Our friends at Indians for Guns produced this amazing video about gun rights in India.

Guns for Peace

If you are a regular reader of RFL you’d know that this site hosts articles from a bunch of writers, each having their own understanding of what a free society could look like. Its impossible to predict how exactly things will take place in such a society, all that can be done is to use the science of human action and envision how would such a society might look like.
Last article published at RFL was an attempt by the author Sudha Amit to answer the questions asked by various people about the rapist and the rape victim in a free society. I agreed with the article overall but I would like to elaborate some of the points.
If you haven’t read that article, you can still read this one, but I recommend reading that article too.

The question generally asked is if in a free society a criminal is let free for a certain amount of money, then wouldn’t that mean rich people will keep on committing all crimes and walk free?

Proportionality of Crime

Before we proceed I must explain a very important concept of Libertarian justice system and that is “proportionality of crime and punishment”, that is any punishment must be proportional to the crime committed. It could happen that the victim wants to punish the criminal less than the proportional punishment, and that is perfectly acceptable, but if a victim punishes the criminal more than the crime committed, then the victim has now become the aggressor, and now the criminal has become the victim.
Take for example if Alice slaps Bob, and Bob breaks Alice’s leg as a punishment, then Alice has become a victim of Bob’s aggression. Similaly if someone trespasses on your property and you shoot them then you have initiated aggression against them.

Restitution Business

Another important aspect of Libertarian justice theory is that a victim first must be restituted for the harm done to him by the aggressor, and then the aggressor loses the same amount of rights as the amount of rights of the victim he violated. For example if I steal $10,000 from you, then first you need to get those $10,000 back, then I lose rights over my $10,000, so you will get $20,000 back. It is to be noted that you do not get double the money back, you just get your own $10,000 and then another $10,000 as a punishment for me.
Similarly if you poke my eye, and blind me by one eye, then you first need to pay me enough money to provide me with restitution, then you lose the right of your eye, and I will have a right to poke it out.

Rape Scenario

In the case of a rape victim and him/her rapist, first the rapist must provide restitution to the rape victim. That is to make the rape victim whole. Then the rapist loses his rights in the same manner he violated the rights of the rape victim, that is rape victim now has a right to either rape the rapist, or have him sexually violated in the same manner through someone else. The rape victim can fortfeit his right to a restitution and chance to violate the similar rigths of the rapist, but he can never force a bigger punishment than the crime done by the rapist.

By this principle if a rich man rapes a woman, the woman has a right to have the rich man pay her a restitution(the amount of will be determined by the courts), and get him raped(chances are she will pay someone to rape him). Nobody can force the woman to accept money in lieu of punishment of the rich man. If this rich man keeps on raping women, he will keep on losing his rights the same way. If a rich man kills someone then it (could be) gameover for him. If I were a rich man I wouldn’t rely on raping or killing people first and then silencing them with money.

Its possible that the rapist makes the victim an offer that she forfeits the punishment by rape of the rich man. But this offer could be a really large sum of money as there is no upper limit to it. If she demands all the money of the rapist in return of not getting him raped, and rapist really does not wanna be raped then he will have to give her all his money.

No rapist, no matter how rich can live life normally in a free society.

Prostitution and ‘Rape-restitution’

This is the most ridiculous idea that someone would suggest that there is a similarity between money exchanged for prostitution and money given as restitution of a rape victim. Its like someone is confusing stealing groceries with purchasing groceries. Prostituion involves voluntary exchange of sex and money. Rape and its subsequent restitution is not even an exchange. The money is being given as an attempt to restore the damage done to the victim, not for rendering services. Even if you rape a prostitute that is still a rape, and not an act of prostitution.

Conclusion

There are many misconceptions about how a free society will operate without the coercive apparatus of state, before any attempt is made to answer how this will happen one thing must be kept in mind by libertarians and voluntarists. If people really want some service and there is no initiation of aggression involved then the free society will have that service or facility. Once you establish that assumption, you acquire a firm ground from which other people cannot displace you by putting words in your mouth.

I would conclude by quoting a recent conversation I had with a friend who had doubts about a free society. After I explained him about the concept of private proeprty and a society of pure liberty he said: “What if your neighbor is beating his wife, then though its none of my business in your society but I wouldn’t wanna live in such a society?”, my reply was simply “What makes you think I would wanna live in such a society?”, after his shocked withered away I claimed, “Trust me in a free society I wouldn’t live in a neighborhood where people are beating their wives”.

Imagine if there is a speeding train rushing towards 10 people who are tied down to the track. Their death is certain if the train maintains its course. You can prevent that from happening if you flip the lever and divert the train to another track, where one person is tied down to the track. Assuming you cannot release the individuals, would you let 10 people die or kill one person to save 10 people.

I am sure you must have heard many variations of this scenario. The proper libertarian/individualist answer is simple, you cannot take away the rights(in this case that right would be his life) of any individual in order to save the rights of one or more individuals(assuming its your inaction which will take away the rights of those many individuals).

The goal of posing this scenario to a libertarian in most of the cases isn’t to ponder over a difficult but hypothetical scenario, but to present them with a ‘gotcha’ moment. Most people would not hesitate to take away rights of one individual over the rights of many people, and saying otherwise is not an easy reply.

My replies to few such scenarios are as follows.

For the above given scenario, the question one must ask is, how did this situation came about to. How did 10 people ended being tied up on the railway tracks, and how come another individual was tied to the alternate railway track when the train was destined to go towards the 10 people. This seems to be a very tailored scenario where every element is designed so that above question can be posed to the libertarians.

I am not saying its an impossible scenario, its physically possible to do something like that, but the chances of scenarios like these showing up in real life are very rare. But assuming this does happen, my answer is simple, if this hypothetical example happens exactly how its proposed to me, then yes, I will not kill that one individual for the sake of 10 people. In reality, if I ever do confront this scenario, I will flip the switch so that the train heads towards the single individual, and then try to make a dash towards that guy to save him(because it would be easier for me to untie one guy then ten people). Even though I would do such a thing, it does not mean I am sacrificing the life of one guy to save the lives of many, but that I still want to save the lives of everybody in the scenario, its just flipping the switch towards the single individual gives me a better chance at it. He may still die, and my attempt to untie him could be proven completely futile, yet I have not chosen to kill him, I have chosen to save everybody.

When I give this answer it frustrates people and they decide to present me with more realistic scenarios, take for example this scenario:

Imagine if a terrorist has planted nuclear bombs in American cities(like in the plot of movie ‘Unthinkable’), would you torture him to get out the location of the bombs, or kill him if the act of killing him saves the lives of the millions of people?

Its true that this is a much more feasible scenario than the train and tracks scenario, except its a very easy scenario to answer. If an individual really has put bombs in American cities and he threatens to explode it, then he is making a realistic threat of violence, and a realistic threat of violence is the same thing as the act of violence itself, therefore this individual, according to his own confession is guilty. If an attempt is made to prevent this attack by harming him, then its an act of self-defense, not an ethical dilemma.

This reply usually makes people feel they have been tricked, so they immediately present to me with the following scenario:

Imagine if there is a deadly virus on loose which has the capability of killing millions of people very quickly, in fact lets just say everybody will die if this virus is set lose. One innocent person is infected with this virus. There is no cure for this virus, in fact its so dangerous that even studying it represents massive amount of risk. Would you kill this person, or forget killing him, would you incarcerate this person so that he may not be able to infect other people?

Finally we have landed on a decent enough version of this question. The individual is not guilty, he is not voluntarily causing the death of millions of people. Keeping the arguments about feasibility of such a scenario in a free society aside, lets just assume this just happened. What would you do in such a scenario? Would you uphold his rights or save the lives of millions of people.

This scenario is not very feasible scenario to start with, if a person has been infected with some virus which may infect everybody else, most individuals will voluntarily submit themselves for any kind of measures which may be required to keep the rest of the population safe. Even if we assume there are no such individuals or this individual has no such conscience even then he can be restricted to a piece of property without violating his rights. Everybody on the planet rescinds consent to allow him on their property since every property is private property. Insurance companies can pay him a lot of money so that he stays on a quarantined villa with all sorts of facilities until the end of his life or until he is cured, this money paid to him would just be a cost towards preventive measures against disease.

The simple answer just like the first scenario given is pretty simple, no you cannot violate the rights of an individual over the rights of many people. There are simply no exceptions to that rule, and if this is the only scenario on which the argument of the anti-libertarian relies upon to demonstrate the abject failure of individualism then so be it. The fact is the sole reason why this argument is being posed to the proponent of Individualism because all his rest of the arguments have been satisfactorily answered. When a socialist promotes his ideology, the critique of his argument does not rely upon some hypothetical scenario where the private ownership of means of production is important, but because private ownership of means of production is required everywhere.

Venus project is another attempt made by people who look at a market economy from outside, and think they see numerous vestigial elements which they think are not needed anymore, or since they fail to see their utility, consider it restrictive, and then they conclude that they can do better by removing those vestigial elements from a market economy.

Karl Marx did the same, he saw the market being divided into owners and workers, so he came up with Socialism. He saw ownership of means of production has vestigial element. Keynes did the same, he saw Stock market crash and economy not recover so he came up with his ridiculous theories about Keynesianism. He saw Gold standard as vestigial element of the market. And so on Time after time people keep on coming up with theories to fix the market because they all see how Market works from outside, and are unable to figure out why many things exist in the market.

Venus project is the latest addition in this category. They see the monetary system as a vestigial or restrictive element of the market economy. They see how beautifully the market works, and how people provided each other with their labor, but they fail to see the role of money in it, so they propose removal of money from this system.

I have seen the movie ‘Zeitgeist:Addendum’, and I have hung out in Venus Project forums long enough to see what they are proposing.

Resource-Based Economy(RBE) proponents refuse to acknowledge that there is a scarcity of resources – Remember your first Economics introduction, they teach you that economics is “.. the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” RBE proponents refuse to acknowledge that we may not have enough resources.

Why do they think so? – As given as an example on Venus Project’s homepage, they observe:

At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.

Its obvious that RB Economists see that market sooner or later provides every individual what he or she wants(or they observe war time distortions), and conclude that if an individual could be provided with an iPhone in year 2010, that means we have enough resources even in the year 1776 that Benjamin Franklin could also be provided with an iPhone(its not like the world acquired alien resources in that time). That means there must be something restricting this feasibility, and their conclusion is if money did not restrict people of that time from constantly acquiring new resources, experimenting and developing new technologies then we would have a lot more progress in the world.

Resource Based Economy proponents do not understand law of diminishing returns – The RBE proponents attack diminishing returns as a faulty valuation system. Of course as Austrians we know that even in Eden Gardens where everything is abundant, a man still is going to have the scarcity of time, therefore even in society with no scarcity, a man will have value scales. Because men assign different values to different ends. The reason why I value another car much less than the first one, because I can’t drive two cars at the same time, I can drive only one, and once I have had a car, I would rather prefer to have some other ends achieved. Therefore I value another car as much less than the first one. Third car, even less than second one.

RBE believes that there is something inherently wrong with high values of Diamond, there is no reason why it should cost so much, and 1 oz of water should be of same value(or even more) than 1 oz of diamond. They believe that if we can get rid of these valuations(or they believe this’d happen on its own once we get rid of monetary system), we will not have to worry about diminishing returns anymore.

Resource Based Economy proponents consider scarcity of capital as just that, scarcity of capital – RBE has taken this page off the books of other schools of economics(Keynesian, Montarists) which do not have a Capital theory. A scarcity of capital according to them only represents scarcity of capital, not a scarcity of resources/goods/time. This is probably the biggest reason why they think they can get rid of monetary system and make things work. The fact that we have scarcity of capital because we have scarcity of time, goods, labor or all of these. We are in a recession because our goods have been misallocated and govt is preventing them from being reallocated to more fruitful production endeavors.

RBE proponents only see one timeframe, and one group of people – RBE proponents fail the one lesson of economics Henry Hazlitt taught, The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. They purposefully focus on a very small timeframe(such as war time production of First class fighting aircrats), and only one side of the picture(that the production rose to 90,000 aircrafts a year from only 600 aircrafts a year). When you remove this error, and look at all timeframes not just one, and all groups of people not just one, you realize that they can hardly promise more production in all aspects of economy without a monetary system even when you give them a very liberal leahway.

During oil crises of the 70s when world saw the power Saudi Arabia might have, they threatened to use Food as a weapon against Saudi, so the Saudi government started wheat subsidy program in order to be self-sufficient. Soon Saudi Arabia had so much wheat production that they were exporting wheat to other countries. The RBE proponents see it as a proof that even a desert country such as Saudi Arabia is capable enough to produce all the wheat it needs. But what it cannot see(and which is even more unseen with a lack of monetary system), is the high cost Saudi govt paid to achieve that. Massive resources were directed from other places to grow wheat. RBE proponents have a habit of looking at examples like these, and use them in their advantage.

