did not take place, they would flee, and the wages of those farmhands left behind would rise. Further, agriculture would be forced to modernize and mechanize.

Not only theory, history can also be called in to aid our thinking on the perversity of Chacha’s NREGA. The Speenhamland System of providing relief to the rural poor accomplished exactly the same in Britain in the 1790s: subsidizing the wage bill of landlords. At the same time, it “pauperized” all farmhands; in effect, disallowing them to escape rural poverty and seek better conditions in the factories of the new, industrial towns. NREGA is India’s Speenhamland System.

Mint is dead right when they say that the only future for the rural poor lies in cities and towns, outside traditional agriculture. This is precisely how the rural poor of Britain rose to unprecedented standards by 1890 – the height of Gladstonian liberalism.

Leftist historians lie about the Industrial Revolution when they depict the factory system as “exploitative” and the pre-industrial days as idyllic. In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Ludwig von Mises has a section titled “Remarks About the Popular Interpretation of the ‘Industrial Revolution’”: this is from Chapter 21 on “Work And Wages”, pages 617-623; PDF here. I will quote briefly below, but I suggest you read the entire section.

Mises says:

The truth is that economic conditions were highly unsatisfactory on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The traditional social system was not elastic enough to provide for the needs of a rapidly increasing population. Neither farming nor the guilds had any use for the additional hands. Business was imbued with the inherited spirit of privilege and exclusive monopoly; its institutional foundations were licenses and the grant of a patent of monopoly; its philosophy was restriction and the prohibition of competition both domestic and foreign. The number of people for whom there was no room left in the rigid system of paternalism and government tutelage of business grew rapidly. They were virtually outcasts. The apathetic majority of these wretched people lived from the crumbs that fell from the tables of the established castes. In the harvest season they earned a trifle by occasional help on farms; for the rest they depended upon private charity and communal poor relief.

Mises then goes on to say what a boon factory employment was for England’s rural poor:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

Mises then goes on to say some important things about economic policy in Third World countries like India:

Vast areas—Eastern Asia, the East Indies, Southern and Southeastern Europe, Latin America—are only superficially affected by modern capitalism. Conditions in these countries by and large do not differ from those of England on the eve of the “Industrial Revolution.” There are millions of people for whom there is no secure place left in the traditional economic setting. The fate of these wretched masses can be improved only by industrialization. What they need most is entrepreneurs and capitalists. As their own foolish policies have deprived these nations of the further enjoyment of the assistance imported foreign capital hitherto gave them, they must embark upon domestic capital accumulation. They must go through all the stages through which the evolution of Western industrialism had to pass. They must start with comparatively low wage rates and long hours of work. But, deluded by the doctrines prevailing in present-day Western Europe and North America, their statesmen think that they can proceed in a different way. They encourage labor-union pressure and alleged pro-labor legislation. Their interventionist radicalism nips in the bud all attempts to create domestic industries. Their stubborn dogmatism spells the doom of the Indian and Chinese coolies, the Mexican peons, and millions of other peoples, desperately struggling on the verge of starvation.

If you want to read more about the non-Marxist view of the Industrial Revolution, I recommend Capitalism and the Historians, edited by Friedrich Hayek, available here on sale. I hope the Mises Institute will put up a pdf copy of this important resource online.

In Great Britain, the 19th century was the golden age of liberalism. This is what lifted the masses out of poverty. This is when Samuel Smiles' Self-Help became a bestseller, and none looked for charity. Liberty Institute has published this great book in India, with my foreword.

As far as 19th century British politics is concerned, full credit is due to Cobden, Bright and the Manchesterites. Their activism changed everything. Bastiat was much influenced by Cobden and travelled to England to meet him. He then set up a Free Trade League in France modeled after the English one. Similar free trade leagues mushroomed all over the Continent; in Germany under John Prince-Smith. Cobden became the most highly feted politician in the whole of Europe. There is an excellent history of the Manchesterites in my The Essential Frédéric Bastiat, in the introduction by Detmar Doering. You can download the book here.

Yes, we need a Cobden in India today. I hope this will serve as an inspiration to many young activists.

Farmers! Fight For Bt Brinjal

I believe our farmers need the freedom to access modern technology. Thus, I am strongly opposed to the anti-farmer “green lobby” that is blocking Bt Brinjal in India. As this recent editorial in Mint makes clear, “per hectare, pesticides for Bt brinjal cost Rs752 against Rs5,952 for the non-Bt variety.” The editorial is titled “False fear of GM foods,” and, in the context of this false fear, I have an interesting anecdote to report on the pesticide-laden brinjal we all eat today.

