There are some topics that make me see red. In that state, I cannot even think rationally, leave alone write coherently. I am so angry that this is not going to read well for sure. But this has to be said. Those who are ultimately responsible for the violence against the Indian students in Australia should not be lynched. Lynching would be too good for them. I am not talking about the red-necks and skinheads (or whatever their Australian equivalents are) who attack foreign students. I am talking of the Indian politicians and bureaucrats that have brought about the conditions that force Indians to go abroad looking for a decent education to places where they are viciously and mercilessly attacked.
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Month: May 2009
The Flipbook Reader (test)
So much great stuff on the web, so little time. Here’s a handy little reader which I found on in the US Internet Archive. I checked out H L Menken’s “A Little Book in C Major“. See below for an embedded flipbook reader.
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Weekend Readings: Ideas and Aid
Here’s a collection of links for the weekend of May 30th.
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Rajeev Mantri on India’s Technological Potential
Rajeev Mantri, executive director of Navam Capital, a Kolkata-based venture capital firm, writes in his piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on “Harnessing India’s Technological Potential” that “VCs typically consider India to be just a technology deployment market. That view is too narrow: India has not just the entrepreneurial competence but also the scientific talent to invent and lead in science-driven innovation.”
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Missing Friedman, Missing Markets
Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal has an article today, “Missing Milton: Who Will Speak for Free Markets“, which makes me despair for India. Milton Friedman was arguably one of the greatest proponents of freedom, and naturally therefore, an advocate of free markets. Trading is a uniquely human activity and humans engage in trade spontaneously and therefore human freedom must necessarily imply the freedom to trade. Human freedom without free markets is a fairly vacuous and meaningless idea. Prohibiting free markets is a necessary and often sufficient for guaranteeing poverty. That’s what all oppressors do — whether they are colonial powers or homegrown communists or socialists.
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“Defeating Political Islam”
In yesterday’s Washington Times, Diana West has a review of Moothy Muthuswamy’s book, “Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War.”
A few bits of the review below the fold.
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On Massive Education Interventions
Much of the benefits of modern life we enjoy and take for granted arises from scale economies in manufacturing — the larger the quantity manufactured by a firm, the lower the average cost. But there is a countervailing effect. Up to a certain size, the overheads of managing a firm goes down as the size increases. Beyond that point, the costs of managing go up with size. That limits how large firms can get. The market weeds out firms that grow too big because the inefficiencies show up in higher cost of production. That process is not unlike Darwinian natural selection in the biological world. There are creatures of all sorts of sizes but there are natural limits to how large even the largest can become. Become too large and you get sorted out.
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