what good stories after death!

"A true life story of Veerappan that shows him to be a person different from the one most of us are familiar with."


It is still worth to read sauvik's 2004 piece "Veerappan as a respectable businessman" published in the Indian Express!!

IS not is Kambara!!

A few days ago was listing the All India Radio after very long time. It was news time. I hear one interesting thing which led me to write here. It is the interview of Mr Chandrashekhara Kambara who is according to Wikipedia:

•  a prominent poet, playwright, folklorist, film director in Kannada language and the founder-vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi.^[3] He is known for his effective usage of North Karnataka dialect of Kannada language in his plays and poems and is often compared with D.R. Bendre.
• Dr. Kambara's plays mainly revolves around folk or mythology interlinked with contemporary issues,^[4] inculcating modern lifestyle with his hard-hitting poems and has became a pioneer of such literature.^[5] His contribution as a playwright is significant not only to Kannada theatre but also to the Indian theatre in general as he achieved a blend of the folk and the modern theatrical forms.^[6]
• He has been conferred with many prestigious awards including the Jnanpith Award in 2011 for the year 2010,^[7] Sahitya Akademi Award, the Padma Shri by Government of India, Kabir Samman, Kalidas Samman and Pampa Award. After his retirement, Kambara was nominated Member of Karnataka Legislative Council, to which he made significant contributions through his interventions.^[8]

In one of his interview he said:

• Age has not hampered my creativity, be it poetry or plays. In fact, I am planning to write a satire on forest brigand late Veerappan, who wielded a lot of clout in the political world. Many Kannada newspapers have requested me to write columns. But I refused as I am someone who uses a lot of metaphors. Newspaper style is dull and does not suit my temperament which is why I have not accepted offers to write columns.

Hope some of you might have read free market economist Sauvik's article on Veerappan (Veerappan as respectable businessman).

I am really looking forward the satire on veerappan!!!

Free market is good for dalits

Milind Kamble, chairman of Dalit India Chambers of Commerce and Industries said: 

• Casteand capital can't coexist: "Capitalism dismantles rural societies and feudalism. Capitalism dismantles traditions and traditional cultures. Capitalism produces urban societies, democracy and modernity. India's caste system thrived and survived on agrarianism and traditional culture. Caste is losing its grip over dalits because India is industrializing, urbanizing and modernizing. Dalit capitalism will accelerate that process and will accord a human face to Indian capitalism. Caste and capital can't coexist. One has to give way to the other." 

Also read “Caste and the Market Economy” by Sauvik Chakraverti

• “I suggest Dalit leaders get interested in the Economics of prosperity. We urban liberals dream not just of making India prosperous; we dream of making India obscenely rich.
• The Dalits will gain enormously from open markets, economic freedom and urbanisation. As they claim, in their respective economic niches, a greater share of a rapidly growing pie, and as they mingle with caste anonymity in bustling metropolises, they will find the old caste equations disappearing.”

Chetan Bhagat writes:

• “I have nothing against commercialisation of education. Commerce and business are a good thing. However, when it comes to education, it needs a sense of ethics and quality. Good people must be incentivised to open colleges. Say, by a simple policy fix like allowing private institutes to make a profit……………. These private colleges have played the role of providing students with a chance to earn a degree of their choice. There is nothing wrong in this. It fact, it is even good that the private sector is playing a role in educating our students.”

Thank heavens their phone monopoly has gone!

Sauvik has great piece in the Outlook Business. Some excerpts: 

• Now, if corporations act in this way—serving the self-interest of their shareholders and customers—then, as Adam Smith says, “society benefits as though by an invisible hand.” The mobile phone with a built-in torch is a great example in India, where the socialist State, with all its social responsibility, cannot provide reliable, uninterrupted electricity, which it has monopolised. Thank heavens their phone monopoly has gone!

• Indeed, all the goodies we enjoy consuming today are produced by private corporations—cars, phones, computers, software, beer, wine, fashionable clothes, and so much more. Because of these “selfish capitalists” the invisible hand ensures that the whole of society benefits. 

• Indeed, all the goodies we enjoy consuming today are produced by private corporations—cars, phones, computers, software, beer, wine, fashionable clothes, and so much more. Because of these “selfish capitalists” the invisible hand ensures that the whole of society benefits.