RBE proponents do not understand economic calculation – Profits are demonized by RBE proponents, it doesn’t mean that they support a loss-making venturing or non-profit venturing(like a lot of leftists do), instead they just refuse to understand what are profits or need for economic calculation. This is actually the hill where their whole theory falls down to pieces, but you will never be able to have a discussion on this topic, because they refuse to acknowledge that scarcity exists. Since they don’t think scarcity exists, and technology can provide them with everything they want, they fail to see why anyone would need economic calculation. RBE proponents do not understand economic calculation because they don’t think we have scarcity of anything, and they don’t understand that we have massive scarcity and whatever we get we get because of economic calculations because they don’t understand economic calculations. So its a cyclical trap.

The list of anomalies and fallacies propagated by the Venus Project is endless. They rely too much on technological solutions and too little on human action or praxeological aspects of their idea. They fail to understand why Socialism doesn’t work(or at least they think it doesn’t work because of lack of human motivation).

Capitalist is a deferred consumptionist

This explanation of capital as ‘deferred consumption’ opens up a plethora of new insights to things. For example, if capital is deferred consumption then capitalist must be the guy who defers his present consumption. This clearly explains to any individual who fails to see what a capitalist’s work actually involves, or why does he deserve profits from any venture.
Warren Buffet is technically the largest deferred consumptionist in US. This means he could consume so many things in present(billions and billions of dollars worth of goods) but he choses to not consume them, and instead he defers it for later consumption(which he probably will never do).

Utility of deferring your present consumption

You may now ask what utility does anyone delaying their present consumption may offer to the society as a whole, because this clearly sounds like a very selfish thing to do. The answer is really simple, almost no human action which does not directly satisfies the end we are looking for requires delaying our present consumption. For example, if you are hungry and you want to eat a pizza then the action of eating that pizza directly satisfies your want, therefore it is not deferred consumption because its an act of consumption itself.
On the other hand if you now have to make that pizza, now the series of actions to satisfy your desire are:
a) You bake the pizza
b) You eat the pizza
The first action involves deferring(albeit a really less amount considering it will take you only 20 mins to do it) your present consumption of raw pizza, or any other food, for later more satisfying consumption of cooked pizza.
You may ask now, that just because in this example I had to wait for 20 mins for pizza to be cooked doesn’t mean that I always have to defer my consumption, for example I could drive to a pizza shop and just buy the pizza without waiting for it to be cooked. My point is simple, someone at that point has already done the job of deferring the present consumption for the future consumption, someone has waited 20 minutes for you so that you can get it immediately and in return you have rewarded them with money(which is their larger future consumption). Of course lets also not forget that making a pizza requires flour, vegetables, cheese, chicken etc. So the total time taken to delay consumption for full making a pizza would be time required to grow wheat, make flour, grow vegetables, make cheese out of a cow you raised, and raising chickens. That means if you were living on an island with no civilization then to make a pizza you will require growing wheat, and vegetables for months, and capturing and raising cow and chicken for months before you are in position to make that pizza. Thankfully in any modern society someone has already done the job of deferring the present consumption so that you now can simply walk into a supermarket and buy all those things, or take even more shorter route and buy the cooked pizza from the pizzaria.
As you realize now that our society and civilization would be impossible if not for deferred consumption or capital. Essentially a capitalist society is a society where production of large operations is planned through deferred consumption of private individuals. This begs the next question.

Who defers their present consumption in Socialism?

This is now the most important question any socialist must answer. If you have read the article till now, you realize that its impossible to get rid of the capital from any society. The only capital-less society would be a highly primitive society where almost every action is aimed at direct consumption, this means the primitive men who created tools to help in hunting, actually ended up creating the first capitalist society of the world. In fact only animals do not perform indirect actions to achieve their ends. The only real world example in this case is a monkey recently in a zoo who planned to throw stones at visitors by collecting them in advance. Coming to think of it, even dogs hide bones for a later date.
The point here is that it is really impossible to eliminate capital from a society, so any claims made by the socialists of creating a new man who is not capitalist are ridiculously wrong. This generally eliminates that last claim and results in socialists making a more smarter claim, that in a socialist society, only the indirectly deferred consumption will not be allowed. For example, any individual can sow his bag of wheat to create 7 bags out of them 3 months later, but no individual is allowed to give his bag of wheat to another and hope to receive 7 bags three months later. This will completely stop a capitalist from ‘exploiting’ workers.
If a socialist makes this claim then it means he at least acknowledges why a capitalist deserves his profits. If in a shoe manufacturing factory, workers from start(homesteading the land, making bricks, concrete, sand, constructing the building, raising animals for leather), to the end(manufacturing the shoes, packaging them bringing them to the market), then they truly deserve the profits proportional to their role in the manufacturing process, but the fact is that this kind of action would be highly inefficient and ardous, and it would be much better of these workers defer their consumption in other ways(like saving money), or allow somenoe else who has delayed a lot of present consumption over time(capitalist) to invest in their venture and allow him to make profits.

This is why even the most hardworking socialist society is poor

The fact is that even in a socialist society someone must defer their present consumption, any socialist who claims that he envisions a society with no capital does not know what is he talking about. A smarter socialist might say that in his system the state will do the job of reallocating the deferring of present consumption equally among people, but that still leaves the big question about a socialist society and that is, if my deferring of present consumption does not lead in increased larger future consumption, then why should I delay my present consumption?
You may reward your workers proportional to what they have worked that day, sure people will work 18 hours a day to catch fish with their hands, but nobody will eat less fish of what they caught that day, just so that they can save enough fish to eventually build a net and be able to catch 10 times more fish than they can with merely using hands, and for a society to become prosperous deferred consumption is the single most important requirement.
If you are a socialist and you have thought of a socialist paradise, to be realistic you must not envision an advanced society, a truly realistic socialist society would be a society of primitive men who hunt animals and gather berries without using any kinds of tools.
Of course this brings us to a whole another set of issues with the so-called modern ‘capitalist’ societies such as US and UK, where the state depletes the deferred consumption of a society with the help of fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, central banks, and taxation. Not to mention the so called ‘free market magicians’, such as Milton Friedman and Chicago school who supports a Capitalist society, yet fails miserably in understanding what is really happening when a market crashes or how capital plans production, but that’s for another article.

Conclusion

My conclusion is simple, if you consider yourself as a Socialist(or any other leftist ideology where you are going to get rid of economic calculation and private ownership of wealth), you must explain me who in your system would be the deferred consumptionist. Who will reduce his present consumption for the future larger consumption. Sure socialists do talk about larger future consumption to be distributed equally among all its people, but what they fail to explain is who will be the person who will SAVE enough for the future date when nobody can work to do something else.

Libertarianism is about Individualism

The fact is that Libertarian philosphy relies heavily on individual, and individual action. Numerous times this question is asked me, and this question is the single question which will determine if you are truly libertarian or not.
If you can save 100,000 individuals by killing one individual(who is not guilty of murder), is it ok to kill him to save 100K other individuals?
If you answered the above question as no, its not ok to kill one to save 100 thousand other individuals, then congratulations you are a libertarian. If not then you are possibly liberty-curious, statist, left-libertarian, Fascist-libertarian and every other possible flavor of libertarianism, but just not libertarian.
I don’t have a lot of space to explain a big answer to this question, but a short defense is, that if you truly are facing the delimma of killing one to save 100K others, you got more problems to worry about than if you should stick to libertarianism or not.
Libertarian philosophy differs from other philosophies because it is the only philosophy which values individual so highly. Every other philosophy is essentially some or the other form of collectivist ideology. This distinction is very important because almost every mainstream ideology in US can claim to be ‘libertarian’, because liberty is a very seductive word in America.
Once you establish this unique identifier about liberty, the most logical question which arises in the debate above is, if you are so much for individual responsiblity and actions, how can you not see that the person who gave the contract merely offerred a choice to the assassin. The choice was:
a) Take $100K from him and kill his wife
b) Do not take $100K and not kill his wife
Remember, a choice is a choice, not a compulsion. If contractee has compelled the assassin in some or the other way that is he left him no choice, and by that I mean if he was coerced to commit the assassination then the assassin is not guilty of murder here the guilt lies completely with the contractee. But offerring money to someone isn’t coercion. If someone offers you money for doing something wrong, no matter how much that money is, this is in no way coercion.
If the assassin wanted, he could have not accepted the money and not committed the crime. The person who offerred him the money merely made a proposition to him.

“But wouldn’t this promote a lot of contract killings?”

One may argue that if we let the people hiring assassins get off the hook wouldn’t this create a huge market for assassins and assassinations? First of all this is a utilitarian argument, so the answer must be utilitarian too. The fact is that since people who hire assassins are getting off the hook, they have absolutely no incentive to keep their mouth shut about the murder. The individuals hiring the assassins(if they don’t feer ostrecization) can now go on the television and claim who killed person X. This essentially reduces the supply of assassins to the market. They are much more in trouble now because they will be solely responsible for the murder now, where as their employer for whom this job was done walks free even blabbering about the crime.
So yeah even though there is more incentive for people to higher assassins, there is much less incentives for assassins to be assassins. Like everything else in utilitarianism we just cannot measure what will be what. Therefore we must rely on the principle, and that clearly dictates that if a person had a choice to not do that act of aggression then we expect him to not do that act of aggression.
In a society of pure liberty as an individual its your responsibility to not aggress against other individuals, and if someone convinces you otherwise then its only your fault, nobody else in the world will be responsible for actions you committed.
Someone may make a point now that although they agree that the person who commits the crime must be responsible for his actions, but why are we not holding the person who caused the crime, responsible? Isn’t his crime in this case “Creating the situation which caused the death of an individual”?? The answer is very simple, you are just describing his action into the most guilty way possible, but all this individual did, when broken down to it, was to offer a choice to another individual. That was his action, and unless providing choices to individuals is a crime in your viewpoint, this guy is not guilty of anything.

“What if I hold a gun on your head and make you commit murder?”

This is a very valid question, if someone holds guns on your head, you do not have a choice in this case, as you were coerced to do that action. Here the person who held the gun on your head is the guilty and responsible party for the murder. To solve this issue, the courts should follow something which I call as ‘weapon doctrine’, if you have no free choice then you were merely a weapon of the crime, not the criminal himself.
* If someone holds a gun on your head and make you do murder, you are weapon.
* If someone holds a gun on your wife’s head, and makes you commit murder, again its a bit difficult to determine if you are a weapon or not but the chances are you are.
* If someone mixes poison in your food and instead of giving you anti-dote asks you to commit a murder, you are a weapon.
* If you consume poison somehow, or someone gives you the poison but the person giving you the antidote and asking you to commit a murder in exchange has nothing to do with you getting poisoned then you choosing to kill, is only your responsibility, not theirs. In this case you are not the weapon.
* If your boss asks you to kill someone otherwise get fired, and you do it, then you are not the weapon.

There cannot be a state or state like entity in a society of pure liberty

The last point above opens up a pandora’s box in terms of the consequences of this principle. You killing someone because you were ordered to do so, or you were merely doing your job, is now a non-sequitor, because it doesn’t matter who gave you the order, they are just not sharing the fault here with you. The biggest concern here is, “If the person who gave the orders is not responsible in any way for the action his employee committed then that means you will let Hitler walk free?”, well the answer isn’t simple because I am sure Hitler would be guilty of a lot of actions he actually did do, but simply speaking, yes Hitler will not be held responsible for the actions his soldiers committed.
This maybe be appalling to many people(and possibly the reason why its so hard to convince libertarians on this issue), but the truth is, by establishing this level of atomic guilt, you are ensuring that Hitler will find it impossible to get soldiers to work for him who are simply rationalizing all their henious acts as ‘I was just doing my job’.
This isn’t even the last of the arguments, this simple principle guarantees that the basic structure of any private defense organization(PDO) in a free society would be such that its the individual responsibility of each employee that the orders given to him are just orders and are not aggressing against any individual.
For example: You are a PDO employee whose task is to apprehend criminals, you get an order that a guy named John Marshton has killed someone and he must be arrested for it, and if he resists then you can use deadly force because he deserves to die for that crime.
Your problem: If this guy turns out to be innocent, your boss is in no way in any problem, its you and only you who will get punished. Since your boss doesn’t share the guilt in this possible act, he may not be so careful with his decision.
Your solution: You now must personally make sure that there is enough evidence against this guy and he did commit that murder. So you do not just get ‘orders’ from your employer, but you get the full case file, you get the verdict of the trial, the whole proceedings and you find out that the guy under all definition of the word ‘guilty’, is actually guilty.
This assuring of the guilt is emulated in our current system as ‘arrest warrant’, the police officers cannot randomly start arresting people, a judge issues an arrest warrant against an individual after looking at the evidence and reasons against him and police officer then relies on it to arrest someone. Although the similarities end there. Arrest warrants can be issued for anything, and it still isn’t the same thing as the document or file detailing all the evidence against the individual. The only reason I made this parallel so that those who are worried about the lack of the ‘greatness’ of a our current legal system where there are arrest warrants and search warrants.

