Well, what do you know! Amazing things are happening around the world. One of the more positive developments has been that of the Islamic State (formerly known as the ISIS) showing up and demonstrating to the world what “peace” means in the “Religion of Peace.(™)” They are the poster boys of Islam, arguing against the left-lib-tards (that’s the short form for “leftist liberal retards”) who keep on insisting that Islam is a religion of peace.
Continue reading “Geert Wilders: “War Has Been Declared against Us””
Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Ganapati Vighana Haran Gajanana
It’s that time of the year once again — the time of Ganesha’s visit and therefore this annual post which is a tradition on this blog.
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Whose money is it anyway?
Milton Friedman used to elegantly distinguish between four ways of spending money. First, when you spend your own money on yourself, you are very careful to get the most benefit for your buck. After all, it is your money and you know what you want for yourself. Second, when you spend your own money on someone else. Here too you carefully economize to meet your objective but since you don’t know the other person’s needs as well as you do your own needs, your spending may not be as optimal for the other person. Third, you spend other people’s money on yourself. In this case, your incentive to economize is certainly blunted. You are much more concerned with getting the best and less with what it will cost.
Finally, when you spend other people’s money on someone else. That is, you transfer resources from one group to another group. In such cases, economizing goes out the window, and what is worse, you promote your own ends rather than the ends of those whose money you are spending or those who are the ostensible beneficiaries of the transfer. The most ubiquitous example of this is what he calls the “distributor of welfare funds” — taxpayers money being spent by government officials for welfare. Here’s Friedman in his own words:
Continue reading “Whose money is it anyway?”
Mises on Bureaucracy
“The characteristic feature of present-day policies is the trend toward a substitution of government control for free enterprise. Powerful political parties and pressure groups are fervently asking for public control of all economic activities, for thorough government planning, and for the nationalization of business. They aim at full government control of education and at the socialization of the medical profession. There is no sphere of human activity that they would not be prepared to subordinate to regimentation by the authorities. In their eyes, state control is the panacea for all ills.”
Ludwig von Mises. “Bureaucracy”. Page 4. Yale University Press. New Haven. 1944.
PM Modi’s Letter on Completion of 1 Month in Office
Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote “A few thoughts as we complete a month in office.” I came across it in QUARTZ. QZ requested annotations. Someone named Vincent Lee did a fine job of summarizing the letter. Here are the annotations:
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Indira Gandhi Imposed “Emergency” on June 25th, 1975
Thirty-nine years have passed since that day when Indira Gandhi decided that Indians had enough of “democracy” and it was time that she dictated to them. Indians did what they have always been good at: they obeyed. Instead of resisting, they obeyed. Our problem, as Howard Zinn used to say, is not civil disobedience; our problem is civil obedience.
Emergency ended on 23rd March, 1977. Did the people learn much? No. She won a landslide victory and once again became the prime minister in January 1980. She was right: the people did not deserve freedom. The people believed that they were free but in truth it was — and still is — an illusion. Frank Zappa said it best. “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Indira Gandhi was an evil person. Indians suffered much because of her and her spawn. However it was well-deserved. It’s all karma, neh?
Note: The source of that Howard Zinn quote is from an opening statement in a 1972 debate at Johns Hopkins. Read the transcript here.
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; . . . Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.
I agree. For the record I should state that I agree with Zinn on many, but not all, matters.
Speaking of obedience, do read this post: THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.
And finally, here’s Matt Damon reading excerpts from the transcript of Howard Zinn’s speech:
Where is #LooteriBahu these days?
This screen capture of an India Today tweet is from just six months ago but feels like much longer. Posted here for the record.
The link above leads to “Stick to huffing and puffing: Congress’ Manish Tewari reacts to Huffington Post’s story on Sonia’s wealth”.
Also see, “Sonia Gandhi worth $2 billion, richer than Queen Elizabeth“.
{By the way, if you hold the cursor over the links above for a second, it will show brief quotes from those reports.}
If you had the luck of the Indians . . .
If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d be sorry and wish you were dead.
If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d wish you was English instead!
I have substituted “Indians” for “Irish” in the song “The Luck of the Irish” by John Lennon.
I was born and brought up in India. By most measures, I did get a decent schooling in India. But my education did not expose me to any even remotely accurate version of history. What little “history” was taught was a heap of lies over a handful of selected politically correct sanitized facts about India’s past. The horrors that the Islamic invaders and the European colonial rulers of India committed on Indians were carefully hidden.
Continue reading “If you had the luck of the Indians . . .”
Narendrabhai Modi, the Man who will Transform India
India’s Phase Transition
Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi’s administration can be considered to be a “phase transition” for India’s economy, to borrow a concept from thermodynamics. Phase transitions are abrupt, often discontinuous changes in systems that alter the degrees of freedom available to it. A familiar example of such a transition is the change from ice to water. Under Modi’s administration, India’s phase transition is likely to be from an economically bound state to an economically free state.
Continue reading “Narendrabhai Modi, the Man who will Transform India”
Hi from Brussels
I am back in Brussels. Accurately speaking, I am in Leuven. I arrived at Brussels airport this morning from Mumbai (Jet Airways). It was overcast and 10 degrees Celsius on arrival at 7:30 AM. Quite a change from 35+ degrees C in Mumbai. Tomorrow is the start of a road trip to Marseilles and Nice for three days. Cheers.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 