Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

Recently a woman named Tailin Lyngdoh from Meghalaya was removed from the Delhi gold club premises by staff officials because she was wearing a traditional dress ‘Khasi’ and was apparently looking like a ‘maid’. The union government minister Mr. Kiren Rijiju has protested against this incident by saying that it is a clear case of racial discrimination and is wrong. He is asking the Delhi police to investigate this matter and punish the club owners. Now, instead of making noise like the minster, let us analyze this case logically. The real question here is: is there anything wrong in such discrimination? Not really. Discrimination per se is not wrong or bad. In fact, it is a right of every individual. Let us see why. Right to discrimination is a human right which in turn, fundamentally, is a right to private property. As Murray  Rothbard said, all human rights are basically property rights.  As property owners we all decide everyday to whom we are going...

Farmers from various states of India like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat etc., are right now agitating against their local state governments demanding, mainly, cancellation of their debts as well as better minimum support prices of their products. In the on-going agitation already six farmers have been killed by police firing. This agitation is a sign of total dependency of Indian farmers on the state. The reason why they have to demand cancellation of their huge debt burden today is because in past they were given easy loans by the government’s central bank RBI and its commercial, mostly state run, banks. Specifically, these protests and killings of farmers are a making of RBI’s cheap money and credit policy. Overall, this uprising is yet another making of the failures of the state’s central planning socialist policies. In the absence of these policies of cheap money and credit and central planning, farmers would be careful in borrowing money from...

Since coming to power in 2014 one of the aims of the Narendra Modi government’s welfare state is to make healthcare more affordable in India by, mainly, trying to curb prices of drugs used to treat critical ailments such as cancer, HIV/AIDS and diabetes. In their efforts to do so they have declared some 350 drugs as essential drugs and imposed a price ceiling on them. Not only this, in February this year they also cut the price of some heart stents by 75 percent. Now a letter from Modi government’s drug price regulatory bureaucracy The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) shows that they intend to add four more medical devices to a list of products eligible for price controls to reduce costs to patients . Making healthcare affordable is a noble objective, but the real question is whether the method of using government price control measure will achieve this objective? Only sound economic theory can shed light on this issue. Economic science tells us that,...