• “I have never seen much good come out of those who purport to trade for the public benefit,” added Smith, and this point is worth pondering in socialist India, where the State owns and operates hundreds of companies that “purport to trade for the public benefit”—from Air India and SAIL to ONGC and ITDC to banks, phone and electricity companies. Our experience with a State-owned industrial sector ought to have convinced us that private corporations serve us—the members of society—far better than public sector firms. The former produce for us our “common wealth,” while the latter are our “common loss”.

• In other words, it ought to be apparent to all of us that “social responsibility” is a hoax, just as “socialism” is a hoax. If a socially responsible government were to take power, its first duty would be to liquidate all the PSUs. Social responsibility, indeed! Friedrich Hayek, the only Austrian School economist to win the Nobel prize so far, called “social” a “weasel word” —and we must watch out for it. The weasel is an animal that feeds by making a tiny hole and sucking everything out of an egg, leaving behind the empty shell. In precisely the same way, if any other word is attached to “social” then it loses its meaning entirely. For example, “social justice”. Justice, we all know, is fair exchange: “the principle of Justice is the principle of Trade.” But what “justice” is there in “social justice”—which means the State robs Peter to pay Paul? Social justice is just a “mirage,” said Hayek. Look at the MGNREGA.

Liberals in UPA government

Sauvik has already commented on what Niranjan wrote: 

• The motives behind the schemes to provide guaranteed jobs and food cannot be questioned. But the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. These schemes will push up food prices and also harm public finances.

What is even more interesting and in fact exuberantly feeling comes, when Niranjan used the words “outstanding economic liberals in government”. However, the meaning of liberals here may slightly vary from the understanding of the word “liberals” as such. Is there any one in the present UPA government? Of course I am aware of whom he refers!!

• No reforms have been rolled back and economic policy is nowhere as interventionist as it was during the Indira Gandhi years, but it is quite clear that the UPA political leadership does not have a deep commitment to economic reforms despite having some outstanding economic liberals in government.

• First, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put his foot down and rejected the ridiculous suggestion by the influential National Advisory Council (NAC) that wages paid for work on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme should be on a par with the minimum wages in each state, a move that would raise rural wages without any commensurate increase in productivity as well as put an immense strain on government finances. Second, a committee on food security set up by the Prime Minister and headed by economist C. Rangarajan rejected the NAC proposal that three out of every four families should be covered by the proposed right to food law.

Blame the hollowness of pity politics, not good economics

When we all see and read the words written on the walls of print media, electronic media, blogosphere etc in almost everyday; the unfettered drama and hollowness of pity politics and the mass murder of people in this republic is no less than the increasing of shamefulness on our face. I use the word “our face” meant to imply the liberals of India. 

Of courses there is a demand for movement for second independence, the economic freedom. The movement being called upon is visible yet only among few groups of people. But what reminds me always the words of “thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in” at masses in this country to evoke against the pity politics which neither have good understanding of good economics nor have good intention to understand them first. Let it be clear about the movement of change that we all wanted to have in India in this twenty-first century. The movements are unfolding almost like scattered lights on the sky year after year! The journey of Centre for Civil Society (Delhi) is almost fourteen years old, the Sanjeev Sabhlok’s journey is more than a half dozen years old, the one man army of Sauvik Chakraverti’s movement is perhaps equal to the CCS’s journey or one of the longest journey if you take into account overtime works!!

What prompt me to say above lines is very simple that the blame game on India’s economic reform is mounting like anything. I am not referring the mass scams and corruptions which we all witnessing now. The process of pity politics has inflated the mass suicides of farmers in India and not by economic reforms. One can say more ‘if’ and ‘but’ taking many other issues of social and cultural aspects. I think I have conveyed the message I wanted to record here.

Catallactics matters

Sauvik has great piece Catallaxy, key to an Open Society in Mint today.

Some excerpts:

• Yet, community is a bogus value in a market society, which, in order to succeed, must be urban and cosmopolitan. Community makes sense in a village comprising one caste or in a small, exclusive tribe where everyone knows everyone else. It makes no sense in a city where individuals operate, peacefully trading with complete strangers. For such a society, the appropriate political value is “catallaxy”, which means an open trading arena. But first, a little about this word.

