Jaithirth Rao's article: The Great Lokpal Conspiracy Theory

In his new article published in The Indian Express, Jaithirth Rao says, "On the surface, the Lokpal bill is supposed to create an institution independent of the executive branch precisely in order to investigate and act against corruption, malfeasance and wrongdoing of members of the executive — be they elected politicians or unelected officials. But dear reader, do not get misled. The hidden purpose of the present Lokpal bill is to undermine the independence of the judiciary, which, in recent times, has been one of the few checks on the executive branch."

Jaithirth Rao's lines seem interesting to read, but I don't think the Lokpal is a conspiracy against the judiciary. Rather it is a conspiracy against the process of economic reforms in the country. The Lokpal will lead to a huge increase in the size of the government. If the size of the government increases, there is bound to be a further increase in the quantum of corruption and inefficiency. If the crusaders against corruption had been serious about ending corruption in the country, they would have campaigned for economic and political reforms. 

Deconstructing the State

The State is not a God. It is not a supreme or “higher” or wiser or beatific or somehow omniscient authority. It is not a hypostatic substance. It is not a thing. Indeed, it is nothing. It is, in fact, a figment of iconolatric homage, a subtle and insinuating illusion which derives its power from a combination of its coercive function and the mystique of psychological projection on the part of those it controls. It is what the Greeks called an eidolon, a phantom or apparition, an image like Euripides’ Helen who was fashioned from cloud-stuff while the real Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt. A moment’s reflection makes this species of necromancy glaringly obvious. Yet we are ruled by specters and chimeras, of which the State is a paramount instance.

Click here to read more.

Rothbard destroys a common statist argument.

A Black Hole Near You

This post (click here) in the Lew Rockwell blog is really interesting. Such "political" blackholes exist in every country around the world. We have one in India too. Perhaps it goes by the name of Lutyens' Delhi, which is the region of such concentrated power that all matter and energy are irrestibly drawn into it and destroyed.... 

End Of The Road Documentary Trailer. Total Collapse Of World Economy.

Poor get punished in "Zero reform society"

Most Indians, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, know, in their bones, that something terrible is happening to the economy. Maybe most people can’t articulate it. Maybe we don't have the statistics to understand exactly what’s going on. But my bet is, majority of us think about the economic situation a lot. It seems as if the entire political class, the corporate leaders and the social activists have lost their moral and economic sense. They think that the country will keep growing and prospering even if they continue to propagate and practise catastrophic socialist ideas.

India is suffering because corruption and lies have become a way of life for the political, business and cultural elite in the country.

Tavleen Singh’s article (This is not food security) in today's The Indian Express is like a poignant moment of truth. Here is a short excerpt from the article: "So let me begin by stating unambiguously that I believe that the most shameful statistic of all is that 45 per cent of India’s children are officially malnourished. Let me add that the famines I have covered continue to haunt me because I have never seen anything more painful than the sight of a small child starving slowly to death. It takes months of suffering for them to reach that point when all they can do is whimper pitifully for the food their parents cannot afford to give them. The reason why Indian children continue to starve is because the schemes that our ‘socialist’ rulers have devised to prevent this happening have never worked. They have been too centralised, too tangled in red tape and run mostly by corrupt and wicked officials who could not care less if children, other than their own, starved to death. The food security law will fail for exactly the reasons listed above."

The so-called pro-poor and food-security schemes launched by our compassionate socialist governments are the primary reason for the abysmal level of poverty and malnutrition in the country. What does it say about our government when the leaders choose to ignore even the most egregious kind of wastage and corruption – involving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food grain, which could have fed the poor? The grain is simply rotting in the government owned godowns or is being stolen by corrupt middlemen and officials, and the leaders continue to talk about food security. Instead of providing food to the needy, the food security bill will give many new powers to the corrupt and inefficient officials and there will be more corruption, more wastage. The plight of the poor will become worse.

In the Sunday Times of India, Srivatsa Krishna has written an article titled, "Zero reform society: has the economy gone to the dogs?" Srivatsa Krishna writes, "Each one of the factoids above shows not just an absence of action but also more importantly, an absence of thought. India should go forward mark 7% as its lower bound rate of economic growth or perhaps call it the new Hindu rate of growth and not slip below that. Every concerned citizen should be asking, are we frittering away all the gains of the past two decades in just two years of zero reform? If yes, that should be a cause of huge worry that our much-hyped reforms are hardly sustainable and should we then be questioning its very viscera? How and in what form would governance reforms occur in, something for which India is crying for? Questions India can ignore only at its own peril."

