Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

 When it comes to the political choices in India, Indians have no real choices. All political parties in India, in one form or another, are wedded to the ideology of socialism and its variants like communism. Whether it is the ruling BJP party or the major opposition Congress party or the Aam Aadmi Party, they all are followers of socialism. They all present the statist view of the society where the individual is subordinate to the state and its ruling government. The government is our overlord, our nanny who is going to control and regulate every aspect of our lives. The concept of the individual and its liberty is completely missing from the Indian social, cultural, and political scene. Basically the Indian culture is collective tribal and primitive. The present BJP government and its prime minister Modi are touted by many as a pro-market prime minister and to the right of the political spectrum, but looking at BJP and Modi’s track record, e.g., increasing centralization of the s...

Corruption has been maligned by everyone as if it is something bad and has to be condemned and removed from society forever. Transparency International   defines   corruption as, We define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Corruption erodes trust, weakens democracy, hampers economic development and further exacerbates inequality, poverty, social division and the environmental crisis. They also discuss three different forms of corruption, public servants demanding or taking money or favors in exchange for services, politicians misusing public money or granting public jobs or contracts to their sponsors, friends, and families, corporations bribing officials to get lucrative deals Although corruption per se is bad and it must be eliminated from society, doing that requires a sound understanding of causes of corruption. This is important because without removing the cause of corruption, if we try to eliminate corruption – which is a mere symptom of the u...

The political institute of the state historically evolved out of conquest of peaceful people by the hoards of marauders. Murray Rothbard in his important work   Anatomy of the State   discussed this theory,   We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been ...

The global hunger report 2021 puts  India at 101 out of 116  countries. Neighboring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal are also better in terms of hunger compared to India. The only country in Asia that is behind India is Afghanistan. The Indian government has expressed its shock on the latest ranking. They have brushed aside these findings by saying that they are “non-scientific”, but government’s own  NITI Aayog said  the same thing few years ago, Niti Aayog’s SDG Index 2019, released on December 27, 2019, says that more Indians have fallen into poverty, hunger, and income inequality in the past two years. This is after a remarkable reduction in poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16. On the other hand the Prime Minister has unveiled a program of military buildup in India via seven state-run defense companies! Prime Minister  said  that the goal of this policy is, to make India the world’s biggest military power on its own.  He also said, a ...

The political institute of the state historically evolved out of conquest of peaceful people by the hoards of marauders. Murray Rothbard in his important work   Anatomy of the State   discussed this theory,   We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been ...

Oxford University press India has refused to publish an upcoming book   To Kill a Democracy   by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane possibly because of fear of the Narendra Modi government. This book is highly critical of the policies of the Modi government. Asia Times reports: In an apparent attempt to avoid offending the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Oxford University Press has declined to print the Indian release of  To Kill a Democracy , a book whose international edition was  reviewed favorably  by Asia Times in June. Is Narendra Modi really killing Indian democracy? Let’s see.  What is democracy? Democracy is defined as a system of government of elected representatives of people. In India a political party needs 2/3 majority to be in power. This is the majoritarian rule for which democracies around the world are famous.  Judging by this main criteria of majority rule, Narendra Modi is very much a democratically elected prime mini...

Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal recently   emphasised   the need to raise tariffs saying that the major cause behind this crisis is low tariffs. He said,   To say that the telecom industry is in a bit of trouble is actually an understatement. It is in a tremendous amount of stress … Mittal emphasised the need to raise tariffs saying that the major cause behind this crisis is low tariffs. Is Sunil Mittal right? To answer this question we need to understand how companies make profit in the market.  Profit is a price differential between the prices of producer and consumer goods. Producer goods are those goods that satisfy our needs in an indirect way by helping us in producing consumer goods, which satisfy our needs directly. Example of producer goods are land, labor, capital, time, raw materials etc. Consumer goods are final products that an entrepreneur produces by using the producer goods. Let us take a simplified example of producing an apple to bring home this...

Recent  survey  said 77% of Indians want petrol and diesel to come under GST. The rationale for bringing petrol and diesel under GST goes something like this, Bringing petrol and diesel under the ambit of GST will significantly improve the cost of living for many. The price of petrol and diesel can come down to Rs 75 per litre and Rs 70 per litre with a 28 per cent GST rate. “This could give a huge impetus to the economy and businesses via increased consumer spending. However, both the center and states will see loss of revenue in the short term,” the survey notes. There are many things that need discussion here. First, are the prices of 75 per litre for petrol and 70 per litre for diesel lower prices? Why not bring down the prices to Rs.10 per litre? Or 5 rupees or 5 paisa per litre? Isn’t that a better improvement in the cost of living of Indians? Second, is bringing petrol and diesel under GST the only way of bringing down the cost of living for many? Or are there better al...

In this Covid era, all the tyrannical measures like masks and social distance mandates, horrible lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc., implemented worldwide to supposedly stop Covid-19 have a common justification behind them: protection of public health. Public welfare has always been the favorite excuse of state officials to justify their coercive use of power over our lives. In its name they have been aggrandizing the world population since the inception of nation states, especially after WW I. But the type of tyranny we are seeing the world over today in the name of Covid is unprecedented in world history. It seems there is no escape from this tyranny anywhere in the world. Previously the West used to be the refuge of the world’s persecuted best and bright people, but today the West is leading the world in Covid tyranny. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany, USA etc., all countries have gone completely Nazi totalitarian. In the name of protecting people, state officials everywhe...

After coming to power in 2014 the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is spearheading a movement to change India completely. He and his ideological backers RSS want a  New India  which is supposedly rooted in ancient Indian traditions. They want to discard the “Old India” which they believe was built by the British colonial masters.  In their effort to build this New India they have drafted a new  national education policy . The vision of this policy is, The National Education Policy 2019 envisions an  India centred  education system (emphasize in original).  The implementation of this policy has slowly begun. In this brief article I am going to discuss this policy and some of its most important implications.  First, before we discuss this new national education policy we need to discuss whether any such national education policy is required. We must question the very need of such national policies. Should education be centralized and provided by ...

Recently a Bloomberg opinion article by Andy Mukherjee proposed to nationalize private telecom player Vodafone-Idea in the wake of their financial struggle and a possible exit from India which will result into job and economic losses. Author  says ,  The world’s cheapest data costs have done wonders for India by helping spread the benefits of the internet beyond a tiny, urban, affluent class.  But there’s a problem: Successive governments have hounded telecom operators with outlandish financial demands.  Now things have gone too far.  Vodafone Idea  Ltd., one of the three private-sector competitors left standing in what used to be a field of a dozen players, is very close to crumbling under the weight of its $30 billion debt. That will effectively turn the wireless market in the nation of 1.4 billion people into a duopoly. Maybe not immediately, but the gains to consumers could be reversed because of the lack of competition. (An international survey shows I...