• In the 20th century, Austrian economists alone used the word “catallactics” to denote the science of exchange. In Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action(1949), the section dealing with traditional economic issues is titled “Catallactics”. Derived from the Greek word for “exchange”, Mises mentions that catallactics was first used by the British economist and theologian Bishop Whately in the previous century, which means the word was well known to the classical political economists. Mises’ student from his Vienna years, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, confessed to having “fallen in love with this word”, for which he discovered two additional meanings that the ancient Greeks ascribed to it: first, “to welcome into the community”; and second, “to turn from enemy into friend”. These connotations of the word indicate its importance to an Open Society.
  
  
• Hayek defines community as “a common recognition of the same rules”. Such rules can be religious or tribal—or they can be secular. In an open catallaxy, only one rule need be recognized by all: private property. Happily enough, as Hayek also points out, this rule has been the cornerstone of open markets for millennia. Whenever people exchange, they exchange properties. Thus, most trade takes place without legal paperwork of any kind. Hayek said that the rule of private property operates in all of us “between instinct and reason”. We follow the property rule without knowing why. We have given up the instinct to plunder, to snatch and grab—but we don’t know why.

More on “Peter Bauer and the Economics of Prosperity”

Peter Bauer and the Economics of Prosperity James A. Dorn, Barun S. Mitra (EDS.) Hard-bound Book (6¼" x 9¼") : Pages : 192 2009 Edition : ISBN - 978-81-7188-665-4 Price : INR 595 / US $ 16.95

ABOUT THE BOOK :

• Peter Bauer was an unlikely revolutionary, yet he inspired a revolution in development economics. In an environment dominated by a poverty of clear economic thought, Bauer built his theories of economic prosperity. He fought to free the poor from the tyranny of poverty. With the recent spread of anti-market, anti-trade, and anti-migration movements in many parts of the world, it is important that we take a fresh look at the way Bauer exposed the fallacies behind these protest movements. He showed them to be anti-poor and anti-people, and to be exacerbating global poverty. This volume is an attempt towards helping in introducing the ideas of Peter Bauer to a new generation of readers.

ABOUT THE EDITORS :

• James A. Dorn is Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Cato Institute and Editor of the Cato Journal. He is a China specialist and a regular contributor to Caijing (online), China’s leading business and finance magazine. His articles have also appeared in the Financial Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, and Australian Financial Review. He has taught at Fudan University in Shanghai and is currently Professor of Economics at Towson University in Maryland.

• Barun S. Mitra is the Director of Liberty Institute, an independent think tank based in New Delhi, which is engaged in public policy research and advocacy with the aim of promoting economic and political freedoms. He is an engineer by training, and writes on a wide range of developmental, economic, environmental and technological issues. He has been published in a number of national and international newspapers and journals. He received the Julian L. Simon Award for his contribution in explaining the role of market economics in harnessing human ingenuity and creativity, leading to improvement in economic well-being and environmental quality. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
  

CONTENTS IN DETAIL :

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Editors/Contributors
Preface
Remembering Peter Bauer
— James A. Dorn
Peter T. Bauer: A Brief Biography
— Ralph Harris

Part 1 Development, Freedom and Prosperity
1. Reflection on Peter Bauer’s Contributions to Development Economics — Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell 37
2. Peter Bauer: An Unusual Applied Economist
— Basil Yamey
3. How Does Development Happen?
— Amartya Sen
4. P.T. Bauer’s Market-Liberal Vision
— James A. Dorn
5. The Market, Yes; Demos, No
— James M. Buchanan
6. Human Attitudes and Economic Growth
— Israel M. Kirzner

Part 2 Migration, Foreign Aid and Poverty
7. Migration, Globalisation and the Spirit of Peter Bauer
— Daniel T. Griswold
8. A Voice for the Poor
— The Economist
9. A Titan Passes Away
— Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar
10. A True Friend of the World’s Poor
— Sauvik Chakraverti
11. Peter Bauer and the Third World
— Anthony Daniels
12. P.T. Bauer on the Population Question
— Nicholas Eberstadt

Part 3 Bauer on the Economics of Prosperity
13. Economic Control or Economic Development?
— P.T. Bauer
14. Indian Economy Policy and Development
— Peter T. Bauer
15. B.R. Shenoy: Stature and Impact
— Peter Bauer
16. The Disregard of Reality
— Peter Bauer

Index
CONTRIBUTORS:

• Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is consulting editor of The Economic Times newspaper in India, and research fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington DC. He writes the popular weekly column ‘Swaminomics’ in the Sunday Times, India.
• Peter T. Bauer was Professor Emeritus of Economics at the London School of Economics, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
• James M. Buchanan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at George Mason University and the 1986 recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• Sauvik Chakraverti is the senior assistant editor of The Economic Times newspaper in Delhi.
• Anthony Daniels is a medical doctor and is the author of From Zanzibar to Timbuktu. He writes for The Spectator, as Theodore Dalrymple, and is a contributing editor of The City Journal of New York. This article is adapted from his dinner address at “A Conference in Tribute to Peter Bauer” hosted by the James Madison Program, Princeton University, May 7, 2004
• Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Public Interest (Eber stadt 2005).
• Milton Friedman was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the 1976 recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
• Daniel T. Griswold is Associate Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington and author of the recent Cato study, ‘Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the USA.’ He has authored numerous studies on international trade and globalisation.
• Ralph Harris was the founder president of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. He was made a life peer as Baron Harris of High Cross, of Tottenham in the County of Greater London.
• Israel M. Kirzner is Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University.
• Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the 1998 recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
• Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, USA. He has published over two dozen books, among them Basic Economics: A common sense guide to economics (Third edition, 2007), Conflict of Vision (Revised edition, 2007), Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (2004), Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1998), and Ethnic America: A history (1981).
• Basil Yamey is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy.

They (IAS and Socialist) want to continue practising their witchcraft upon us forever.

That is the word from Sauvik's new article in today’s Mint.

What is not changing in ous society is the mockery of The State Organ.

• “In all our cities and towns, huge bureaucracies have been set up which contribute nothing towards improving our lives or our urban environs. These must be sacked and the system of government service delivery drastically reformed.”

Peter Bauer and the Economics of Prosperity

There is a new book on development economics giant Peter Bauer

Every rich and poor is dependent on what kind of Money system you have

For a while I have been reading IBM’s advertisement which says goes “….rich and poor around the world, all of whose prosperity dependent on a money system that is stable, secure and accessible to all.

In today’s Mint Sauvik has a great piece on how fiat money or the State monopoly money kills poor people’s animal sprits instead of making them rich.

He says:

“Private money is but whatever the common people are willing to accept in their day-to-day transactions. It is safe to predict that if fiat paper were abolished, the common people would revert to gold and silver. All these hoards of gold and silver will then be private hoards, private capital, private money. If collective action is required to manufacture standardized coins, these official mints will be converting private stocks of gold and silver into coins. Even in the performance of this task, the state should be offered nothing but its modest seignorage, with no role in establishing a fixed rate of exchange between gold and silver. All prices, including those of gold and silver, must be freely determined. That is capitalism.”

Our fiat paper system a scandal

Sauvik has piece on Money vs Gold, Paper and Silver. He concludes:

• “Any nation can unilaterally revert to the gold standard whenever it chooses. If we do so, our rupee, now pegged to gold, will always appreciate against the rest of the world’s fiat papers. This will help us become big importers. And cheap imports, including of capital goods and components, will make our manufactured exports competitive in terms of technology, quality and price. Our banks will attract the world’s savings, and we will possess capital, the vital ingredient of “capitalism”. All prices will steadily fall and the consumption of the poor will rise in leaps and bounds. This is the power of “sound money”.

Prosperity by Road, not Literacy

Sauvik has a piece on “The road to trade and growth”

As I have earlier blogged here the key idea about road and prosperity is not to just worth note and give lip services whenever election come but needs rethinking in a wider prospective.

Sauvik writes “..the losses we suffer because of this “planned catastrophe”. Topping the list is the reduction in productivity for each of us. Productivity is measured in time. And a disaster of a transport system wastes time—the most important factor of production. The human engine can work only so many hours in a day. The more hours eaten up by transportation, the less there are left over for work and production. As Lord Peter Thomas Bauer famously remarked: “What limits growth in poor nations is not the limited capacity to export. Rather, it is the limited capacity to produce.”

There is no such thing as SOCIAL JUSTICE!

Sauvik has a piece titled “Saying no to ‘social justice’” indeed we must say no to those who “Advocates of social welfare........ But they invariably champion state redistribution”

Please remember as I have been saying in this blog that F A Hayek has valid points to ponder on “the idea of justice”.