A "Mai baap" sarkar (nanny state) is bad for the country

All kinds of economic data tell us that Indian economy is in decline…if not outright collapse.

I believe our country is heading into a crisis due to the corruption and economic mismanagement of the UPA. The present crop of political leaders, business leaders, and even our cultural leaders have made a series of catastrophic choices. The result has been a "temporary" end to India's growth story.

However, I continue to be an optimistic. I believe that sooner or later Indians will make the right "political" choices and put our country back on sound footing.

Today's edition of The Indian Express has published a good editorial "Mai baap, selectively."

The editorial says, "Such arbitrariness is a throwback to the mai baap sarkar that policymakers in India consciously worked to get rid of over the last two decades. In September 2010, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi flew to Niyamgiri in Orissa to declare Vedanta’s land acquisition illegal. The previous month, the then minister of environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, shot down the company’s mining proposal citing violation of forest and environment laws. Since then, it has become only more and more difficult for Vedanta to get past regulatory hurdles. The Cairn-Vedanta deal also met with serial obstacles during the last 18 months. Now, when the transaction is just about to be approved, the home ministry’s formidable research team has discovered “transgressions”. At the government-industry task force earlier this week, CEOs complained of harassment by the taxman. They stopped short of citing specific instances of businesspersons being targeted. This comes in the middle of the slowdown, the policy freeze and all the flip-flops. Not exactly an India Story picture postcard to send home this season."

Selling Liberty: National Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Ron Paul on self-ownership and the real threat to liberty

Intellectuals whine about excessive wealth, they say nothing about excessive political power!

I have always been surprised about how some people (celebrities and intellectuals) are constantly whining about the so-called excessive wealth that some businessmen or professionals might have been able to earn by conducting their trade. But the same celebrities and intellectuals don’t let out a whisper about some politicians and activists having excessive political power.

They are so eager to regulate the economy and redistribute the wealth, but they don’t care to regulate the excessive discretionary power that the political elite has managed to corner. The intellectuals (of the socialist breed) are hand in gloves with the dictators. Their theories of regulating the economy are all about increasing the political power of the political elite.

All these new  laws and rights (right to food, right to ditch-digging jobs that create zero assets and pay a pittance, right to education in schools where quality of education is abysmal and often teachers are absent, etc.) that our government  is passing under the direction of socialist intellectuals, will lead to vast increase in the discretionary powers of the government. Common people are not going to benefit. It is the bureaucrats, the politicians and their cronies who will make money and rule like tyrants.

I have never heard these socialist intellectuals talk about property rights, which lies at the core of freedom and democracy. But we only need to look at how better the world is ever since the idea of property rights took root in society. It is the job of professionals and businessmen to spread the idea of property rights. We can’t depend on these worthless intellectuals for anything.

In Capitalism Magazine, Michael Hurd has written an excellent article “Businesspeople are the Ones Who Need to Protest.”

He writes, “In today’s political climate, business is the first thing under attack when things go wrong. And it’s no wonder. “Greed” and the actions of corporations—whether or not they’re demanding government handouts—are blamed for everything that could ever go wrong.


Yet even when things go well, business is accused of engaging in “irrational exuberance” or otherwise being “too successful.” Gigantic business successes, such as Bill Gates, live out their careers apologizing for their successes, either by fawning over incompetent and corrupt politicians, or by making a show of giving lots of their money to charity. And where does it get them? Nowhere. Business just can’t win. As a result, neither can business people.”

The crash of confidence in India's growth story

Is the value of currency dependent upon hard economics or hard politics? You can arrive at a judgement after reading this really interesting article titled “The crash of rupee is crash of confidence” by S A Aiyar (published in The Sunday Times of India).

S A Aiyar writes, “Till recently confidence in India was high, and dollars flooded in from overseas Indians and foreign investors. Much of the black money that had earlier left returned through the Mauritius window. But now dollars are flooding out because people have lost confidence in the ability of the political system to make decisions or implement reforms. As long as confidence in India ebbs, so will the rupee.”

The value of rupee is dependent on both – economics and politics. This is because in India, it is the elected politicians who enjoy total stranglehold on the economy. The government is running some of the most polluting, most corrupt and inefficient businesses in the country. The so-called social sector schemes are prone to massive corruption and wastage. Indian and foreign investors have lost confidence in the government’s ability to keep the economy growing.