Anarchist Search Warrant

Here is the interesting part of the article, many people ask me the question, ‘In a free society if an individual runs and hides to a property(or his own property) where you are not allowed to enter, or any PDO is not allowed to enter, how will this guy be captured?’
Many people envision a statist kind of solution that somehow PDO’s will be allowed to enter a property, otherwise it would cause a lot of lawlessness in the society. But this solution breaks down really fast, because it isn’t really a libertarian thing. Its really a very simple question to answer, that is if you strictly adhere to the above mentioned principle of extreme atomic guilt theory(EAGT), then you will realize that no individual would want to aggress upon another indivdual merely because it was his job or he received orders from someone else.
Basically each individual who works for the PDO, for him to possibly aggress against another individual, he must ensure it himself that its not an initiation of aggression. For example, if your PDO has rendered the verdict that person X is guilty of murder and you have seen the whole proceedings and agreed with the conclusion then you can pursue the guilty individual with the use of deadly force.
The reason why any PDO would want to go through this way because if that individual turns out to be not guilty and he has been aggressed upon then the PDO employee would be held liable for all crime of initiation of aggression and (most probably) by contract PDO would be required to pay for restitution. A search warrant or an arrest warrant essentially in this case is a release document from the insurance organization claiming that all individuals involved in this act of aggression have seen through all the evidence and testimonies and concluded that the individual is guilty. Remember this overseeing of the case and trial isn’t the same thing as the trial itself(well I am hoping that this is more expeditated and faster than a trial), its merely going through the evidences and arguments and concluding that the verdict was accurate. If they do not feel it was accurate they have a right to excuse themselves.
This insurance requirement ensures that the least amount of property rights violation is done by the company, and least amount of damage payment is required.
In case of a false documents and testimonies, it will be liability of the individual who created the false documents and testimonies, for example if a person testified that he saw X enter that building, and this testimony becomes the basis for a verdict which renders X guilty, but later it turns out that he perjured, then in this case the actual individual who committed the act of aggression ended up being only the weapon of the crime and the crime was committed by the person who perjured.
Similarly if the judge took the bribe and falsifies the proceedings to alter the verdict to be guilty(or otherwise), will be the solely guilty individual for the aggression committed over the falsely convicted individual, not the PDO enforcer who looked at the records and proceedings and like any just man agreed with the judge’s conclusion.

No state or state like entities can be created

The biggest concern of people who consider Anarchy as an option is that in a free society the best private defense organization will rise and end up becoming a monopoly which is essentially a state-like entity. The truth is that a society of pure liberty, which follows this principle will realize that the formation of state or state-like private defense organizations is not possible, because we have eliminated the concept of soldiers. If you join a private defense organization which asks you to take away property of an individual because he stole it, then its your responsibility to ensure that its really stolen, and not blindly follow their orders.
Imagine this scenario, you join a Private Defense Organization which aims to act as a government, they already have 85% of the market share because they were so good at their job. Your boss, now asks you to go and raid a warehouse owned by your biggest competitor, you now must ask the question to him about why should you do such a thing. If he shows you the proof that the warehouse contains stolen property, and like any rational and just man you are unable to consider that proof to be sufficient to consider it as a stolen property then you must not follow the orders. If you do follow the orders then when the justice will be served only you will be held guilty for that action, not your boss will go free.
So think again, even if you want to joing an organization and become the state, why would you want to be the foot soldiers, nobody who is not a foot soldier or doing the actual acts of aggression in your organization will ever be punished.
The implications of this are huge, organizations who aim to become an entity like state will find it impossible to get people who would commit acts of aggression for them. Some people would still be willing to do it but their fees would be really, really high.
Just to be thorough, lets imagine an organization which is fully comprised of individuals who are willing to follow the orders about initiating aggression against others, after all its possible. What is not possible in this society is for this organization to become as big and powerful as we earlier expected the best PDO to become.
Finally, if an PDO who has a share of 85% of the market suddenly gets a change of conscience one day and realizes that they must now become the government, will soon find out that they may be the most powerful militant organization, but they do not have that 85% market share anymore, and it will be reduced massively as soon as people realize that this PDO is willing to commit aggression against them. The remaining honest private defense organizations will get an influx of new subscribers, and new money to expand their operations. In the stock market the prices of the rogue PDO will plummit, and the honest PDOs will rise.
This may still not be sufficient to completely defeat the rogue PDO but if we follow the extreme atomic guilt principle we will find that the chances of above scenario happening are really low, so low that we can even say that a society of pure liberty which follows true and pure principle of individual responsibility will find that principle acting as a deterrent against the formation of state or state like private organizations.

Similarly its very important for people who support freedom, liberty and capitalism to understand the operations of a market player. we all are drilled about how to use state as a solution for everything, if there is a possibility that the car manufacturers might make an unsafe car, our statist upbringing immediately kicks in and tells us the statist solution, “Lets have the govt make car safety regulations, after all the govt’s only valid job is to protect life, liberty and property, so that seems to be a proper justified role”, but the truth is this statist solution always causes more problem and deaths than its equivalent free market solution. You will be only and immediately be able to see how undynamic and faulty this solution is when you manage to think like a market operator, rather than a government beaurecrat.

This is why to understand the market and support it properly its important to train yourself in the most important of market’s operations, buying and selling of means of production(aka trading stocks). I know a lot of us are very excited about stock market trading, and those with good money might already be in the market, but if you jump in directly with real money in the market then you might get turned off very quickly by successive losses. That is my I strongly suggest trading with virtual money on real stocks as long as possible. Those who are impatient to start as soon as possible please scroll down to the bottom of the document to click on the best virtual trading website, and join it, but I would highly suggest to read the rest of the article because I attempt explain stock market and its function in as less boring possible.

Stock Market

A stock market in a capitalist society is the brain of the market. Remember that in the most basic level a capitalist society like USA differs from a socialist society like Cuba because the former has a stock market. The whole concept of a socialist society is based on non-private ownership of means of production, and stock market is a place to trade the ownership of means of production.
Lets say if the city of London has a requirement of oranges, city of Tel Aviv has a huge infrastructure to produce those oranges then that means that there is an opportunity to supply oranges to the city of London from Tel Aviv. Any company having the infrastructure, or which starts to establish an infrastructure to buy oranges from Tel Aviv and supply it to London, is doing the right thing, and stock market investors would start appreciating the means of production of this company. The stock price of this company would go up, which means a better credit line for the company and more money flow. This will enable the company to invest in a bigger infrastructure and transport more oranges from Tel Aviv to London.
Similarly, if a company is in the business of producing cup cakes, and a report comes which concludes that having cup cakes is really really harmful to your health, this clearly means that people will now start buying less cupcakes, so the stock owners of that cupcake company will sell their shares, resulting in undervaluing of the stock price of that company(it won’t go down to zero unless company is really going bankrupt, there would still be some sales of cupcakes therefore stock price will just go down and settle to something less).
By correctly identifying the stock prices, the stock market investors earn huge profits in this process. If you come from one of the socialists or quasi-socialist countries like India, and Soviet Russia, you will realize that a stock market works a lot like the central planning commission, it moves resources and capital goods from one venture to the other. Where it needs less to where it needs more. In the above example if at the same time Coffee demand in USA is going down(and it receives huge amount of Coffee from Brazil), then a stock market will start depreciating the value of any Coffee company doing business from Brazil to US, maybe making it get rid of its now excess capital goods(such as cargo airplanes and crew), and the added capital flow to the orange company will enable it to buy more cargo airplanes and crew. In a central planning scenario this thing should have been done exactly be a central planner, where he reallocates the cargo airplanes, from import-export of coffee to oranges, from Brazil-US route to Israel-UK route.

Stock Market is not a casino or a horse racing game

It is shockingly disappointing that a large number of people believe that stock markets are nothing more than places where you gamble with your money. I recently found some individual on an economics chat room who had an opinion about everything, sounded quite smart, but when I asked him what does he think about Stock Markets, or if he thought Stock Markets served any utility or not. His answer was, “I think stock markets harm small businesses”. This is by far the dumbest thing I have heard someone say. Stock Markets are the brains of a market, without them, market cannot function. A casino is a place where everybody has equal odds, and you play for the fun of luck. A casino’s only utility is entertainment, but a stock market is far from being entertaining. But it would be very unfair to not realize why people think so low of stock markets.
The reason why people think Stock Markets are nothing more than Casinos because of the massive uncertainty in the markets. A lot of people invest a lot of money in the markets, and most of their odds are not better than winning on a roulette table. Also there are times when stock market rises at once and falls at once, you might wonder if Stock Markets are all about putting capital at the right method or venture of business, then how come in 2008, 2001, 1987, 1929, the stock market crashed at once. Or why is it that people treat it as gambling tables, after all most people just look at the technical trends, and follow them, most stock market traders don’t worry about the exact business model of a company.
The answer of all these questions comes down to single most important problem bugging all the ‘capitalist’ societies in the world, and that is the Fiat Currency. Due to high inflation, the prices of consumer goods rises really fast, and all the people who want to save their capital, find their capital depleting at a really fast rate. So people are forced to somehow try to keep up with rising consumer prices. Stock market provides some very high returns compared to say fixed deposits or other investment opportunities.
Similarly the massive amounts of regulations on the stock market creates this fog which makes it really hard for real prices to appear. For example short selling(selling without owning the stocks) has a huge set of regulations. Whenever market crashes the government steps in and makes short selling of the major stocks illegal. All this cripples the real functionality of a stock market, and most people end up losing a lot of money.

The Solution

What should you do if you are someone who is interested in stock markets, and who has found the life of a stock market very fascinating? Or you could simply be a capitalism enthusiast who wants to understand the brain of the free markets. Or you think its an evil thing that companies are liable only to their stock holders(there is a big surprise waiting for those who think so).
The solution is simple, start trading in stock markets, but without using real money. There are some very good virtual stock market softwares available, but my personal favorite is Wall Street Survivor. Its a web based stock market game, and it allows you to invest in real stocks and real prices but by using virtual money and virtual portfolio. I really like it because it allows you to create a variety of portfolios in the same account(say you want to try to parallel strategies at once without complicating things too much, for example I have two portfolios on guessing which would be the next bubble, and I invest in two industries, keeping the portfolios separate).

Before I go on let me warn you this, virtual stock trading will not enable you to make money in real stock market, the only way you can learn to make real money in real markets is by investing in real, but there is something very important virtual stock trading will help you learn is to get rid of the initial quirks new investors face. Let me put it this way, if you practice on a virtual stock trading account, it will help you not make huge losses new investors make(purely because they are unaccustomed to the ups and downs of the market).
Most people lose money in stock markets when they start into this thing because they don’t have this investor’s mentality. They just go with their feelings, and the moment they make a little bit more money they go crazy with the power, and end up losing not only the profit they made but their initial investment capital too. Some sitcoms(Seinfeld, King of the Queens) captured this roller coaster experience new investors face beautifully in their series. Overall it goes on something like this, you invest, you make some good profit, then you hit a losing streak and you end up at 50% loss of what you started with. In real life that’s when most people bid stock markets good bye, but if you stick through this experience you have just managed to achieve some stability and a great experience which will help you in making profits at a later stage.
I practiced with all sorts of stock market simulators for over 2 years before I dealt with real money, and I have tried all sorts of markets, stock markets, options markets, futures trading, forex markets, and overall my conclusion is(and its only applicable for me), that I should only put a very small amount of money capital into the markets. I should never do technical trading(technical trading is when you trade only on the basis of prices, and nothing else, business model doesn’t matter), stick with options(you can do options trading in Wall Street Survivor). It has helped me to learn and understand futures and most importanly Options(which are a bit complicated). Thankfully I am now as comfortable with options as I am with stocks themselves.
So use the above link to sign up on Wall Stree Survivor(https://wallstreetsurvivor.com/), and start playing. If you want to add me as buddies on WSS, send me a mail at renegade.division+wss@reasonforliberty.com and I will add you.

I wrote this ‘controversial’ article Was Gandhi a Libertarian? last month which had many positive and belligerently negative responses from the readers as well as the other RFL team members¹². The question which came up again and again(Gandhi was asked this during in his lifetime as well), which I unfortunately couldn’t answer satisfactorily. In fact I haven’t seen anyone answer that question satisfactorily. The question is, how would Gandhian philosophy help the Jews in Nazi Germany. What could have Jews in the Nazi Germany have done consistent to Non-violence principle to deter Nazis.

This argument seems to be like the lynchpin of Gandhian philosophy. Gandhi himself wasn’t very informed of the situation in the Nazi Germany. So even his own answer is not sufficient in my opinion. Upon being asked about the Nazi persecution of Jews, Gandhi answered:

If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest Gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy [...] the calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror.³

This answer is very unpopular in the western world. Gandhi is called anti-semite(try typing the terms Gandhi and Jews in your favorite search engine and see what shows up in results). The question almost always asked is “How do you think Jews in Nazi Germany should have followed the philosophy of non-violence, the Jews were slaughtered in millions without any resistance anyway. In fact the task of the Nazis would have been much more easier had they just gone to the gas chambers peacefully”

I really had to think a lot about the possible solution of this issue. What I came up with was simple, the person who asks the above question actually doesn’t really understand Gandhian method. He confuses Gandhism with non-violence, but it is really important to differentiate between the two. Not all non-violence is Gandhism. Nor all civil disobedience is Gandhism. If few people want to bring Socialism(which is an inherently violent philosophy) through non-violent civil diobedience, they may or may not succeed for a short period of time, but in long term they will fail, because they are not being a Satyagrahi.

