Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

Yesterday a 9 judge bench of the Supreme Court of India gave a so-called historic decision of declaring privacy a fundamental human right now enshrined in the article 21 of the Indian constitution. Many are saying that this for the first time that some verdict is given unanimously by the bench 9 judges. This verdict now includes privacy also as a part of fundamental rights in article 21 of the Indian constitution, which wasn’t the case previously. Most people of the country and intellectuals have cheerfully welcomed this verdict hoping that this will stop the ruling BJP government from becoming totalitarian. The legal experts have hailed this verdict as historic, a watershed moment and a victory for common citizens by saying that it has far reaching implications for the matters like the beef ban, forceful use of Aadhaar card, government telling people what to wear and eat, abortion, LGBT rights, government surveillance in the form of reading peoples’ emails, text messag...

A recent news report said that in India The IT services industry alone is set to lose 6.4 lakh low-skilled positions to automation by 2021 . Is this true? Let us scrutinize. What is Artificial Intelligence? As Jerry Kaplan, the author of Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know , has said, there is no one all agreeable definition of Artificial Intelligence in the computer community today. Roughly speaking, Artificial Intelligence means, as its founding father John McCarthy said, a process “that of a making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.” Artificial Intelligence is an all encompassing name given to different automation technologies that is coming in the market since last couple of decades. From the economic perspective AI is nothing but just another type of capital good (machine) that is going to make the life of humans more comfortable because it increases human labor productivity. It is a form ...

The second volume of government’s Economic Survey recently flagged a great risk of faltering economic growth in India, and demanded a loose monetary policy stance from the RBI in the form of further easing of the interest rate to combat this downside risk. The report said , Forecasting “greater downside risks” to economic growth, the Survey, tabled in Parliament Friday, argues that the “scope for monetary policy easing is considerable” and could go up to 75 basis points. The underlying theoretical basis of this recommendation of monetary policy easing is that a loose monetary policy in the form of lowering of interest rate will revive the economic growth. This means, this policy of loose money will only work if that underlying economic theory is correct. In this article we will analyze this theory and its implications. Is it true that a loose monetary policy can revive economic growth? To understand the answer of this question we need a quick short lesson of sound e...

We are witnessing an age old fact about the State playing out in front of our eyes in India today. This fact is that of, as Murray Rothbard said, the state as an apparatus of parasitism which uses, as Franz Oppenheimer said, political means for its survival. The state is an institute which represent political power which its officials like politicians and bureaucrats use to parasitically live-off productive people on whom they forcefully and clandestinely rule by use of propaganda. One of such propaganda is that there are opposition parties in politics. Of late opposition party politicians are joining the ruling BJP party en-masse in India e.g., many Congress politicians switched over to BJP in the state of Gujarat , The Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar broke-off his alliance with Congress and other so-called anti-BJP parties like Lalu Yadav’s RJD to form a new government with its enemy BJP party, quite a few MLAs from the SP and BSP parites also joined BJP etc. Th...

In the zeal of controlling everything that either walks or doesn’t walk, the present Narendra Modi government of India is shooting in its own foot. It is giving one shock after another to the society and economy in the form of mob lynching of innocent people in the name of “cow protection”, beef and myriad of other bans, attacks on minority communities, compulsory use of Aadhar card, demonetization of 86% of total currency supply, GST etc. Why am I terming these policies as government shooting in its own feet? The reason can be understood with the aid of the laws of human action. Any individual needs freedom to achieve his full potential and flourish e.g., if I chain you in one room or throttle you then you cannot act to do something progressive and you will most probably die. The same is true for the body economy and society. Freedom is the precondition of any growth or development process. If people and businesses are strangulated by myriad of controls and regulat...

The on-going stand-off between the armies of the Indian and Chinese nation states on the Sikkim border has created quite a bit of ruckus in the, now very nationalistic, Indian public. People in India are calling for a total boycott of Chinese goods . This demand for boycott of Chinese goods is nothing new. Economics of Boycott The relevant question here is that, what consequences will follow if India’s nationalistic public actually decide to boycott Chinese goods? Without going into the details of numbers of what is the volume of trade between India and China etc., let us carry out a theoretical analysis of the consequences that will necessarily follow this action of boycott. What will happen in India after the boycott? The first thing that will happen in India is that the consumers will be at a loss immediately because they will not be able buy and consume the cheap Chinese goods now. They will have to spend more on acquiring the same product because similar I...

The finance minister of Narendra Modi government Mr. Arun Jaitley recently, in the Institute of Chartered Accountants while celebrating Chartered Accountants  Day (sic), said that India should have a “new normal” with citizens ready to pay the taxes they need to pay and a new mindset to move from a developing nation to a developed one … During the time of demonetisation I have said that India now needs to define the new normal. And the normal is whatever taxes I have to pay, I need to pay” . Is this true? Will paying taxes make India developed as a nation? Not at all. Quite the contrary. It will make India and Indians poor. Let us see why. Any society, at a given time, has a limited amount of resources which it can use to fulfill various unending present and future consumption needs of its citizens. The first stage of any development process requires the fulfillment of basic material needs of people. A nation of hungry people can never develop. Now, a socie...