Tavleen Singh’s article titled “Legally Obsessed,” published in today’s The Indian Express, rightly points out that the top leaders of the UPA government are deluded enough to think that laws framed in New Delhi are a solution to each and every problem that the country faces. Since it came into existence this government has been creating one law after the other, one right after the other.

Tavleen Singh writes, “It is not just in education that we think legislation is a panacea. Our political leaders appear to believe that a new law is some kind of magic wand in every area of governance. The Sonia-Manmohan government has shown a special weakness for new laws. So they made a law guaranteeing employment and spent more than Rs 40,000 crore on it at the outset. Without noticing that it mostly ended up misspent, they expanded the programme. Then, there was that law giving Adivasi communities the right to cultivating forest land. I was in a Gujarati forest at the time and saw local officials go mad trying to prevent combine harvesters from mowing down trees.


Now, we have a spurt of new anti-corruption laws in the hope that a new ‘satyuga’ awaits. This we cannot blame on government so much as Anna Hazare. But the mistake was to let him get his foot in the door of Parliament in the first place. The Lokpal law, when passed, will do no more than create a vast new policing bureaucracy. When Arvind Kejriwal was asked at last week’s Jantar Mantar rally how he could be sure that Lokpal 40,000 officials would be paragons of honesty, he said, “We believe that if an institution is good then the officials in it are automatically good.” Did this man grow up in a cave?"

For the ruling elite in this country, it is an article of faith that social engineering can fix all the world’s problems, and that is why they keep churning out new laws and rights to implement their socialist agenda of making everyone equally poor and miserable. The truth is that socialism, like cancer, is a self-liquidating malady. Eventually it kills the patient.

When there is socialist politics, the nation always loses

In Shekhar Gupta’s article “Winning 1971 again”, published in today’s The Indian Express, I found these interesting lines to be most interesting, “India lost the strategic gains of 1971 because Indira Gandhi’s politics came to be dominated entirely by the Left elite encircling her. In fairness, we have to record the fact that she had taken a hard Left-turn already to counter the party’s fuddy duddy old Right. But she erred in mixing the issue of high strategy and diplomacy with domestic politics and economics. In the run-up to the war, beginning with Yahya Khan’s brutal crackdown on East Pakistan beginning March 25, India was confronted with not just a pro-Pakistani tilt from Washington but also an emerging US-Pak-China axis. Mrs Gandhi countered this by signing a strategic treaty with the Soviet Union. This was a clear departure from the non-alignment she herself so strongly believed in. But she blundered in not only continuing that aligned posture but also in believing that it dovetailed nicely with her own post-1969 socialist posture. This is just what the intellectual and bureaucratic Left elite around her wanted. The result was a series of missteps leading up to phenomenal inflation (28 per cent at one point), widespread popular unrest, and then the Emergency. In fact it was during the Emergency that some of our most awful pseudo-socialist laws were passed, many of them by an illegitimate Parliament in its sixth year. In fact, it was this Parliament that added the word “socialist” to the preamble to our Constitution.”

Shekhar Gupta is absolutely right. When socialism gets imposed on any country, it is only the politically connected vested interests who gain, the vast majority of the “aam admis” always loose. Socialist politics doesn’t work. They have never worked. Socialist politicians and intellectuals are greatest enemies of the middle class and the poor class. The price rise, the unemployment, the lack of infrastructure, India’s repeated failures on the foreign policy front, each and every malaise that this country suffers from is almost entirely the creation of socialist policies, inspired by the scheming of the backroom intellectuals. Since independence, the out-of-control socialist regulations in the economy have led to a feeling of chronic uncertainty, and caused many potential investors to stay away. This is the root cause of unemployment and lack of infrastructure in the country. We can't be a mature country until we gain "freedom" from this socialist stranglehold on our culture and our economy. 

Lew Rockwell on Ron Paul

The Moral Case For Capitalism

Capitalism is the practical expression of liberty.  Without private ownership of capital, all other expressions are merely indulgences permitted by the government.  We understand instinctively that the suppression of free speech indicates a dangerous lack of respect for individuals by the State, but we have been conditioned to forget that a lack of respect for property is at least as disturbing.  Once property is gone, speech is not very difficult for the State to control, or ignore.