Once, many years ago, I was traveling by train, and my traveling companions were a medical doctor and his wife. After dinner, the wife took to cutting some apples and serving them to her husband and me. I commented to the doctor that wasn’t it strange that she was peeling the apples, for was not apple peel healthy? He said, “No, apple peel contains pesticides and it is better to peel them.” As we discussed pesticide use in agriculture, he told me something fantastic about brinjal. He said that in the old days you always got brinjal with holes, because of insects that would bore into them. People cut these portions out of the brinjals and ate the rest. That was a good practice he said, and far healthier that the shiny brinjals you get today, without holes, but covered with pesticide.

The enemy of public health is not Bt; rather, it is the excessive use of pesticide. Bt Brinjal reduces pesticide use by over 75 per cent. Such brinjal is good for the health.

While I was with the Economic Times in New Delhi in 2002, a similar fuss was made over Bt Cotton. Then, farmers took to illegal Bt cotton farming and protested loudly for the formal approval of the new seeds. At that time, I interviewed Professor CS Prakash, who teaches plant biotechnology at Tuskegee University in the USSA, for my paper. The interview had a tremendous impact and Bt Cotton was formally approved within a few days of its publication. This interview is still available online, and can be accessed here. It reveals a lot about the Bt technology, and the anti-farmer, anti-poor and anti-science attitudes of the “green lobby.”

As I said, at the time of Bt Cotton, it was farmers who took up arms against the State. For Bt Brinjal, it is once again up to our farmers to take up their cudgels against the establishment, and against the greens. As the editorial in Mint says, yield per hectare of Bt Brinjal is double that of the traditional variety. Farmers not only get to grow double the output, they also save hugely on pesticide costs. Thus, the economics is entirely on the side of farmers – and, let us not forget, consumers benefit hugely too.

There are many great farmer leaders in India. My friend Sharad Joshi is probably the greatest of them all, and the tallest Maharashtrian in Indian politics. He is a true-blue classical liberal, and a trained economist. He is also a great fan of Frédéric Bastiat. He believes strongly that Indian farmers need open access to modern technology, and he fought valiantly for the approval of Bt Cotton. I hope farmers’ organizations like his will now take on the establishment and the greens over Bt Brinjal.

On Political Selfishness... And Intellectual Altruism

Yesterday, I discussed selfishness – good and evil – and concluded that political selfishness is evil, while commercial selfishness is good. Our Chacha State’s food minister, Sharad Pawar, is an excellent example of the former. He is known as a “sugar baron” – but he is no entrepreneur. He runs a vast sugar empire through his “nationalist socialist” (Nazi) politics, and it is he who is directly responsible for the astronomically high prices of sugar in India these days. I have an earlier post on his thuggery, where I referred to him as a “rascal.”

As ET has commented today, Sharad Pawar is playing Marie Antoinette, telling us all that sugar is bad for the health, that people should consume less sugar, and that sugar is not an “essential food” for the poor. These views have been echoed in his party mouthpiece, ET says.

Actually, sugar is an essential source of energy – especially for the poor. The tea that poor people drink is always heavily loaded with sugar, because it instantly delivers the “sugar rush” and enables these poor people to continue with their back-breaking labours. Truck drivers in India, for example, refer to a heavily sugared cuppa as a “100 mile tea” – because of the energy received. For all these poor people, tea is now unaffordable. And Sharad Pawar, the political sugar baron, is saying, “let them eat gur.” This is political selfishness at its worst. The man is not just a rascal; he is actually an unapologetic gangster masquerading as a politician. And he is Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi and Soniaji Gandhiji’s closest “ally.” It is rumoured that he is now chumming up to the Shiv Sena. Welcome to Indian socialist politics, where all “political parties” are but gangs of thieves, ruffians and murderers.

Talking about selfishness, Anoop Verma has left another comment on my post of yesterday. He says he found the post useful, but he sticks to his stand on altruism being evil. I would have let it pass – for did not Ayn Rand title her book The Virtue of Selfishness – but for his comment on men of ideas. Anoop writes:

Altruist intellectuals have been in the business of dishing out false propaganda for thousands of years. They have managed to impart false meaning to almost every concept. That is why selfishness has such a bad name, and people think that altruism is a good. The reverse is true.

I am a great admirer of men like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, who suffered greatly for their views, but steadfastly maintained their integrity. I suppose they could be called “altruistic intellectuals,” though I would prefer to call them “creative geniuses.” In a chapter in Human Action on “Action Within The World,” in the section on “Human Labour As A Means,” Mises discusses the creative genius from the praxeological angle – that his work cannot be called “labour” as such, for it satisfies its performer neither mediately nor immediately. Indeed, his work is his personal struggle, an agony, and its benefits flow freely to mankind, although the common people mostly sneer at the man who struggled to create his books, theories, poems, plays or novels. I reproduce the entire section below, for Anoop’s education. The PDF file of Human Action is available here. For this section, go to page 139.

