Indian government declared Education as a fundamental right for all Indians on 1st of April 2010. Was it a fool’s exercise on the April Fools day? It seems so.
By staging education as a fundamental right, government obviously insured a very well crafted vote bank issue based on altruism that will keep the ruling political parties in good colours. Political parties will not only gain votes over the issue, rather the government will also gain a further seemingly appropriate cause to rob the wealth-producers by means of taxes to implement all the required infrastructural development programs for the fulfilling of the dream of “Education for All”. Certainly, that will provide a vast canvas for further scams and swindles in the infrastructural development sector. Thus, for the political parties with their political motives, education as a fundamental right looks pretty good. There will be many new government schools that will provide governmental jobs for many Indians in education sector. The problem is will the new schools overcome the failure of the already existing governmental schools?

What about the drop-out rates?

There is a governmental school within the range of 2-5 KM near almost every village or slum of India, that is, lack of governmental schools is clearly not a big issue.
The problem is not about the children who never attend school. Such students are separate and very fast diminishing category. About 50% of children who join up in Class I drop out by Class VIII and that can be suggested as the major problem.
Despite all the mid-day meals and similar programs, governmental schools fail to keep the children intact with their governmental education. Now no matter whether government declares it a fundamental right or necessity, if the parents and their children simply do not prefer the idea of investing their time in such governmental schools, than this idea of education as a fundamental right will remain only a paper exercise that will never be a reality, although the governmental robbers will keep robbing the middle class of India and will burden them with more and more taxes to facilitate the education for all those who does not want that education and are certainly not interested in it.
According to the National University for Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) total enrolment in primary classes (Class I to V) was 134.4 million in 2008-09. In Classes VI to VIII, the total enrolment had dramatically dropped to 53.4 million. Now, if government considers that education is literacy, than it is acceptable that primary classes will provide the required education as a fundamental right, but what if more than half of the total students decide not to study any further the primary classes? Will government force them to continue their “governmental schooling” until all do not clear out the VIII class?
The problem is not that parents do not have money to educate their children properly; the problem is the poor quality of governmental education. Governmental education actually provides nothing to an upcoming citizen rather it burdens them with heavy books and senseless exercises that will never help him by any means throughout his life. Even if every Indian becomes a well educated graduate, not everyone can become an IAS officer, some may prefer to be a barber, or a shopkeeper, or a gardener, farmer, or may be taxi-driver. As some prefer to be a doctors and engineers, some other may prefer to be peons and beetle shop owners, or snacks vendors or simply “chai-wala”. Now no school provides any fundamental knowledge about how to be a better “chai-wala” or a better “paan-wala” or a better barber, or a better street-sweeper. There are so many jobs that people may prefer to do rather than going and wasting their time in the schools to clear out the VIIIth class exam. Can Government Issue a law that no person can be allowed to work and earn if he is not VIII class pass? That is, one cannot work as a laundryman, or a barber, or home-helper, or a “bawarchi” or chai-wala or any similar minion works if he is not VIIIth pass.
The Right to Education Act covers children in the 6 to 14 years age group, precisely for the classes from VI to VIII. So may be the idea behind the right to “governmental education” is meant to abolish child labour.
However, that will be a fraud against the children who prefer to go for all those minion works that are never touched by school education. Why should a child work so hard and waste all his time in learning the maths, science and languages of VI to VIIIth classes when he knows that it will never help him to be a good barber or taxi driver? For him, better education would be to attend a barbers shop and learn how to cut hairs with ease and provide consumer satisfaction for the consumers. If a child is looking for maintaining a shop owned by his father, he will certainly learn educate himself much more in his father’s shop under the tutelage of his father rather than in a governmental school. For such children, if government forces them to attend schools up to VIII or Xth class, than it will actually be forced child labour for those children and they will not earn even a penny for that unwanted labour.