As Sauvik writes:

• “As Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek says, “Rules of just individual conduct are as indispensable to the preservation of a peaceful society of free men as endeavours to realize ‘social justice’ are incompatible with it.”
• Hayek goes further: He says, “No one has yet found even a single general rule from which we could derive what is ‘socially just’ in all particular instances that would fall under it.” Welfare is such a loose concept that “some will put it here and some will put it there”. Amartya Sen will champion nutrition, Jean Dreze employment generation, and Manmohan Singh education. A fourth person might find something else, say, healthcare. The decline of the modern West is indeed such a story, thanks to ideas of social justice, which produced the “Illfare State”.
• Hayek also offers an explanation for the popularity of social justice: The idea appeals to our primitive instincts. Whereas liberalism is modern and individualistic, social justice yearns for a return to the happy days of hunter-gatherer tribes where there is the “leader” who shares the prey with all members. Yet, we emerged from primitive society only by disregarding the principles that held the old tribes together. The pioneers abandoned the old closed groups and sought unknown people they could trade with. This is how we created cities and towns, settled agriculture, and the Great and Open Society. Social justice is “atavistic”. As a theoretical concept, Hayek calls it “intellectually disreputable”.
• This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that, while eminent étatists champion social justice, there is little real justice in India. The National Human Rights Commission registers 75,000 cases a year—against the State’s police! There are at least 30 million cases pending in courts. Murders and rapes go unpunished. Injustice rules the land—and these étatists wave the flag of a phoney justice, a mirage, an illusion, a trick. They must be defeated.”

Indian Institute of Catallactic!

Our great Indian liberal Economist Sauvik has good piece on Indian Austrian Economists and Economics!

Important excerpts

• “Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has produced the chief ideologue of the Maoists running Nepal today. Parliament has recently passed The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. Yet, I sincerely doubt the administrative capacity of this state to implement this evil agenda. There are already hundreds of thousands of "unrecognized" schools for poor children operating throughout India, as James Tooley’s studies have documented. Poor parents prefer to send their children to these unrecognized private schools because they see government schools as the pathway to failure in the great game of life.
• India is a nation of over a billion people and the vast majority is young. They are witnessing the success of the market economy and they seek their future in it. Finding mainstream economics irrelevant, they turn to management institutes. But these teaching shops do not teach them any economics at all. They therefore come out "trained" as managers who cannot fathom how an economy really works. I say this from personal experience. Over the years, I have delivered lectures in many prominent management schools throughout India, and the ignorance on economics they cultivate has never ceased to astound me.”

If we had listened to Rajaji and Masani!

As Sauvik has already commented on Jaithirth Rao’s article for demolishing Professor Amartya Sen’s latest book, however, the following paragraphs are quite noteworthy.

• It was Rajagopalachari and Masani (not leftists, but thinkers genuinely concerned about “Nyaya” for the poor) who had pointed out that the fundamental right to property protects the poor more than the rich. The rich never had a problem with the leftist permit-licence “Niti”. The empiricist in Sen should be aware that some forty years ago the Dutt and Hazari Commissions established that moneyed business houses benefited most from the crony capitalism inherent in the policies that the Left would like to revive today. If we had listened to Rajaji and Masani and not to the Left, “property” would still be a fundamental right and the common law principle that the state cannot take from Peter to give to Paul would have prevailed. To attempt to take from a poor peasant to give to an Indonesian chemical firm or an Indian automobile firm would not have been permissible. But since “property” is not a fundamental right our executive branch need have no fears in pursuing reverse Robin Hood policies of taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Then and now it is Rajaji, Masani and their intellectual descendants who have been on the side of both right “Niti” and “Nyaya”.
• Sen has noted that one of the positive fallouts of high economic growth is growth in government revenues which can then be deployed in imaginative anti-poverty programmes like the NREGA. One of the engines of high growth in the last decade and a half has been the computer software industry. Many of us have not forgotten that the Left parties bitterly opposed computers and delayed their introduction for years on end. One could argue that they set the whole growth process back for at least a generation. It is really ironical today to meet an old trade union veteran of the leftist persuasion who sheepishly admits that both his daughter and son-in-law are computer programmers. And that’s just what happened to me the other day!
• Professor Sen: You have just written what could be the most important treatise in political philosophy of the first decade of this century. Please do us a favour and do yourself one. Do not praise the Left and confer on “adharmic anyayis” the respectability they do not deserve.