The Creative Genius

Far above the millions that come and pass away tower the pioneers, the men whose deeds and ideas cut out new paths for mankind. For the pioneering genius to create is the essence of life. To live means for him to create. The activities of these prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result, but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The genius wants to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves toward his own disaster.

Neither does the genius derive immediate gratification from his creative activities. Creating is for him agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him. The Austrian poet Grillparzer has depicted this in a touching poem “Farewell to Gastein.” We may assume that in writing it he thought not only of his own sorrows and tribulations but also of the greater sufferings of a much greater man, of Beethoven, whose fate resembled his own and whom he understood, through devoted affection and sympathetic appreciation, better than any other of his contemporaries. Nietzsche compared himself to the flame that insatiably consumes and destroys itself. Such agonies are phenomena which have nothing in common with the connotations generally attached to the notions of work and labor, production and success, breadwinning and enjoyment of life.

The achievements of the creative innovator, his thoughts and theories, his poems, paintings, and compositions, cannot be classified praxeologically as products of labor. They are not the outcome of the employment of labor which could have been devoted to the production of other amenities for the “production” of a masterpiece of philosophy, art, or literature. Thinkers, poets, and artists are sometimes unfit to accomplish any other work. At any rate, the time and toil which they devote to creative activities are not withheld from employment for other purposes. Conditions may sometimes doom to sterility a man who would have had the power to bring forth things unheard of; they may leave him no alternative other than to die from starvation or to use all his forces in the struggle for mere physical survival. But if the genius succeeds in achieving his goals, nobody but himself pays the “costs” incurred. Goethe was perhaps in some respects hampered by his functions at the court of Weimar. But certainly he would not have accomplished more in his official duties as minister of state, theater manager, and administrator of mines if he had not written his plays, poems, and novels.

It is, furthermore, impossible to substitute other people’s work for that of the creators. If Dante and Beethoven had not existed, one would not have been in a position to produce the Divina Commedia or the Ninth Symphony by assigning other men to these tasks. Neither society nor single individuals can substantially further the genius and his work. The highest intensity of the “demand” and the most peremptory order of the government are ineffectual. The genius does not deliver to order. Men cannot improve the natural and social conditions which bring about the creator and his creation. It is impossible to rear geniuses by eugenics, to train them by schooling, or to organize their activities. But, of course, one can organize society in such a way that no room is left for pioneers and their path-breaking.

The creative accomplishment of the genius is an ultimate fact for praxeology. It comes to pass in history as a free gift of destiny. It is by no means the result of production in the sense in which economics uses this term.

There are extremely great men who live lives far above those whose only concerns are “breadwinning and the enjoyment of life".

Chacha's Food Minister - A Rascal

Nidhi Nath Srinivas, agriculture correspondent of the Economic Times, a position she has held with distinction for well over a decade now, has an important blog post today that lays the blame for unusually high sugar prices on the nation’s food & agriculture ministry, now headed by a “sugar baron,” Sharad Pawar. The post is titled “Time to quit, Mr. Pawar.” It should have been titled “Throw the rascal out.”

She begins:

On December 31, sugar was selling for Rs 36/kg. On January 7, wholesale price jumped to Rs 43 and we began paying Rs 50. Sugar is now pricier than desi ghee, kaju and badam.

She goes on to say that sugar should be cheap now because this is the season when the mills are crushing all the cane. What is the “real story”? Here is her scoop:

Each month Sharad Pawar’s food ministry fixes how much sugar is sold in India. On December 30, it announced that only 16 lakh tons would be sold in January. But January is a month of festivals and weddings. Traders know actual demand is about 2 lakh tonnes higher. So prices exploded instantaneously. Instead of cooling rates that have already doubled over last one year, the food ministry added fuel to the fire by widening the demand-supply gap.

About then, traders say, the railways began delaying wagons for moving open market sugar to the East because other commodities took priority. This was a disaster for Kolkata, a key market which needs 30 rakes a month, and the North East, which monthly consumes 2 lakh t. Both depend on Maharashtra and the South for supply. Kolkata flared, leading to a corresponding jump in supplier Vashi as well.

So, Mamata and Pawar are hand-in-glove – probably.

Nidhi also comments on Pawar’s “misbegotten” – or should we call it “insincere” – attempt to fix things:

A few months ago, in a misbegotten attempt to flush out hoarders, it [food ministry] asked all states to impose stock limits on traders, processors, large consumers and even mills. It completely forgot [forgot? Or was it intentional?] that in a country where three-fourths sugar is produced by two states – Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, only a reliable and efficient supply chain can make sure consumers everywhere continue to get it affordably.

Thus, it seems to me that our great Central State is nothing but Chacha and his Chaalis Chor (forty thieves). They are not “governing” the country; they are only pretending to do so. In reality, they are all running huge rackets – at the expense of the governed.

Let us take a vow to throw ALL these rascals out – soon.