Recognizing the ownership of property is a vital component of respecting individuality.  You obviously don’t want people wandering into your house whenever they feel like it, or helping themselves to your car.  If you purchase a sandwich at a street vendor, a passing hungry person is not morally entitled to seize it from you.  They’re not entitled to seize food from the sandwich vendor, either.

The thief is, in a sense, enslaving you.  You spent a certain number of hours to work for money you planned to use for your own needs, but it turns out you were really working for the thief instead.  Your right to decide how your capital should be invested was suppressed by force.

Click here to read more of this excellent article by John Hayward.

Ron Paul had predicted the housing bubble & economic slowdown

Will India ever have a politician like Ron Paul! He deserves the Nobel Prize in economics, but unfortunately these days the economics prize only goes to banksters, advocates of big government and all those pseudo-socialist types. I have become a big fan of Ron Paul. He is the "real hope and change" president.

Ron Paul

I hope Ron Paul wins the Republican nomination and becomes the new president of USA. I have read two of Ron Paul's books, it is surprising to find a politician who can talk and write so sensibly. In one of his books, he has said that the world should go back to the gold standard. He is not pandering to the mob of stupid voters, he actually talks sense.

Only Ron Paul can reform the US economy and any such reform is bound to have a positive impact on Indian economy. A Ron Paul victory in USA could also inspire a "economically right" movement in India. Obama's pseudo-socialism has been a disaster not just for the US economy but for the entire third world, of which "unfortunately" India is a part.

Crony Socialism

I have always been of the opinion that the term "Crony Capitalism" is a big lie. It is an invention of the socialist intellectuals, who wish to give a bad name to capitalism. The correct phrase for referring to an unholy nexus between a business house and government is "Crony Socialism."

It is only in socialist system that businessmen and professionals have to whine before powerful ministers, who enjoy all kinds of discretionary powers. If the economy is really "capitalist" then the  politicians won't have any discretionary power over economic matters. So businessmen and politicians won't have to come to New Delhi for getting their licenses, quotas and permits cleared.

Mario Rizzo has written an interesting article: The Free Market versus Crony “Capitalism.” Alas, he too prefers to call it Crony Capitalism. But the article is worth reading. Here is a picture that I download from Mario's blog:

India is back to a "Socialist Intellectual's" rate of growth

Unlike our high-flying super-rich political elite, I don’t have a number of palatial houses in top Western cities. Hey, I don’t even have a Swiss bank account! So it is natural that I should be having “nightmares” about price rise and all the economic mismanagement. If the economic situation gets worse and there are people protesting in the streets, people like me are in no position to flee by taking the first flight abroad, where things might still be much better.

Instead of taking some concrete measures for implementing economic reforms that can bring about some real improvements in the lives of the people, the top leaders in the government are trying to feed us a badly cooked ensemble of stale socialist clichés. The top leaders don’t seem to understand that when politics gets reduced to a surfeit of meaningless clichés, there usually is a backlash with a vengeance. For a change, they should stop talking about helping the poor; the poor can take care of themselves once the government moves out of the way.

In The Indian Express we have Tavleen Singh’s article, “Of Cabbages and Kings.” Tavleen Singh writes, "So here we are. The economy, at this rate, could slow down by 2014 to the old ‘Hindu rate of growth’ that kept India poor for decades. And, politically, the Government of India looks so timid and confused that any old person can come and bully it into doing the wrong thing. So it is time that our real prime minister, Sonia Gandhi, took urgent steps to rectify the things that have gone wrong. She needs to forbid her kitchen cabinet from making policy, and she needs to encourage her son and heir to either claim his inheritance or give it up for now. As things stand, we are led by a government that does not lead, take responsibility for decisions or allow itself to be held accountable for mistakes.”

I also liked Meghnad Desai’s article, “RIP UPA.” Perhaps the article could have been titled, “RIP Indian Economy.” How about “RIP India’s Growth Story.” Meghnad Desai writes, “Professor Ian Little who was the PM’s teacher at Oxford, once advanced the idea that reform cycles in Indian politics got exhausted within five years. The radicalism of the Mahalanobis Plan did not survive the 1950s. Indira Gandhi ran out of steam before she had five years in power and resorted to repression. Rajiv Gandhi got derailed thanks to Bofors, and the NDA thanks to Tehelka. This time the Indian Miracle has been killed. When and if India regains its growth momentum is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, welcome back, the Hindu rate of growth.”

