The Supreme Court of India & Prof Murray N. Rothbard

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India gave its much awaited verdict on The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. 

The judgment comprised of three judges which includes Chief Judge of India S.H. Kapadia and Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan. 

The only judge who gave dissent to the order was Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan. The Courte Order has been interpreted in many ways both positive and negative perspectives.

The best part of the order is the learning taken from the book of a great Austrian Economist Prof Murray N Rothbard. The book referred in the order is here. 

The exact text of the order is as follows: 

• 145. Mr. Murray N. Rothbard, an eminent educationist and Professor in Economics, in his Book "Education: Free and Compulsory" [1999, Ludurg von Mises Institute, Auburn, Aliana] cautioned that progressive education may destroy the independent thought in the child and a child has little chance to develop his systematic reasoning powers in the study of definite courses. The Book was written after evaluating the experiences of various countries, which have followed free and compulsory education for children for several years. Prohibition of holding back in a class may, according to the author, result that bright pupils are robbed of incentive or opportunity to study and the dull ones are encouraged to believe that success, in the form of grades, promotion etc., will come to them automatically. The author also questioned that since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner so as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all formal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the "group," rather than the development of self-independence, for the deprecation of intellectual subjects.

• 146. I am of the view that the opinions expressed by the academicians like Rothbard command respect and cannot be brushed aside as such because, much more than anything, the State has got a constitutional responsibility to see that our children are given quality education. Provisions of the statute shall not remain a dead letter, remember we are dealing with the lives of our children, a national asset, and the future of the entire country depends upon their upbringing. Our children in the future have to compete with their counter-parts elsewhere in the world at each and every level, both in curricular and extra-curricular fields. Quality education and overall development of the child is of prime importance upon which the entire future of our children and the country rests.

Among the responses of Indian newspapers The Pioneer has expressed in its lucid editorial in a very meaningful way taking the issues of whether any justice provided for allowing privately managed schools to admit children from economically weaker sections in the society.

The New Menace of Gandhism by Murray Rothbard

A friend of mine sent me the following excerpts from 1983 essay (PDF) by Professor Murray Rothbard on M K Gandhi:

• "Gandhi's India, which led t o Mrs. Gandhi's dictatorship and the horrifying experiment in compulsory sterilization" ...... AND ........."The comparative record of non-violent revolutions is, then, worse than that of violent ones, for the violence of the American Revolution after all brought forth a pretty good result, while non-violence has accomplished nothing fruitful at all.

• ‎"Let us not mince words: Mahatma Gandhi was an economic crazy. For Gandhi , not only modern technology but almost any technology was sinful and evil. Railroads were evil, the industrial revolution was evil, cotton textiles were evil, modern medicine was evil, education was evil."

• "It should be clear that the life of Mahatma Gandhi was essentially a scam, from start to finish. Making a big show of his allegedly deeply-held principles, claiming t o make his life and thought a seamless web, he always ended up betraying those principles. H e rode on railways, he fell back repeatedly on Western medicine and surgery, and he continued to "test" his chastity with various females until the end of his life".

• Thus, after the first nationwide  pogrom  against  the  Jews  in Germany,  in December  1938, Gandhi counselled the Jews t o  react in a non- violent  manner:  "if  the  Jews can  summon t o  their aid  soul-power  that   comes only  from  non-violence,  Herr  Hitler  will bow  before  the  courage  which  he  will  own  is  infinitely superior to that shown by  his best storm troopers." And after the news  of the Holocaust  became  known,  Gandhi, in 1946, counselled retroactively. 

• The  Jews  should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They  should  have  thrown  themselves into the sea  from cliffs  . . . It  would have roused  the world  and  the people of  Germany.  (Geoffrey  Ashe, Gandhi: A  Study  in  Revolution,  London,  1968, p.  341.) Perhaps what the Jews lacked  was little Bapu  to  give them their "training."