As I wrote in my previous article on Gandhian philosophy, what Gandhi managed to do was to remove the the color of righteousness from a morally wrong aggressor. If a thief steals something from someone, and then tries to be all non-violent when the person tries to take back his property through violence, then that’s not Gandhism. This is why Gandhi coined the term ‘Satyagraha’, because civil disobedience does not capture the essense of Gandhian philosophy.

Lets come back to the original question, what could Jews have done as they were standing in front of the gas chambers, consistent with the Gandhian philosophy. The answer would be NOTHING. They could not have done anything as they stood in front of the gas chambers, that is not the time to become Gandhist, its just too late. Then what is the right application of Gandhian philosophy in case of Jews in Nazi Germany? The answer is simple, the Jews in Germany should have done Satyagraha long before they were shipped to the concentration camps.

What Jews should have done is the moment Hitler gave the order that the Jews must stop owning all the businesses, the Jewish businessmen should have done Satyagraha against it. The moment the government took away the guns from the people in Nazi Germany they should have started Satyagraha against it. The moment Hitler ordered all the Jews to get registered and move to the ghettos the jews should have started Satyagraha against it. There are two possible outcomes of this situation:

1. The German government backs out and allows Jewish businessmen to continue doing businesses, allow people to own guns, give up trying to register and move Jews to ghettos, which solves our problem but is highly unlikely, knowing what we know about the history.
2. The Germany government orders shooting of the Jewish Satyagrahis or forcefully ship them to the concentration camps.

We don’t have to worry about the first outcome, so we will just discuss the second. There are some historical facts you must know about the Nazi Germany, at that particular time nobody in the world knew about the concentration camps. These gas chambers and concentration camps were not publicly known until the war ended. The only news about such atrocity were regarded as mere rumor and war gossip. When Hitler forced Germans to give up their guns, it wasn’t foreseen by anyone that he is disarming the Jewish people in some diabolical plot to eventually have his ‘Final Solution’. I am not saying that the Jews walked gladly into the concentration camps, but all I am saying is had Jewish businessmen not followed the Nazi instructions, had Jews not given up their guns so gladly for the ‘peace’ in Germany, had the Jewish people not registered and moved to the Ghettos, but instead refused to follow the orders from the exact point where they were living their lives exactly how they wanted, they would have been able to expose the Nazis WAY EARLIER, and that exposure would have been the most effective thing to do to fight against the Nazis.

When the news spread about how the Nazis shot 500 Jewish businessmen because they refused to stop owning businesses, or that they sent 1000 people to places from where they were never seen just for refusing to turn over their weapons, or that German soldiers shot 20 families inside their homes in Warsaw who refused to move to the ghettos or registered, this would have uncovered the truth of the Nazi Germany. This would have shown Jews what was coming up for them. A lot of jewish people would have still died, no doubt about that. In fact I can’t even say if more jews or less jews would die in this scenario, either way the number of people killed by the Nazis would have been much much less. It would have mobilized people against the Nazi Germany. Remember, Nazi Germany did not look as monsterous as it looks now to us. Imagine Nazi Germany just as Germany who is invading its neighboring countries without all the holocaust stuff. This is what Allies thought they were fighting during Second World War.

Conclusion

Gandhian philosophy is not applicable for the Jews already standing in front of the firing squad or gas ovens. The correct application of Gandhian philosophy is on the day when the German government first aggressed against them, when the German government wanted to take away their guns, when the German government wanted to them to move to ghettos, when the Germany government wanted them to move to concentration camps. As the aggression of Germany government increased against the Jews, the time to do anything slipped away with every new aggression. We are facing the same situation here, we trade our liberties for temporary security or peace. The UK government orders every citizen to give up their guns, and the British follow the orders, after all who wants to risk getting arrested, so people fool themselves that this will help in maintaining law and order, what they are doing is laying the ground work for another possible Hitler. Yeah the current UK government may not do anything like what Hitler did, but trust me, the new Hitler will not be racist(it won’t be Nick Griffin of British Nationalist Party, it won’t be the Klan association in US, and it won’t be Bal Thakarey in India), whomsoever it would be, you wouldn’t be able to expect him.

Today US government is installing checkpoints across the border to look for illegal immigrants. Indian government is creating a national database of all citizens and every citizen have an ID card. Whatever reasons given for these things, however rational these actions may sound, the fact is you are giving up your liberties! Once you have given up your civil liberties they are much more difficult for you to get them back. Do not give in to evil! Lets say you live in India and you think we cannot allow Indian citizens to have guns otherwise we will have a gun culture like we have in America (where our kids are shooting each other in schools). The thing is, if China attacks in India again or any foreign government for that matter, tries to disable our government and military, we will lose so many lives and property that few disturbed kids shooting each other will sound such a fair deal to the possible resistance Indian citizens could have done to a foreign invasion.

1. Was Gandhi a Libertarian – II – Author: Unpretentious Diva, Dec 8
2. Gandhigiri and Libertarianism – Dec 10– Author: Unpretentious Diva, Dec 10
3. 26 November 1938 (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 74, p. 240)

The society considers income inequality as a curse upon itself. In a general argument between a ‘Capitalist’ and a ‘Socialist’, or a ‘Liberal’ and a ‘Conservative’, generally the Socialist/Liberal individual accuses free market or Capitalism of creating economic inequality in the society. A general example given is of US society where top 1% of the people own 40% of the wealth in US(or a variation of the statistics). This makes the people who stand for free market and capitalism generally go on a defensive by either attacking the statistics, or by comparing the worst person in a ‘seemingly’ capitalist society like United States being better than most average or well rich individuals in a seemingly socialist or an equal society like North Korea and Cuba.

My point here is not to argue whether the statistics is correct or not or to argue whether poor people in United States are better than poor people in Cuba, but to see whether ‘inequality’ is a negative attribute of a society on its own.

Society with an all knowing Superman

Imagine a society where there is one human being which knows each and everything. Consider him as knowledgable as God. He knows how much exactly its going to rain or snow, how much wheat is going to be produced, how much metal is there in a gold mine, and when its going to become uneconomical to dig more gold. He knows everything, if you ask him what is the best job you could do, he could even tell you that. He has all these information of the time till he dies.¹ In a free market society this man will end up owning everything in the world. There will be no investors in the stock market but only him, he could plan the resources in such a way that it gives him maximum profit. He pulls out capital from a oil company exactly when the oil extraction will not be economical anymore and invests in alternate energy. He shorts the shares of the companies the moment its CEO tries to be dishonest or to cook the books. He bursts the bubbles and lifts up the recessions by investing in such time. Overall he owns everything in the world. Everybody works for him now.

The question which comes now ‘Is this a terrible society to live in?’, or ‘Is there something wrong with this society?’. Initial reactions would be, ‘Of course, this is a horrible society to live in, one employer and he owns everything. You can never become rich in this society. He will be consuming everything.’. But give it a little bit more thought. What this guy has managed to do is eliminate the risk from the society. There is no risk. When you start a business, you see a demand and you see a supply, and you hope to match the supply and demand and hope to undertake the leftover of that operation. In this society, all demands which can be met by supplies are already been met by this guy.

People of city A want a train to the city B, but they don’t really wanna pay enough money which facilitates the operations of a train, so they use buses instead. The day people of city A get enough fed up and decide that they would be willing to pay enough money for a ticket of this train, this Superman sends his men who start to build a railway line between city A and city B. Sure Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and all the successful Stock market Investors and businessmen would not wanna live in this economy, but common people like you and me are much better off in this city than we are in our current situations.

Imagine there are no shortages of wheat and rice, because this Superman who has the insight of demand/supply fluctuations always buys/sells the wheat and rice in such a way that maximum people are able to buy maximum amount of rice all the time. Imagine there is no stock market crash which proceeded 9/11 because this guy has already smoothed it out. Imagine no real estate bubble because when people overvalued the houses, this guy shorted them.

Is this society better?

You see the reason why the people of this society would be so much better than our current society because there is no risk in this society. Sure someone might say that you can never dream of starting a business and becoming a billionaire, well don’t forget this is a hypothetical society where we are presuming this superman knows everything. We dream over the possibilities. We don’t dream that we will go to school tomorrow, because we are pretty sure we are going to school tommorrow like every day(though we may dream of NOT going to school tommorrow for the possibility of a rain storm or something). Imagine it to be like this, on a roulette table, some people win and some people lose. If you told everyone the outcome of the game, the people who lose will never play the game, and the people who will win, now have nothing left to win from. Roulette is a zero sum game and real life is not, but in our example, if you play knowing that you will lose, you still lose and nothing changes(lets say you decide to run an airplane service from City A to B whereas they don’t really wanna pay that much, so now you lose all your money by investing in it). If you are correct on your entrepreneurship decision, and you wanna run a railway line from City A to B, you will be either beaten to it by the super investor and your train will run in a loss, or if you are really lucky you may beat the super investor to it.

Even if he lived in a socialist society, you will have to make him the central planner, performing the same functions as he did in a free market economy².

The point is that although this society may not be as thrilling to live in as our current society, it will have a lot less poverty. Except for that superman guy everybody else would be more or less equally rich.

Society with real life men

In our society there is no such human being who knows each and everything about the economy. Nobody can really be that accurate, so that situation is highly unrealistic. But it tells us something, it tells us that inequality of wealth isn’t really a objectively bad or good thing. Sure if in North Korea if Kim Jong-Il is the richest man and his family owns everything and everybody else is terribly poor then that sure is a bad kind fo inequality, but for economies with private ownership of means of production(countries with stock market), if the stock investors are the richest people then that isn’t neccessarily bad thing. It would be a bad thing if they made all their money through government coercion, like being a politician’s relative who knows which property will be picked up for Olympics stadiusm etc etc.

Conclusion

Inequality figures on their own are completely useless piece of infromation. They don’t convey any information. Someone supporting equality, or someone being egalitarian³ as in someone desiring an equal society does not say anything about them. Although whether someone supports use of violence(like supporting welfare and income redistribution schemes) or just social movement for voluntary charity is a completely different issue. Most economists in America support income redistribution and welfare programs.⁴ General trend was that the more elite institution they were affiliated from the more they supported redistribution. In an earlier article I explained why Hollywood is so leftist⁵, probably the similar mentality affects the economists.

1. I am cutting the example short so that it does not complicate the article, so imagine him knowing everything about the future till the day he dies.
2. Except theoretically he cannot plan everything in the society, so he has to choose, and you must incentivize him in some or the other manner to perform his task. Even in the free market society he has limited time so he had to choose between planning the resources by trading in the ownership of these capital goods, and spending leisure time. The huge profits ensures that he tries his best to utilize himself from most important to lesss important decisions.
3. Was Gandhi a Libertarian II – By Unpretentious Diva, considers Gandhi as an Egalitarian, an accusation author considers sufficient enough to be considered as a negative attribute.
4. In a 2003 poll of 1,000 economists, a majority of polled economists favor “redistribution”,safety regulations, gun control, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. They voted Democrat:Republican by 2.5:1
5. Why is Hollywood so Leftist? – by Renegade Division, RFL

Contrary to what a lot of people in west think about India and Gandhi, I know that not everybody in India likes Gandhi. In fact I grew up hating Gandhi because I was so much indoctrinated in statism that although the State tries its best to preach Gandhism, the obvious disjunct between being loyal to a state and being Gandhian pacifist makes no sense. Its really a funny thing that on 2nd of October each year, the government celebrates Gandhi’s birthday and Gandhian philosophy by prohibiting sale of liquor all across the nation, you might as well celebrate Valentine’s day by hanging all the intercaste lovers, Buddha’s birthday by drinking animal blood, and Channukka by saluting to Hitler. Even more funnier fact, recently someone filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court of India, requesting to make insulting Gandhi illegal and any individual who insults Gandhi be thrown in prison. People just don’t understand what Gandhian philosophy is all about.

Now when I finally understood the libertarian philosophy and the principle of non-initiation of aggression, the question which really bugs me is how do we get the liberty which we so much deserve. Its impossible to physically fight the state, its so big, and not just that, it has the most legitimacy that even though they could do the worst things to the humanity, it will all be seen in the good light of justice. I have been closely following the fight for achieving liberty in our lifetime going on in New Hampshire by the members of Free State Project. Its because of my desire to figure out the most effective way to fight the state, I have been forced to reconsider Gandhian philosophy in a new light of libertarianism.

