Author: Atanu Dey

Doing Good is Always a Good Excuse

If you want to be loved and admired by the people, do good to others. Unfortunately that only works sometimes. But if you wish do well for yourself, even if it means that it causes harm to others, make the people believe that what you are doing is for the good of others. That’s always guaranteed to work. It has worked like a charm in the past, works now, and will work in the future. Public perception trumps reality. Billions spent on false advertising attest to the fact that it works.

The past masters in this game of duping the public into believing blatant falsehoods are governments of all stripes, be they communists, socialists, fascists — and especially democracies.

One of the more important lessons to be learned from the British Colonial regime is the absolute necessity for governments to hoodwink the public. The British rulers cloaked their imperial drive with the noble enterprise of helping the natives as part of the “White man’s burden” to better the “half-devil and half-child” (phrases that the bigoted racist Rudyard Kipling so memorably penned in 1899.) Continue reading “Government of India Carries the White Man’s Burden”

As a matter of principle, I don’t vote. Why not? Because it is taken as signalling endorsement of democracy and by extension, an endorsement of government as it exists. I believe that governments should be abolished. They are the primary agents of war. As long as governments exist, humanity cannot know peace.  Continue reading “Ron Paul in conversation with Charlie Rose”

Getting around in most Indian cities is no cake walk given the awful traffic. What makes the experience worse is that quite frequently addresses are hard to locate. I was in Delhi recently and was trying to locate L-1/18 in Hauz Khas Enclave. It is never easy. I’ve been there about half a dozen times, and each time it involved a good deal of driving around because the numbering is random and unpredictable.

Why Indians have not figured out the simple street numbering system used in much of the world is a mystery to me. Another mystery is the naming of streets. Street names manifest what I call a “personality cult disorder” or PCD.

Continue reading “Personality Cult Disorder and the Naming of Roads”

I like to quote Ludwig von Mises to my socialist friends (who also do double-duty as the enemies of humanity in keeping with their ideology). Mises wrote, “A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”

Socialism Equals Misery

That it’s not mere exaggeration and hyperbole is clear from the fate of socialist economies, both contemporary and of the past. Socialism impoverishes nations. But why? Because socialism does not use markets to conduct economic activities. Instead of voluntary exchange in free markets, socialism uses force and coercion, command and control. That leads invariably to the disintegration of society.

Continue reading “Wealth of Nations — Part 5: Markets”

Visiting India for even a short while reminds me of a favorite quote from Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784). In his 1775 work Taxation No Tyranny he pointed out the terrible hypocrisy of the American leaders who were fighting for their freedom from the British. Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

I ask, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps of concern for the poor from those who engineer the very poverty that the poor endlessly suffer?

Continue reading “Friends of Poverty, not the Poor”

On board Turkish Airlines flight 80 from San Francisco to Mumbai via Istanbul. 

This too