So the prediction from Tavleen Singh and Meghnad Desai is the same – India might be hurtling towards a so-called Hindu rate of growth, because the government is deeply caught in a web of stale and rotten socialist clichés from a bygone era. By the way I HATE this phrase - Hindu rate of growth. Why should the entire Hindu community be blamed for the bad economic policies of a handful of politicians, who are in awe of socialist intellectuals trained and indoctrinated in western universities? Primarily it is the socialist intellectuals who are responsible for the policies that have kept India economically backward. So low growth rate of the economy should be called - "Socialist Intellectual's rate of growth." It is an ethical crime to call it - "Hindu rate of growth."

Did Coffee Fuel the Age of Enlightenment?

I drink lot of black coffee everyday. Perhaps that is the reason why I feel somewhat enlightened. :-)

Modern India’s Nero plays Stradivarius

If they were violinists, the UPA’s instrument of choice would be the multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. Of course, the Stradivarius would have to be funded by the blood, sweat and tears of the hapless taxpayers in the country. But even with Stradivarius, the UPA would create lousy music. They would mess up the music, just as they have messed up the economic landscape of the country due to unimaginable corruption and wastage.

Today we have an excellent article from Shekhar Gupta in The Indian Express. The article titled “The Sinking Feeling” has this to say in its final paragraph: “What is the Hindu Rate of Growth two decades after reform? It certainly can’t be the 2-3 per cent of India’s socialist Brezhnev decades. The new Hindu Rate of Growth is 6 per cent, and on all evidence, from macroeconomic data to the empty billboards of Mumbai, we are headed there next year. Returning to economic stagnation like that is bad enough by itself. But this is not the forgiving India of the past. This India has tasted growth, progress, optimism and aspiration. Two years of 6 per cent growth and joblessness will bring its angry millions out on the street and you can try sending them back to their villages with the promise of more NREGA days. In short, three years of lousy growth, with a fiscal bankruptcy to rival Greece will totally rewrite the script for 2014.”

For me it is incredibly easy to empathise with every word in almost every article that Shekhar Gupta writes. Best thing about Gupta is that despite being the editor of one of India’s finest newspapers, he has not lost touch with the common middle class people (the so-called aam admi. In India only the political elite is VVIP, rest of us are aam admi.) He is not like one of those elite editors, who issue their sermons from their secluded “ivory towers.”

The views expressed in Shekhar Gupta’s articles are realistic and practical. He is right to question NREGA project that has been imposed on this country. When majority of the Indians are flocking to cities for finding jobs, why is the government wasting billions on NREGA, which is not leading to creation of any valuable assets and is prone to massive corruption? Even the maids who work in middle class homes in our cities are not willing to go back to their villages. I actually asked my maid if she would like to go back to her village and work in NREGA. She told me that she would not leave the city at any cost.

It is time the government woke up from its deep slumber and started implementing some reforms to revive the economy.

The Wizards of Oz: Part 2

The Wizards of Oz: Part 1

India needs FDI in retail

India is a poor country because majority of our social activists and politicians don’t have any sense of history and economics. For many decades we have been a so-called “swadeshi” country; what good has swadeshi-ism done for the citizens. The level of poverty is abysmal.

The quality of life has only started improving after the economy was liberalised. Perhaps the intellectual and political elite does not want India to be come a prosperous country. Why is it that they always gang-up to oppose something that is good for the poor and the middle class!

Tavleen Singh has written an excellent article “Hysteria over FDI” in today’s The Indian Express. She writes, “…it is time to remember that we will never end poverty in India without going ahead with economic reforms at full speed. The decision on FDI in retail is the first economic reform in nearly a decade and should be welcomed. If the Prime Minister does not stand by what he knows is the right decision, we can look forward by next year to an economic slowdown so serious that there could be unemployment and unrest in our cities. Already GDP growth has fallen below 7 per cent in the last quarter and this is just the beginning of bad times. So please Prime Minister, stand firm.”

In The Times of India we have SA Aiyar’s article, “Aam bania is more powerful than the aam aadmi.” S A Aiyar writes, “Politicians opposing foreign investment keep repeating that the East India Company entered India as a trader and then took over politically. Are conditions really the same today as in the 18century? China today has a phenomenal 57 million sq ft of retail space owned by foreigners. Has it become a vassal of imperialists? Of course not. Other Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia see foreign retailers as catalysts of new technology and price reduction. Can it be otherwise in India?”