The question in front of us is, how do we fight the mammoth in front of us. The problem isn’t only on defeating a powerful enemy, but how to eliminate a righteous enemy. Of course the state isn’t right, but it has the color of righteousness. The people believe it to be right, and just people believing that state is being excessive doesn’t solve our problems, or motivates people against the state. There are many people who believe in conspiracies regarding US government behind the 9/11 attacks, but if you ask them if should we eliminate state or eliminating the state would be a good idea to solve the problem of an evil force from our lives, most of them will answer “No, we just need to CHANGE the people in the system”.

We all realize that even if we had bigger guns than state, we could still not kill the spirit of the state, it will rise again. People would want to recreate the state. So we get this feeling that the state cannot be defeated with violence, and using violence against the state sounds like the worst possible method to fight it, but then the libertarian philosophy comes into the picture which says that its acceptable to respond to aggression with (same amounts of)aggression and not many of us really believe that if a robber comes to our house and wants to rape your wife, then allowing him to rape your wife and then turning your daughter in too, will change his mind in any way.¹

We realize that responding to a common thief with aggression makes sense, but responding to state with aggression does not make any sense. How is that? Is this an inconsistency with the libertarian philosophy(which suggests responding violence with violence as a just solution) or with the philosophy of pacifism(which suggests responding violence with non-violence).

When I reconsidered the Gandhian philosophy I realized something very important something which the Indian society and the government greatly distorts about his philosophy, that Gandhi used these philosophy against a similar environment. He was fighting a mighty British Empire which had ruled India for over 150 years until then. There were Indian soldiers in British Army, fighting FOR the government against their own people. Contrary to what we might believe, it wasn’t until 1930² that people in India made an official declaration of getting rid India of British Rule, until then it was all about home-rule or more autonomy. Until 1930 people the idea that India can be completely independent on its own was too far-fetched and radical.

The Indian people are generally very peaceful, and the call to everyone to raise weapons against the British government would not have gathered many people behind you.
What Gandhi managed to do was, he declared that he would not raise a weapon against any individual, because of this, he gained a upper moral status against the British Government. The British rule in India wasn’t really like the current US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but more like current US occupation of South Korea and Japan. People continued to live their lives, do business being unaffected by the foreign army, living under British law, courts, using roads, and railroads built by British Empire. In fact India got independence in 1947 and until 1st Jan 1930 they weren’t even fighting for completely independence. I must point it out that Gandhi had been fighting the British Rule in India since 1915, before the official declaration for complete independence, Indians were merely fighting for a self-rule, like Libertarian Party and Republican Party striving for a Small government(and call for complete independence being equal to call for no government).

When Gandhi declared that he would not commit violence against any individual, leave alone British government, he made himself more righteous than the British Government. If British Government orders to shoots a violent revolutionary, its soldiers would readily comply, they will follow the orders because in their own head they are thinking that they are preserving themselves, if they don’t shoot this violent revolutionary he will shoot them. So in their own head, it becomes a very easy decision to make. On the other hand, when the government gives the order to shoot someone like Gandhi, they don’t want to shoot a guy who would not harm an ant. Even if someone DOES end up shooting Gandhi, one fallen revolutionary may raise 10 more revolutionaries, but one fallen Gandhi, raises 1000s of people to take his place, because most people do not sympathize with the violent revolutionary, even if they do they rationalize it as he chose the path of gun, and he was shot down by a gun, but when Gandhi, a guy who chose to never commit violence, is killed by the state, then people realize that nobody is safe, there must be something greatly wrong with the state.

The British government never tried to kill Gandhi, because they understood it pretty well that if they did it, their empire will lose all its legitimacy, and the only way a few handful people can rule millions of people is through legitimacy(or the color of legitimacy).

So what is the guiding principle here, how do we establish consistency between being Gandhian and being libertarian. It all comes down to a simple principle which makes Gandhian non-violence consistent with libertarianism. If the aggressor’s right and wrong are twisted around, his polarities are reversed, if what you consider right is wrong for them, and what you consider is wrong is right for them, then there is no way you could win against them by responding to their aggression with more aggression.

Just consider it for a minute. If a thief tries to steal something you own, he knows he is committing a crime, he is trying to acquire something he does not own. If you punish him for his crime or acquire restitution, then that would be a possible way to deal with that thief. But if a government employee comes to your property to take away your house for non-payment of property taxes, he thinks he is just following the orders, and he is the righteous individual, you are the aggressor against the society by not paying your property taxes like everybody else.

If you try to punish that government employee, by trying to take away his property, him and his peers will just come after you because now its a matter of their own life and property, and they will commit more aggression against you.

If a cop tries to arrest you for some made up victim-less crime and you shoot him back, you don’t defeat the state, his son, his wife, his friends will all see him has a brave martyr shot by some violent drug dealer in the line of duty. His son would want to grow up and become like him. On the other hand, if you are a non-violent person like Gandhi and all you did was stood in front of the police station and tried to smoke some marijuana, first of all no officer would shoot you, but if some officer DOES shoot you, he ends up taking this huge guilt over his conscience whether he really stands for a right thing or not, similarly his family will see him as a murderer and not a brave police officer who shot a pacifist marijuana drug user. Even if nobody understands what you really stand for, the first question a cop’s wife would ask, ‘what wrong thing was that guy doing?’, ‘Was he selling marijuana?’, ‘Was he making profit by selling drugs?’, ‘Was he threatening your life in any way?’, and they see what really happened, nobody would really respect that cop in long term.

You will realize that Gandhi was a libertarian(there are many other libertarian things about Gandhi, but he wasn’t a statist), who mastered the art of fighting the aggressor with convoluted morals. We the contemporary libertarians have managed to figure out that the State is the aggressor, but what we have not managed to figure out is how to fight this aggressor. Everything Gandhi did, was against state. Every Gandhian principle becomes libertarian if you consider it a libertarian principle applicable against an aggressor with twisted right and wrong.

Gandhi said “If someone slaps you, don’t slap him back, but turn the other cheek around”.  Imagine it to be like this, “if a cop slaps you, don’t slap him back, but turn your other cheek around”.
Gandhi said “Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner”, imagine it to be like “Hate the State, Love the Statists or people who form the State”.

When I first started understanding these things, there were many things which did not make any sense, but over the time it all made sense. For example, there is a common objection that Gandhi was anti-technology and materialism, the truth is, Gandhi held those positions because these rules were only applicable to soldier against aggression. The state relies on punishing you by throwing you in a prison and devoiding you of all materials, if you devoid yourself of those materials, the state has left with no recourse to punish you in any way other than to come out of the cloak of morality and openly aggress against you(and like the cop who shot a peaceful marijuana protester in front of the police station) and lose all the morality and respect it claims, or to just let you go(like the British did) and let you build more people against the system.

Contrary to what you many people think, Gandhi only ran his non-cooperation movement for less than 2 years(out of his 30+ years of Satyagraha), he ended the movement in the middle long before he achieved his goals because a bunch of protesters in a small town in India, burnt a police station and many cops in it³. By cancelling the non-cooperation movement he became immensely unpopular among the extremist revolutionaries because right when the movement was going so strong Gandhi ended it. When this incident was portrayed in a Bollywood movie, this caused people watching this movie to chant anti-Gandhi slogans at the end of it. It didn’t make any sense to me, but now it does. What Gandhi did was, he took away any, and by that I mean ANY accusation British could bring upon Gandhian followers as being violent people.  If Gandhi had allowed the movement to continue and allowed more incidences of violence to go on, then that would have made the British government a good incentive to violently deal with all the people taking part in the non-cooperation movement. The wikipedia page of Chauri Chaura says “Many modern historians view the Chauri Chaura incident as a minor episode of violence, which while regrettable, did not merit the cancellation of a nation’s demand for political freedom.”, its a sad thing that most modern historians do not understand the core reason behind the philosophy of non-violence.

Gandhian philosophy of non-violence is not for weak people, but surprisingly this is a common viewpoint that Gandhian philosophy worked because it gave weak people a weapon to fight with, it is not true. Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and Satyagraha isn’t a weapon for weak people, its a weapon by which strong people eliminate the legitimacy of a powerful aggressor.

Ahimsa is the highest ideal. It is meant for the brave, never for the cowardly. – Mahatma Gandhi

1. Gandhi said that if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn your other cheek around and make your enemy realize how he is doing the wrong thing.
2. It was in 26 Jan 1930 when in Indian National Congress and Nationalists resolved that they will achieve a complete independent rule in India. Purna Swaraj declaration. Until then most of the political parties favored a dominion status for India, like South Africa, Australia, Canada, Irish Free State, New Zealand etc
3. Chauri-Chaura, Bihar

I was thinking about this the other day, about why is every major personality in Hollywood so leftist? Why is it that people who make a fortune on the Market just are so hypocritical and promote taking money from other people on the threat of violence? This was the conclusion I arrived upon that if you are a neutral individual in Hollywood there is no way you can turn out to be pro-Free Market.

Imagine if you are a rising Hollywood star. You made your first million. You rose from dire poverty/dire mediocrity, and you get a taste of wealth. You spend a lot of money, do things what you always thought you wanted to do. Maybe at this point you love the Market, or maybe not. Overall you just thank god for giving returns on all the (relative) poverty you faced over the years. Then you make millions more, and then millions more. Soon you are one of the most appreciated actors of Hollywood. You live in the limelight, and you never see anything bad.

You ponder over your life, and realize that you make all this money merely by showing up your face(or writing a story, or directing a simple movie) for a few hours on a screen. You don’t have to worry about doing anything wrong in your performance because it can always be covered up by a retake. You do good things or you do bad things you only get fame. If your sex tape gets leaked out, people don’t dump you and stop watching your movies rather they just come to your movie in an even greater numbers. You realize this and then you look at someone who is not that lucky to have happened to be born with that talent or that face. You do not consider that you could have actually worked this hard to achieve this success. The only thing which makes sense to you is that you are just too lucky than others. And this is how you see ever other hard working self-made billionaire entrepreneur. You believe that you must do something to help the unfortunate people out.

Hollywood people just happen to be the lucky people who have the face or the talent to provide us with that entertainment. Most of that earnings relies on the Govt-granted monopoly over information. Irrespective of what happens you will never find a leftist Hollywood star opposing MPAA or copyright, because they always know the effort involved behind making the movie. They just cannot ignore it.

Their whole world is basically made up of people who are the lucky people and those who are the unlucky people. Capitalism for them is just a system to reward the lucky people. They stand for all sorts of coercive redistribution of wealth and creation of big government laws not because they believe that some people have more wealth than others, rather some people have more luck than others. If a Hollywood star supports higher taxes, it is because he does not see the labor of wealth generation the entrepreneurs do. They just entertain people, so they believe businesses do not serve any utility to the people.

Similarly a lot of these things happen with the super rich billionaires, for example George Soros, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Bill Gates recently made a call for creation of a “Creative Capitalism” or “Compassionate Capitalism”, and it was a big blow to all the non-billionaire capitalists out there and it angered everyone considering he built his capital based on Capitalism. If now suddenly he wants creative capitalism or compassionate capitalism then he should start with making all Microsoft technologies open source.

The hollywood elites earn so much wealth that they now think they are just much more luckier than other people. It is true to a lot of extent, but then the problem is that they perceive every other hard working entrepreneur as much of a lucky individual as they are. There was one exception in Hollywood and that was Ronald Reagan who stood for lower taxes for rich people, because he himself never was super rich. He just was rich, before he could enjoy that super richdom he got enlisted in the US army and then he joined Politics.

Neerav Said:
You seem to be very strongly jaundiced against the government and India’s system of government controlled economy(finding it unethical to work for the government!!). So be it!
Me being a callow in the field of capitalistic economy or the open economy, can u please answer some of questions in order to enlighten me about “the only panacea to India’s problems-open market”? Please I insist!

It is called the ‘Free Market’, which means market operations without any interference from the government. That includes no regulations, no taxes, no subsidies, and no distortion of the market in any way or form.

1). Where were these business bazigars when over 100,000 farmers in India committed suicide in last one year?
(one cannot question IAS because they cannot decide whether to give a subsidy to farmers at all! they can only survey and ‘suggest’ how much to be given) and why did my philanthropic business friends exacerbated the wounds of these farmers by selling the agricultural products at such higher prices!
Even for dying these farmers had to use the pesticide the government is selling for free!
On the other hand there was a market crash on the Dalal street? The then finance minister had to jet to Mumbai to console the many businessmen who had just lost crores of ‘notional’ money. Since the fortune of a farmer has lesser zeroes, so their lives also became less important!

First of all I would want to point out that the reader has completely misunderstood my post about the uselessness of IAS officers. The reader thinks that IAS Officers are these Angels descended from heaven and they have been taught by the other Angels as their teachers in the IAS academy. These Indian Angel Services Officers perform social services, create hospitals for poor from their money, distribute clothes among poor people, and give anti-depression medicines to poor farmers to prevent them from committing suicide. Then the reader compares their benevolence with the lack of benevolence of businessmen in India. Even if the reader does know what IAS officers do he is comparing what IAS officers do not do with what the business man should have been doing according to him.