Fiction of central bank

From The Economist on Milton Friedman (His centenary birthday is on coming Saturday 31^st July):

"…central banking is an essentially illegitimate criminal enterprise freer rein. When a significant portion of a political movement's activists believe that the whole point of central banking is "systematic robbery", and that inflation is the means by which this robbery takes place, widespread, reflexive opposition to inflation is not surprising." 

Who would like to see the real Keynes in the twenty-first century?

Thanks to Lewrockwell and Mises Institute for constantly reminding us to understand the real tragedy of Keynes’s German Language and his arrogance towards Mises’s book.

The following paragraphs are from Murray N. Rothbard’s classic article. Till now I have read at least twenty times!!

• “One striking illustration of Maynard Keynes's unjustified arrogance and intellectual irresponsibility was his reaction to Ludwig von Mises's brilliant and pioneering Treatise on Money and Credit, published in German in 1912. Keynes had recently been made the editor of Britain's leading scholarly economic periodical, Cambridge University's Economic Journal. He reviewed Mises's book, giving it short shrift. The book, he wrote condescendingly, had "considerable merit" and was "enlightened," and its author was definitely "widely read," but Keynes expressed his disappointment that the book was neither "constructive" nor "original" (Keynes 1914). This brusque reaction managed to kill any interest in Mises's book in Great Britain, and Money and Credit remained untranslated for two fateful decades.
  

• The peculiar point about Keynes's review is that Mises's book was highly constructive and systematic, as well as remarkably original. How could Keynes not have seen that? This puzzle was cleared up a decade and a half later, when, in a footnote to his own Treatise on Money, Keynes impishly admitted that "in German, I can only clearly understand what I already know – so that new ideas are apt to be veiled from me by the difficulties of the language" (Keynes 1930a: I, p. 199 n.2). Such unmitigated gall. This was Keynes to the hilt: to review a book in a language where he was incapable of grasping new ideas, and then to attack that book for not containing anything new, is the height of arrogance and irresponsibility.[4]

Notes No 4:

• In view of his friendship with Keynes, Hayek's account of this episode characteristically misses Keynes's arrogance and gall, treating the story as if it were merely unfortunate that Keynes did not know German better: "The world might have been saved much suffering if Lord Keynes's German had been a little better" (Hayek [1956] 1984: 219; see also Rothbard 1988: 28).”

LRC Mania!

LRC Mania!

Myth of welfare state

Since the political independence what we are seeing in India is the “Great Society functions as a great boon and benefit to the poor; in reality, when we cut through the frothy appearances to the cold reality underneath, the poor are the major victims of the welfare state. The poor are the ones to be conscripted to fight and die at literally slave wages in the Great Society's imperial wars. The poor are the ones to lose their homes to the bulldozer of urban renewal”, (The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique by Murray N. Rothbard).

War may be backed, peace is not… but State are stuck!

Murray N. Rothbard writes “The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its "strategic intelligence" in facing the major problems of our time.

If nuclear warfare is totally illegitimate even for individuals defending themselves against criminal assault, how much more so is nuclear or even "conventional" warfare between States!

It is time now to bring the State into our discussion. The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self-defense. (Professor Robert L. Cunningham has defined the State as the institution with "a monopoly on initiating open physical coercion.")”

Man is born naked into the world

One of the important articles that I read a few years back was the Murray N. Rothbards “The Anatomy of the State”.

Threat of sending Buffett to jail

Eric Englund writes “To be sure, I adhere to what Murray Rothbard stated in his magnificent book The Ethics of Liberty:

If, then, taxation is compulsory, and is therefore indistinguishable from theft, it follows that the State, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization far more formidable and successful than any "private" Mafia in history. Furthermore, it should be considered criminal not only according to the theory of crime and property rights as set forth in this book, but even according to the common apprehension of mankind, which always considers theft to be a crime”. 

Murray N. Rothbard on “Greenspan's still in his heaven”

It may be appropriate to say Rothbard wrote “I found particularly remarkable the recent statements in the press that Greenspan's economic”.

But I really found a three days back here!