In his article in Sunday Pioneer, Swapan Dasgupta has rightly said that BJP risks losing the support of urban India if it senselessly keeps opposing FDI in retail. Swapan Dasgupta writes, “In 2009, the BJP ceded the modernity plank to the Congress with its hyper opposition to the Indo-US nuclear accord. It has to take care that in opposing the government, it doesn’t paint itself as a party of the Flat Earth movement.”

The Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

Just where do these fools who are marching with so called Occupy Wall Street movement think that money, and the astonishing affluence it has brought in its wake, comes from?

Shekhar Gupta's new article "National Interest: Dirty Business"

I am convinced that Shekhar Gupta is one of India's best political commentators. Best thing about Gupta is that he never hides behind cliches. He dwells on bare facts. Case in point is his article "National Interest: Dirty Business" published in today's The Indian Express. Here is an interesting excerpt:

... corporate India is not stupid. Call it looking at the big picture, or reading the political winds, but the fact is, Indian businessmen are more disillusioned with UPA 2 than they have been with any government since V.P. Singh’s 11-month disaster. Never in the past two decades have they been made to feel so unwanted. Never have they been given so little attention. On the other hand, ever since UPA 2 was sworn in, the government has worked on distancing itself from corporate India as if politically mandated to do so. The three top-most leaders of this arrangement, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have reduced their contact with India Inc as if by a conscious strategic design. Sonia and Rahul have not been seen at a corporate gathering: either an event of one of the chambers or the World Economic Forum for years. Even the prime minister’s contact with the most direct beneficiaries, and the most vocal supporters, of his reform has diminished to almost nothing. He no longer goes and speaks at the chambers: in fact, the last time he did so, at a big CII event in 2007, he lectured the corporates on high salaries, a point Salman Khurshid, as corporate affairs minister, rubbed it in again in October 2009, months after the swearing in of UPA 2. It is as if the UPA discovered the anger that drove the Occupy Wall-Streeters two years ahead and embraced it fully.


The fact, therefore, is that corporate India, over the past two years, has felt left out, if not orphaned. This at a time when half the ministers are back to old “we are the mai-baap sarkar so we will decide” ways, the bureaucracy is more powerful and indecisive than ever, regulators are non-existent or weak if not compromised, the civil society leads a strong “corporates-as-evil” upsurge and some of the courts play along. And it is not just about the senior owners and executives jailed in the 2G case. While sections of the Central government, from infrastructure ministries to finance and environment, have returned to powerful “glory” days of the pre-1991 era, the corporates have discovered the mistake they made in breaking old lobbying networks and political relationships. This is where the Radia phenomenon had emerged. You needed someone to “deal” with Raja when the rules were ambiguous, and the government (and the prime minister) by and large too powerless to be the higher court of appeal.


You ask some of the cleanest and most respected leaders of corporate India and they will tell you the picture looks even worse from their point of view. As they see it, not only has this government fully ignored them, it has been hostile to them, treating them almost like outcasts, as if it was embarrassing to be even seen in public with them. The way individual business houses have been targeted, Lavasa, Vedanta and even Posco for example, was reminiscent of the way V.P. Singh went after hand-picked corporate enemies, like Lalit Thapar and S.L. Kirloskar. When you specifically target one corporate because you dislike it, it is an even more vicious form of crony-capitalism than merely favouring someone. Because you are then damaging one and in the process helping his rival who you like for whatever reason. If any of this is news for anybody in this government, they are either delusional or plain dishonest.

The Chain of Obedience

I found this excellent video on the Lew Rockwell blog. Also worth reading is The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, by Etienne de La Boetie, especially the excellent introduction by Murray N. Rothbard.

Überdebten

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Do you remember the song “They All Laughed At Christopher Columbus”? Everyone made fun of Columbus because he said the world was round, but turns out he was right! As the late Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out, today the argument of that song is taken as gospel.

It is a gospel written largely by John Stuart Mill. It goes like this: Throughout history, the authors of moral, political, or social innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, imprisoned, even killed. But do we not owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators? “Without them,” Mill wrote, “human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist.” Mill’s conclusion is that innovators — “developed human beings” is one phrase he uses for such paragons — should not merely be tolerated but positively be encouraged as beacons of future improvement.

Click here to read more.