If 100,000 farmers died in India last year, how is it responsibility of the businessmen. What were the IAS officers doing? If its anybody’s responsibility other than the farmers themselves then its the responsibility of the IAS officers as they are the part of the government. Why didn’t the IAS officers spend millions of their Rupees to save these farmers? Clearly the reader expects the ‘business bazigars’ to spend that money from their pocket.

Anyways the reason why I did not really bother to answer the question is because of the questions being heavily loaded with rhetoric. What we need is private property rights on agricultural land. Farmers cannot easily sell their land to someone who could be better in producing wheat over a land of 10,000 acres. Just like we do not have a million cell phone companies in market, somehow we believe a million farms to produce food for so many people. All these rhetorics are raised by P Sainath and we have already responded to P Sainath here.

Famers die in Vidharbha

2) Wasn’t it the profit motive that actually RUNS the open economy was also the reason behind the cases like Bofors case or the cheap spare parts of MIG case(which killed many of our soldiers who unlike u and me go to war & try to keep us safe by working with the government)? If politicians were caught during the Tehelka case-who bribed them. THE OWNERS OF THE OPEN ECONOMY’!

The reason why a baker provides you with bread is not because he is benevolent upon you, but because he wants goods for himself like Clothes, housing, medical care, education for his kids which he cannot do all these things himself. So he specializes in baking bread for you. A tailor specializes in sewing clothes for people, a carpenter specializes in building houses for people, and all these people try to make profits because if a tailor does not make profit on his clothes then this means he spent more on buying cloths and got less for the clothes and soon he will become bankrupt and will be left with no money. I suggest you to read my article What are Profits? to read an explanation of the whole concept from me and the Importance of Economic Calculations to understand the necessity to do every operation to maximum profit.

Profit motive runs the free market. Government is not Free Market. Government tries to do things which are anti-free market like taking the monopoly on justice and defense system. When government has a monopoly over something, like providing defense to a large land mass like India, they will have the power to choose any private entrepreneur for supplying them with commodities, then the corruption is bound to happen. It is not the fault of the Bofors gun manufacturers that your politicians are corrupt. They are corrupt because you gave them all the power of monopoly. The Bofors salesman is still doing his honest job when he offers the politician a bribe.

If you really want the solution of corruption in defense sector I suggest privatization of defense sector.

3) Somebody blamed the IAS for the license raj. I agree with that person completely. But who is responsible for the Mafia raj?
let me answer this one!- it’s those business barons who want to control your open economy.

The government is responsible for Mafia Raj. IAS officers do not make decisions I understand that, but they are the enforcement arm of the Indian Government. His answer is clearly wrong because he doesn’t understand why Mafia exists. Mafia exists because there is a profit opportunity in the economy which was created by the government by banning the good people from making use of that profit opportunity.

Currently the good people of Reliance, Airtel and Tata are providing people with cell phone services, but if tomorrow the government bans cell phones from India, then that will give birth to a Mafia Raj in telecom industry. Since police with their weapons is chasing peaceful people who perform their business with peace, only the evil people with guns who could retaliate the police are left. Suddenly Chota Rajan will find it quite profitable to run the telecom companies, since people want telecom services, they will be willing to pay high amount of money to him, and these increased profits will allow the mafia people to bribe the politicians to safeguard them. The reason why we had Veerappan because the Sandlewood forest weren’t owned by any individual. Since police hunted down any individual who tried to do business in sandlewood, only the evil man with the gun was left to do the same. I hate to suggest you more articles but I spent a lot of time researching this one.

Prohibition Always kills more people than non-prohibition

4)What is wrong with United Nations that its surveys are saying that in the developed countries (i mean open economies like US and UK), the barrier is constantly increasing between the rich and the poor,that is, the rich (owners of the open economy) become richer and the poor become poorer.

Its a very misrepresented fact. Let me ask the reader this, if in one country almost everyone has a salary of Rs 1,000 per month and in another country 90% of the people have a salary of Rs 50,000 per month and 10% have a salary of Rs 10,00,000 per month, in which country people are better off? In the first country almost everybody has the same salary, there is no major difference between the rich and the poor, where as in the second country the rich is 20 times richer than the poor individual.

The truth is that the difference between the rich and the poor is as useless fact as the fact that in your school the class topper has 50 times more marks than the class loser. If in a class everybody got marks between 50-60%, is this classroom better than a class where the range is 5–95%? The fact is that some people work harder, and better than others. In the Capitalist economics the better workers keep on climbing up to managing more and more resources(unlike in an IAS exam where the more butts you kiss the more you progress), and they become more and more rich.

Take for example in America Warren Buffett manages billions of dollars worth of resources, there is no way an IAS exam could rightly identify his talent. There is no IAS officer who could do his job better than him. When you look at Warren Buffet you just see an investor, what we see is what he really is, he is a Capitalist planner who plans resources from his own money. He plans resources, his companies order glasses from one country, water from another country, mixes them and sells carbonated drinks all over the world.

If the reader want to be like Warren Buffet instead of some bureaucrat and if you really want to save some lives from those poor farmers who committed suicide then try to get into commodity futures. Help Poor farmers, speculate on grain Futures.

5) What is the motive behind the kidney scams and our poachers? isn’t it just profit?

Again, all the problems the reader is blaming on the profit motive are actually problems created by the government. The government has banned a market in organs. So only the evil people are left to serve such a huge demand. They serve it by performing these illegal activities. If he wants the kidney robberies to stop then allow free trading of human organs. Those who want to buy the organs will then legitimately buy it from the person who willingly want to sell it. Please read the Prohibition article I posted³.

He is blaming the profit motive as if it is something really evil. Remember something if we do not have profit we will not be able to survive. This is the exact reason why none of the socialist countries seem to be diong any good. This is the reason why Soviet Union had such a massive scarcity of every commodity. Why don’t we all eat in gold utensils? Because the economic calculation tells us that Gold could be better used somewhere else than to a less economical(or profitable) use such as having dinner.

1. Wanna be IAS Officers, read this, http://www.reasonforliberty.com/india/wannabe-ias-officers-read-this.html
2. Comment made by Neerav
3. Prohibition Always kills more people than non-prohibition

One of the strongest arguments used by the Intellectual Property(IP) supporters is that patents promote innovation, and the strong counterargument by the IP opponents is, that patents stifle innovation, and that once patents are removed we will have more innovation, considering the fees which will not be spent on securing patents and hiring patent attorneys. The reason why I used the term ‘strong’ and ‘strongest’ because both the sides acknowledge that there is some weight on the argument of the other side. The question is, overall do patents promote innovation or will removal of patents promote innovation? To analyze the arguments, we need to perform small though experiments.

Society with very strict IP Rights

To exaggerate the observation, we need to consider a radically different society. Lets presume a society(say on the planet Mars) where every intellectual property is tangible like real property. For example, if you discovered a specific way to cover your body with a cloth(say you made a Shirt) then the only way I can also wrap myself with a cloth in that way is by taking your permission, otherwise it will be stealing, because then you will not be able to wear shirt the same way. If I discover a new term say ‘liberty’ then anyone who wants to use that term, must take my permission(usually granted for a specific fee) or else you will devoid me from using that term and it will be just like the theft of real property.

In this society every time a couple gets married, in addition to gifting them various physical products like a coffee maker or a toaster, people gift licenses to various recipes, as making a recipe without the prior permission of its creator will be theft. To write a book on the various topics, the publisher has to clear every possible term for its license. If you want to use the term ‘liberty’ and its definition is ‘the condition in which an individual has a right to act according to his or her own will’, then either need to get license from the creator of the term liberty(which would be the current descendents of John Stuart Mill), or you need to coin your own term which should be different from ‘liberty’ but convey the same meaning, like ‘liberty22’ which defines as ‘the condition in which an individual has a right to act according to his will without infringing on the rights of less than 5 million people’. Now presuming that your lawyers are able to defend this term as different from ‘liberty’, it basically conveys the same intention to the readers as the term ‘liberty’.

You will realize that in this society, there are a million different food recipes, a million different languages, billions of terms and words in languages, millions of different clothing items. As you can see this society would have much more ‘innovation’ than our current society, after all we only have a few 100 recipes in any cuisine, only a few hundred thousand words in any language, and if someone coins a term, it is used for so many things.

The truth is, that we can all see that although this society will have a very wide variety of innovation, it will suffer from two things, first the poor people will be devoid of so many things, the poor people will not be able to build efficient houses, because they cannot buy the licenses, they cannot eat variety of dishes, the poor kids will have to arrange for a lot more money because the education will be so costly. Secondly, although this society will have a lot more ‘variety’, we can see that it will lack the advanced technologies. For example, there will be 200 different types of semiconductor devices, but instead of having a million devices created out of one semiconductor device(like transistors) we will have only a few hundred different types of electronic devices. We will have hundreds of different words for describing ‘gravity’, but very little number of people who actually understand advanced concepts because they are using their brain cells to store 100 different terms for gravity, rather than 100 advanced usages of gravitational force.

Society with no IP Rights

Lets presume a society with no concepts of intellectual property, in fact there are no property rights at all as everything is intangible like information. If you have a loaf of bread then to give it to me all you need to do is show it to me, and I will close my eyes, wish it and I will get my own loaf of bread. If I like your lawn mower then all I have to do is close my eyes, wish it and I will be able to conjure it to me.

Its obvious that there will be a loss less starvation in this society, all we will have to do is conjure food for the poor people and they will be able to eat. If you need an computer or a television you just have to wish for it and you will get it. The only thing scarce in this society will be the time, that is you just have to do the work of choose what you wanna wish for and then you move on to enjoying that product.

What will happen to the innovation in this society? Its obvious that there is no incentive to do so many variety of things. There are no factories to mass produce a product, this means that the only job people do is either consuming the products, or invent new products out of their own need to do something different. The houses will all look the same, except for the rich people who would still wanna spend some money to have their houses look different(which will be immediately copied all over by poor people if they are given an access to their houses).Every product in the society will basically be the same except they will be personalized by each individual according to their own taste.

The development of technology in this society will be quite straightforward. There will be rarely two kinds of alternate technologies, for example if a cell phone is developed then all the other cell phones will be only personalized forms of this cell phone, until a stage is reached when personalization of personalization pass through hands of a geek who tweaks it to an iPhone, and so on. The biggest force behind the innovation in such a society will be a human need for variation. People want variations in their lives. Every technology in this society will be achieved through humans who voluntarily want to give their labor into developing something new, when they know they are not acquiring monopoly on the usage of that technology or property. An iPhone-like phone in this world may or may not be developed, we don’t know. But we do know that if it is developed no single company has to spend millions of dollars in developing it. The question ‘who will spend millions of dollars to develop a product without patents’ will never arise. There are no products in this world, there are no corporations producing these products, because they don’t really have to.

Vertical vs Lateral Innovation

There is clearly some reduction of innovation and some increase in innovation in both a society with patents and without patents, but none of sides(the pro– and anti– IP people) seem to realize this. There are no clear definition of what kinds of innovations are promoted by patents and what kinds of innovations are not. So lets define these two innovations, Vertical Innovation, and Lateral Innovation.

Vertical Innovation is when a new product is innovated based on merely a small amount of added new technology, for example adding the facility of watching videos on an MP3 player, or adding a new metal on an alloy best suited for making railway tracks which now reduces its ability to expand and contract in heat and in cold, or creating an AIDS vaccination by using the results, effects, and formulas of 10 different immunity vaccines.

Lateral Innovation is when a new product is developed which provides same functionality as a previously existing product but it tries to achieve that in a different manner. For example a new motorcycle is developed which uses fluids load-balancing(just making it up) for more stability because a motorcycle is already developed and it is patented, or a new type of Fan is developed which is embedded in a box because the regular fan is already developed and patented.

Patents only promote Lateral Innovation, and allow very slow vertical innovation, on the other hand a non-patent society promotes vertical innovation and allows very slow lateral innovation. Is either of them better than the other? Well the truth is, although you could make an equally strong case for the need of lateral innovation(or even a mixture of both by promoting a limited patent system), you cannot argue about the fact that a non-IP rights society allows its products to be reached by more and more people. If lateral vs vertical innovation was the only point of debate then there is literally no reason to choose one over the other, but the truth is, we live in the world of scarcity. We have property rights in tangible things only because if I create a loaf of bread, only one person can consume it, so its necessary to exclude others from consuming that loaf and give its ownership to its creator, but if that loaf of bread could be copied and distributed among millions of people and thereby satisfying the hunger of all those men, then forcing exclusion of other individuals from consuming it is just inhumane.

Its true that if you put your labor into an idea then you should be allowed to consume the fruits of it, but the only reason why you put that much labor into that idea(or innovation or discovery) is because you were excluded from using someone else’s labor. Intellectual Property is a classic solution created by the problem itself, just like everything else in the world done by the government.

Please please help…I wanna be a honest IAS officer….?
I wanna be a honest officer, but the thought of challenges posed by corrupt politicians pushes me back.
Is IAS a good and clean career?
I wanna serve the nation, but what if politicians don’t allow me to do so?
What is politicians interference in IAS officers work? Can IAS officer rejects politicians decision?
Please help! Can I prepare for this humongous exam? Is there any honest IAS officers in India?

I wanna be one of them. Are there any honest politicians? Name them i wanna work with them.

I answered this to him, and my answer was chosen by him the best answer with a 5 star rating by the asker:

If you wanna serve your nation then create some Capital!

We don’t need another bureaucrat, please.

Trying to become IAS officer to serve the country is like trying to serve women by becoming a rapist. It just doesn’t fit in.

My life as an average Indian is not improved by another IAS officer(honest or dishonest is irrelevant), my life is much more improved by an entrepreneur who can create wealth, like Azeem Premji and Narayan Murthy.

Creating wealth uplifts the hard working people of India, it makes the society better.
Becoming an IAS officer on the other hand is just another way to get authority and things for free. I know this because I know a lot of people who want to go to IAS.

You wanna serve your country, be a businessman, try to get rid of all the shackles around the businesses in India.

Being honest or dishonest is irrelevant, in fact the more dishonest you are, better it is for the public.

Make govt offices efficient: Bribe Them!

1. Wikipedia, Indian Administrative Services
2. Yahoo Answers! Plz plz help…wanna be a honest ias officer….?

I have seen “The Matrix”, and I have read numerous fiction on how a day will come when machines will be able to take over the mankind. I hardly think there are many technology savvy people who disagree that such a day will come, its just they differ on whether the day will come soon, or it will take its own sweet time so nobody has to worry about it. I am going to present a very novel viewpoint on this situation. My view is that this day will never come. How did I come to such a conclusion? I would like to thank Ludwig Von Mises’s Human Action for that.

Human Action

Mises gave his theory of Praxeology based on the science of human action. Consider Praxeology to be the Economics which tries to describe the science of human action. To understand Praxeology Mises describes the fundamentals of Human Action. Most modern day economics suffer from misunderstanding of Human Action axioms.  Since this article is not about bashing mainstream economics I will move on to what Human Action axioms are.

1. Humans have desires.
2. Humans have means to achieve those desires.
3. Humans act because they believe that by acting they will be able to achieve their ends by the means they have.

That’s it. This in the most simplistic manner explains the whole basis of human action. We have desires, we have means to achieve those desires and we act to achieve those desires by the means we have.

A milkman has a desire of eating cookie. A baker has a desire of drinking milk. The milkman has the means, his milk. The baker has the means, the cookies. So the milkman and baker act to achieve their desires using the means they have and they exchange their milk and cookies.

A milkman wants to fly. But the milkman has no means to achieve his end. So the milkman cannot act to achieve his end of flying in the sky.

A wheat farmer wants an iPhone.  The wheat farmer has the means(5 tonnes of wheat) to achieve that end. But the wheat farmer does not act because he desires a house and a doctor’s services more than he desires the iPhone(presuming by buying iPhone he cannot achieve  his desire of a house and doctor’s services).

Automaton Action

The problem with the machines taking over theory is that it makes the same mistake what mainstream economists do about human action.  They fail to understand that machines cannot have desires on their own. A machine cannot have survivalistic tendency like humans do unless its programmed into it. A machine does not want to feed itself(fuel itself) unless its programmed to do so. If I could write the Machine Action axioms:

1. Machines do not have desires unless its programmed to have those desires.
2. Machines have means to achieve the desires it was programmed to achieve.
3. Machines act because they are programmed to act.

To elaborate the last point, even a machine fully capable of thinking is actually programmed to think, it is programmed to act, it may not be programmed to precisely choose what the act upon, but it is designed to act. Now you could say that what if we program and design machines who think exactly like humans wouldn’t then we will be getting evil machines which try to take over the humans?

The problem with this argument is that humans act because they want to achieve their ends which are their desires. Humans act because they want to rest in leisure at the end of the action. Humans want pleasure. Its true that we can program machines to have desires and feelings just like man, but then this machine would be the weakest machine on the earth. We find machines scary because they are powerful than us. We humans cannot work for more than 8–10 hours in stretch(and that too not for long), in fact we work as long as the work of next hour is more costly to us than the leisure of the next hour, so if any individual who is capable of working for 20–24 hours without a break, then that individual is much more powerful than us, as he does not have the same desires as us. Fortunately there are no such humans.

On the other hand a machine which acts like humans, which works only for 8–10 hours, which shows whims for working is actually quite weak of a machine. Imagine you wake up next morning and your toaster refuses to toast your breads, then you have to spend 20 minutes petting the toaster and then the toaster becomes happy and toasts you some bread. This machine will be so useless for all practical purposes that its better to hire a human for that job. This means that nobody would actually design a machine(and employ) which has the same desires and whims as humans. The whole point of having a machine is to be better than humans.

It is the same reason why machines will never suddenly “develop the logic” to take over the mankind. Machines who have the same desires as humans will not be deployed anywhere. Machines who do not have the same desires as humans will not dream(so to say) to take over the mankind. They will perform the same action which they are programmed to perform.

Bugs

Being a programmer myself I know its nearly impossible to write a code which has no bugs. Even long after you have developed the code, and deploy it in real world, you still will find a few bugs here and there. So is it possible that some machine gets a bug(or some logic which the programmer did not see) and the machines conclude that they need to enslave the human race to serve their purpose. Machines will still be performing their original intended task, but at the same time they will be harming the mankind. Lets say you created bots which dig for oil, and then found out that Saudi Arabia has oil in it so they decided to invade Saudi Arabia for oil, or they started to steal oil from somewhere where they shouldn’t.

Although this threat is quite realistic, a bug which makes robots take over mankind is highly unlikely. If a company deploys 10,000 robots in the households all over, and suddenly a bug causes them all to take over their masters simply shows how weak the programming of those bots are. Since the threat of robots harming human is really high therefore the robot companies will spend extensive amount of money on the logic ensuring the safety of humans. The probability of a bug causing this is really really low. The bugs which are more probable and might still damage the humans are, bugs which causes robot to put the baby into the laundry chute, instead of on the cradle. And these bugs are merely accidents and there is no escape out of it. The threat is no more than accidental gun deaths, pets killing their masters accidentall etc etc.

Virus

Now comes the issue of someone actually programming a machine or a robotic army to kill and destroy all humans. Or some robot which hacks into pentagon’s robots and makes them initiate nuclear attacks. Although logically its very possible. But the reason why this will not be a wide scale effect because of the fact that the defending machines will also be equally powerful and will have the same resources at their disposal. A computer virus is a program written specifically with the intent to harm other softwares. A computer virus can be written which hacks in and stops all the life supporting systems in hospitals, killing thousands and thousands of people. But if you look around, you will find that its not happening. Hackers(which are smart humans) cannot break into Pentagon’s servers and initiate nuclear war.

Even if a hacker can make use of a bug and enter into the deepest level of Pentagon security, the sophisticated systems are programmed to handle a major breach by using human elements and mixing them together. If a hacker can write a robot which can think for itself and continues to hack into the security, then the Pentagon can also write a bot which can think for itself and defend itself. So eventually the whole scenario will be no different than the current viruses vs anti-viruses war. Its been on since a long time and there is no end of the virus vs anti-virus war. Some people will always program their bots with malicious intentions to attack and take over the other robots, but then the robots programmed to defend and fix the infected robots will be equally good and efficient in managing the problems.

Conclusion

There will be a lot more deaths(and lives saved) by the machines, by bugs, accidents, viruses etc etc in the coming time. But the threat of machines taking over mankind is way overblown. Just like your internet banking account is protected by a software and there are malicious software out there always trying to hack into it, there will be real robots trying to rob a bank, but then the banks will also have real robots protecting itself. We have a web server software which serves websites all day long, and just like it is programmed not to start acting up on itself, in future we will have an automaton which is programmed not to start stealing money at his job as a bank cashier. The rogue robots will be as successful as the current hacking softwares in damaging our economy and infrastructure.

If you are a loyal reader of this blog you know that two of the major contributor of this blog greatly disagree with each other over the issue of legitimacy of Intellectual property rights.¹² I for one am against intellectual property rights, and I have tried my share to convince my co-author towards my viewpoint. I believe that upto some extent I have managed to convince her, except for I guess patent laws for innovation in Pharmaceutical industry³. But this article is not about whether copyrights are justified or not, in this article I want to convince the readers to utilize the innovation supporting framework of Creative Commons licensing which exists within copyright framework, and release their works under this licensing.

Copyrights Model

Under the copyrights model you release a work of your labor under the Copyright license as defined by your government. Most of the copyrights licenses over the world are similar to each other, and they grant the author/creator exclusive rights to use and sell that work. If a non-copyright holder wants to utilize the the copyrighted work, for commercial or personal uses then he must take the permission from the copyright holder to use that product. For personal usage, this permission is usually granted through the sale of the individual copies of the work. For example when you buy a book you are given the right of reading that book for personal use by the author. If you want to print that book and sell it, then you will need special permissions from the author. If you want to translate that book into another language, if you want to create a movie on that book, if you want to use the characters of that book, you will need special permissions from the author.

Creative Commons Model

In the Creative Commons licensing model, you first acquire the copyright of your work(as I mentioned earlier, its a framework within a framework), and then you let go of some rights on your work. For example you could allow people to use your work as long as they attribute it to you, use it for non-commercial purposes, and release the derivative work under a similar license, or you could release a work under Attribution license which means the user must attribute the usage back to you(otherwise he could do whatever he or she wants with it). A list of these rights which can be released on their own or in a combination with others are:

• Attribution (by) – Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
• Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
• ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

For a detailed explanation please refer to the Wikipedia entry on Creative Common licenses⁴

Choose Creative Commons over Copyright

If you are a content creator, that is you write for a living, you are an architect, you are a rising or an established music artist, then all your creations are automatically covered under copyright. As a copyright holder only you can release your creation under a CC license. I am going to cover these cases of each individual content creators as examples and their reasonings on choosing CC over Copyright mode.

1. Architect: If you are an architect, then releasing your architectural designs under CC licenses benefits you more than anything. There are a very little things which change for you. Your work can be freely copied and distributed among students and other architects, and they all will bear your name underneath it. Even if you allow commercial usage of your designs, there is little in there for another architect to benefit from your design, at max he can modify your works and charge only the derivation fees from a client. Customers can freely build based on your designs, but then who really wants to create another Sears Tower in the same city, if a customer really likes your design, and wants to build his building exactly like that, chances are he will do it in a far enough city, from the original constuction and it will only spread your name, as the building will bear “Designed by: <your name>”.
   Even if you allow the least restrictive licensing of CC(that is as long as you are attributed all the usages are allowed, including commercial and derivates), no matter who uses that design to build their own, they will need to put your name over it as “Original Design: <your name>”. If you think this will enable someone from using your design and not attributing you, well then it does not prevent anyone from using your design under a copyright license either. You are free to form any commercial deals with any individual as long as you don’t grant them exclusive rights of your design.
   Warning: If you release a design under Creative Commons license, you cannot revoke it, that designs is now a part of the public domain. If you rely on selling same design to many many individuals, then don’t expect some profits which you usually would expect in a copyright model, although if you are the only Creative Commons architect in the city, then expect the city to be mapped out only in your designs. If you have never resold a design to more than one client, then this is ok.
2. Writer: If you are a budding writer, then releasing your works under Creative Commons allows the wider audience to be able to read your works. Consider this, you are not famous, but you release your work under Creative Commons license under which the general public is able to read your works. If someone decides to use your short story for their story collection(presuming you allowed commercial use of your work) then it gives you the fame, and more people are now going to know you. If someone wants to put your novel on their website they are free to do so as long as they are not selling it(if you chose it that way),this way more and more readers will come to know about your works.
   If you are already an established writer, then releasing your next major work under Creative Commons license(providing you don’t already have an agreement which prevents you from doing so), helps you reach more and more readers. I cannot comment on the amount of money you will make by releasing it under CC license, but you will be more famous than ever.
   Warning: If you release a book under Creative Commons license, you cannot revoke it, that book is now a part of the ever increasing public domain. If you are a writer to make money, then Creative Commons has nothing much to offer, but i
   f you are a writer because you love writing, then there is no better way to show your love for your readers than to release it under a CC license. There is no way of actually telling whether you will be making more money or less, but then be the first one to experiment.
3. Musician: If you are a music artist, then considering the massive monopoly a few artists have over the music industry you have a little chance of achieving any real success. If you get signed by a major recording label, you can become famous, otherwise there is little chance for you to achieve any major success. If you belong to a less famous genre(for example Goth-Metal, Reggaeton, or say Metal in India), then even a major recording labels will not come near you considering the small market for such music. If you release your music under a Creative Commons license you allow your music to be freely shared over the internet, used by podcastes, posted on the blogs, etc etc. Your chances of being heard by more and more people greatly increases. There is a great website for musicians who want to release their music under Creative Commons licences and that is Jamendo(http://www.jamendo.com/). Whether you are a music artist, or just a music lover, there is a great amount of music on that website which is freely available for download. If you would like to use any of those music for your production, there is a very easy and fast licensing process on Jamendo PRO! If you are going to create a youtube video and need a track go to Jamendo and freely download any track you like and use it freely in your personal non-commercial production.
   Nine Inch Nails(NIN) is the most famous band ever to experiment with Creative Commons licensing.⁵ They have managed to reach way more audience by their CC licensed music than they would have had they released the albums under the restrictions of Copyright.
   Warning: If you release a music piece under Creative Commons, you cannot revoke it, that music is now a part of the public domain. Other than that, if you are reading this blog post, chances are you aren’t really as famous as Metallica or Michael Jackson. If you want to stick with the Copyright model and want to be as rich as a Rock Star, go ahead, but let me warn you, the copyright model is failing miserably in the Music industry. People still go and buy paper novels because they like to hold the book in their hands, but the copyright model in music industry is on a demise. Release your music under Creative Commons on Jamendo, and post your link on the commens, and we will guarantee a few loyal listeners to you if not much.

I have tried to create a utilitarian argument for individuals to release their work under a lesser restrictive licensing scheme. But to be honest, the biggest reason why I support avoiding the use of Copyright is because I believe that copyright is only possible through government coercion. A free market will never prevent an individual from using his property in any manner shape or form by creating and respecting artificial property rights. If you are a liberty loving individual, then none of the above listed pros and cons should matter to you, just go ahead and pick up the least restrictive CC license for your next work and share ideas with the whole world. One of the biggest reason why in India we had an IT revolution is because of the lack of copyright enforcement in software industry, we learned to work on the most costliest software and ideas flew freely. Our whole IT industry is a service based industry, and there is little development of commercial software in India. We will not see software development of commercial products for a long time(well as long as American government keeps on creating artificial innovation in America through the artificial monopoly of IP rights).

We have released all contents on this blog under Creative Commons license, our reason is simple, if you like the content, and want to post it somewhere else, do it, but make sure to attribute it back to our site. The more people read about rationality and liberty, the better it is for us. If you would like to print our articles and distribute them for free among other people, please feel free to do so. If you would like to work on our articles and create a better version or your own version of those articles, feel free to do it as long as you link it back to us. Personally speaking I find nothing more smug than petty bloggers putting heavy handed copyright notices in their blog posts, or worse putting “DO NOT COPY” notices on their blogs.

1. Legal or Illegal : Copyright Violations
2. Violation of Copyrights is illegal
3. Patent laws:Beneficial or Bane
4. Creative Commons Licenses, Wikipedia
5. Nine Inch Nails Ghost I-IV

American experiment with Prohibition
In 1919 after public demand, the constitution of United States was modified to ban the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption as 18th Amendment¹. Women groups such as Women’s Christian Temperance Union, had been pivotal in bringing about national Prohibition in the United States of America, believing it would protect families, women and children from the effects of abuse of alcohol.

The proponents of Prohibition had believed that banning alcoholic beverages would reduce or even eliminate many social problems, particularly drunkenness, crime, mental illness, and poverty, and would eventually lead to reductions in taxes. Until 1920s the Mafia groups were only limited to illegal gambling and thievery but after the prohibition there was a massive scope of profits in the black market. So the organized crime rose in America.

The situation became so bad that the lawmakers repealed the 18th Amendment in 1933 by 21st Amendment which made alcohol and liquor legal in US again.
Organized crime lost almost all its profit of the black market when alcohol was made legal in 1933.

J D Rockafeller(American businessman) wrote at the end of the prohibition era:

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

As it turns out that people get more drunk, and the mafia becomes more stronger. This experiment of banning a perfectly legitimate commodity fails pretty much everywhere.

1950s-80s Gold and Import restrictions in India

Bombay had the biggest underworld in India, because that’s where the import of the prohibited items came to from the rest of the world. Dawood Ibrahim, Haji Mastan, Chota Rajan, Chota Shakeel, they all were smugglers(illegal importers) in the starting. Then police started hunting them and they started acquiring more and more weapons, powers and became more and more brutal.

Mumbai underworld mostly imported gold, western watches, weapons, drugs and electronic items. The huge profit margins created by the cheap gold prices outside India, and artificially increased prices in India, helped them hire the whole Police department for themselves. They kept politicians in their pocket. Now since import restrictions are gone, the underworld has been decimated, and the police inspectors take false credit for encount killing the underworld. The truth is, if the smuggling business was still profitable(that is India was still not liberalized) then these same cops would have been on don’s salaries.

Coal Mafia of Bihar

Although not exactly an example of a commodity trading ban, it explains how govt creates lawlessness by facilitating only the lawless people do trades of some commodities. Bihar the most mineral richest state of India(by Bihar I mean current Bihar+Jharkhand), and it has India’s largest coal, but you cannot mine coal freely, you cannot own the coal mines, and all the coal mines must be owned by the government. The government then contracts it out to the various private organizations. Since there is no individual claiming the ownership of the mines, this results in private individuals and government officials digging coal and selling it in black market. Govt orders their police officers to hunt down the peaceful businessmen who would have provided the coal in a more peaceful and consistent manner to the market, soon there are only organized criminals left in the business of coal mining. Because of the manipulation of market there is a huge arbitrage opportunity, and these Coal mafia organizations acquire power to own the police and the state government.

From Wikipedia page on Coal Mafia² :

The state-owned coal mines of Bihar (now Jharkhand after the division of Bihar state) were among the first areas in India to see the emergence of a sophisticated mafia, beginning with the mining town of Dhanbad. It is alleged that the coal industry’s trade union leadership forms the upper echelon of this particular arrangement, and employs caste allegiances to maintain its power. Pilferage and sale of coal on the black market, inflated or fictitious supply expenses, falsified worker contracts and the expropriation and leasing-out of government land have allegedly become routine. A parallel economy has also developed with a significant fraction of the local population employed by the mafia in manually transporting the stolen coal for long distances over unpaved roads to illegal mafia warehouses and points of sale.

This is a clear reason behind the failure of a mineral rich state such as Bihar.

Sandalwood smuggler Veerappan

Again we repeat the same story as in Bihar coal mines. Only the govt wants the rights to be able to cut the Sandalwood forests for its Sandalwood(which has a huge price in International Market). There is no private property rights over the sandalwood forests of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Naud. Because no individual owns these forests, and there being a huge profit margin for anyone who wants to cut them and sell them in the International Market, many independent illegal sandalwood smugglers and wildlife poachers sprung up. Soon the government had them arrested or killed for such activities. This lead to the rise of the most brutal bandit of those jungles, Veerappan. Veerappan earned $22 million dollars from sandalwood and $2 million from killing some 200 elephants for their ivory. He killed around 180 men in his lifetime.

Although Veerappan was very much liked among the local people, the situation could have been worse. Had these forests owned by private individuals, and if there were no restrictions on the trading of Sandalwood, Ivory and other animal products the forests wouldn’t have eroded that fast, and Veerappan would not have been born.

Drug prohibition in United States

Currently in USA there is a massive demand of drugs, but the govt puts severe restrictions on it. This demand has to be fulfilled from somewhere. Initially local drug dealers tried to fulfil the demand, but Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA) agents with their M16s and sophesticated technology hung the drug dealers, but irrespective of how much money they spend on fighting it, it just increases the profit margins of some of the most lawless people.
There is a brutal war going in Mexico right now.³
Mexican drug cartels which supply drugs to United States and Canada, these people have assault rifles, military-style semiautomatic rifles, hand grenades, and a variety of other military weapons.

This is what you give birth to when you try to restrict peaceful transactions like trading drugs, gold, watches, sandalwood.
The point I am trying to make here is, that Indian govt achieves great advantage when it keeps all the power in its hands, and blames the corruption of its components on the individuals placed on those positions.
You can keep on replacing the Train Conductors for next 1000 years but you still will not be able to have honest train conductors as long as they have the power of monopoly and free market’s competitive forces cannot touch them.
On the other hand, you eliminate the monopoly of Dept of Telecom(DoT) and you suddenly have honest linemen who refuse to accept bribes(I have tried bribing BSNL employees them they didn’t take it).

The solution for liquor deaths is not stricter punishment for those who are caught in the trade(as the Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi has suggested), but to remove all the restrictions on consensual acts between adults. There isn’t a single commodity in the the market which should be banned from trading or restricted in any way. The usual response to this suggestion is “Should we follow every policy based on the fear of the growth of Mafia?”, the answer of this is Mafia is organized criminals, they are essentially businessmen who grow based on the profits they acquired by peforming the transactions the government tries to prohibit everyone from doing. If that profit goes away, the mafia becomes weak. If that profit increases(because the government prevents more and more people from doing it thereby increaseing the profits by killing off the supply), Mafia becomes stronger and stronger.

There is no possible way to prohibit something by the use of force. The only way by which something can be prohibited successfully is to convince people to give things up voluntarily. The best example of that kind of prohibition is non-usage of beef in India and pork products in Islamic countries.

1. Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
2. Wikipedia entry on Coal mafia
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War

As you can see above that women above 25 earn about 70-80% of the salaries of their male counterparts. Why do women earn lesser than men for supposedly doing the same job?

Before going into the reasons for that, let me explain you this logic. Lets say pawn broker had two slabs of gold for trade in front of you(as shown in the illustration below). According to the pawnbroker both the slabs weigh 100 oz(consider price of gold in market to be $1000/oz).
The slab 1 which is covered with a black sheet can be purchased for $100,000, and the slab 2 which is covered with a white sheet can be purchased for $85,000.

If I ask you which slab would you wanna buy, what will you say?

Clearly any profit seeking individual would perform the calculation and realize that if they buy the white slab, and if it really contains 100 oz it will sell it in the market and make $15,000 profit on it.
But then, if the slab covered with white cloth did have 100 oz of gold in it then it would also be sold for $100,000. This means that either the white slab did not have 100 oz, and had only 85 oz, or else there is an amazing business opportunity for anyone who buys the white slab.

Now lets say all the people who come to buy those slabs have an aversion towards the white color. They hate white color, so they keep on buying the black slab. Any individual who now buys the white slab will make $15,000 over every transaction, so soon he will be able to drive the discriminatory people out of the business.

Soon there will be so much demand for White color slab, that the prices will soon drive up to $100,000 per slab. This means that if women and men are doing the exact same job, and somehow women can be hired for less than men, then every profit-seeking individual will end up hiring women, and soon the wages will come up and both the wages will be equal. If the market was discriminatory against women and had some sort of conspiracy to pay women less because of their prejudices due to sexism, and was paying them less for the same work then soon the profit seeking non-discriminators would have ended up making more profit than sexist employers and kicked them out of business.

But since we know it for a fact that women are not paid as much as men are, what does that mean? In our black slab-white slab example, the white slab is continuously bought for $85,000, and the black leather covered slab is bought for $100,000, this means that the white cloth covered slab is actually having less gold than the black leather covered slab.

This means that the pawnbroker’s claim that both the slabs have same amount of gold is not true, the white cloth slab actually does have lesser gold than the black leather cover.

Similarly, if in the market women are paid less than men for the same job, then everybody would wanna hire women and make more profit off them than to hire men. The only logical explanation which makes sense on why women are continuously paid less than men is that they must provide lesser labor than men. The women do not work the same as men, and that explains the lesser wages.

Now I understand if someone told me that Indian men are paid lesser wages because they work less than White men, then I would get offended too. But there is nothing to be offended here for women, because there are perfectly valid reasons on why women work less than men.

First of all let me make it clear, women under 25 years of age are paid the same(or even more) wages than men. Similarly, never married women also are paid almost the same wages as never married men. But suddenly the difference between the wages of married women and married men is very high. Why is it that merely a change in status from never married to married causes such a big difference in wages(and henceforth their labor).

The answer lies in the concept of relative specialization. Michael Jordan(the Basketball Star), is not a very good pianist, because he is a basket ball player and he spent most of his time playing and specializing basketball. Now he could be very well a piano enthusiast, and may practice playing Piano in his free time as much as he can, yet his Piano skills will not come nowhere near to even a high school music teacher. In simple words Michael Jordan has to sacrifice Piano skills in order to achieve mastery in Basket Ball.

Similarly, women have to sacrifice the work output in order to be able to fulfill their marital and biological duties. Even in a marital setup where a guy takes care of the same amount of duties as his wife, he simply cannot bear the baby for 9 months, nor he can breast feed his kids. Biologically the women have to take more duties than men, and because of this they have to sacrifice their work output.

If women feel like the society has been setup to keep women at home and men into the work field, then there is a pretty good evolutionary reason for that too. Take for example during World War 2, Germany and Russia decimated each other’s population. There were almost no men left in Russia between the age of 15 to 65. Yet only after one generation the population ratio came back to normal. There were same amount of kids born as in a generation before. Reason is simple, you only require one male to impregnate thousands and thousands of females among mammals. Just like a farmer keep only one bull for 100s of cows, because that’s all he need. Consider if we sent women on a war front, side by side with men, or on all the hazardous work conditions as much as men. Our society would have been reduced and even extinct by now while hunting one Mammoth.

Professor Walter Block¹ makes an amazing explanation for why the wages of men and women differ.

1. Walter Block, Loyala University, New Orleans