Market is the Best Educator

A doctor practicing medicines in market since last 5 years is obviously much more apt than a freshly graduated medical student is. The market actually teaches the medical student how to treat the consumers, how to fight the diseases and save the patients. School and college education provides the base, and market furnishes the education.
In case of a barber though, no college, no school provides any base for becoming a successful barber. One needs to go to a barbers shop and practice there. For a forthcoming doctor, if he attends school and than college, education helps in strengthening his base, but for a forthcoming barber, only the market, that barbers shop can provide the necessary education and practice. Forcing him to go to school to get “governmental education” will be similar to burdening him with child labour and disallowing him the “necessary education”.
Conclusion: right to education may prove to be a good vote gainer for the ruling parties in upcoming elections, it will certainly increase the vast canvas of governmental corruption and swindles and will burden the Indians with extra taxes, yet it will remain only a paper exercise meant to fool the public and that is why education was announced as “fundamental right” right on fools day. It is inappropriate and unnecessary to expect every child of age group 6 to 14 years to go to school because for many such children, governmental school education itself proves to be child labour, while the market provides them the proper necessary education they require and search for. Thus, if government does not make it compulsory for every citizen to be at least VIIIth pass if he wants to work and earn an honest living, it is impossible to expect the RTE to work any better than a paper exercise. But if government makes it compulsory, than education will not remain a right, it will become a torturous duty imposed by dictatorial despotic altruistic politicians, because than, the certificate of VIII class pass will become the necessary license even to work and earn an honest living freely. Most of the times, these politicians displays slavery in the colours of freedom and compels the citizens to buy their enslavement at the expense of freedom.

Generally speaking I hate the phrases such as ‘true so and so’ or ‘perfect so and so’, but its important that people who support free market understand what and how a market player works. Imagine if you are a football fan, you support your football team, you probably know all the rules of the game, but since you haven’t played the game yourself you just don’t feel it exactly how a football player feels.
You know that if the ball leaves the emarkated boundary then the opposite team gets to throw in the ball from that point on the boundary, but what you don’t know is what does the player really have to go through or consider when he gets that chance in order to win.

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.

What is a Right!

The term “Rights” is a moral political term, Right is defined as a definite course of behavior of Individuals in a society that is sanctioned, proper, allowed, a privilege to be respected by all others and if anybody violates any individual “Right”, he is wrong, immoral, unsanctioned, evil, a criminal.
Now, if education is a right, then anybody arguing that Education cannot be free, education cannot be a privilege, education cannot be a right is obviously a criminal, an evil-doer, and that creates a certain anomaly, a serious contradiction with the term Right. As per the viewpoint of Individual sovereignty and free citizenship in a society, our only rights are the rights to life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. That is, we are not born with a right to a trip to visit Taj Mahal, or a dinner at Hotel Taj or a cosmetic surgery or a degree in aeronautical engineering. Why cannot we have such rights? We cannot have such rights because the Individual Rights in a free society does not impose any obligation on other people except that of a negative obligation to leave the individual alone, to not to interfere with his life, to not to exploit his Rights. The Individual Rights guarantees you the freedom and chance to work and put efforts for what you want, rights are not to be given to you without any effort by somebody else. That is, you do not have a right to be fed, to be clothed, or to have a house, a car, an AC etc. Although, you have proper right to work and earn your living but you also have complete freedom to use your earning according to your wishes, you have a right to pursue your happiness. More clearly saying, one has the right to act and to keep the fruits of his actions, to produce and to keep his products or to trade them to others if he prefers. However, he has no right over the actions and products of others, except on the terms of which they voluntarily agree. That is, we all have a right to have a mutually beneficial deal voluntarily. Similarly, the right to the pursuit of happiness guarantees you the freedom and right to act to pursue your happiness and to be happy, to keep the results of your actions. It does not guarantee that other people will make you happy or will try to make you happy. If one’s desire for something imposes a duty on others to satisfy his desire, then the others have no choice in their life. They are merely slaves. One’s right to happiness at the expense of others means that the others become rightless slaves. Your right for anything at other’s expense means that the others become your rightless slaves.

The Immorality of Current Politicians

Just in order to gain a vote bank, politicians distorts the meaning of right. They say that you are entitled for something because it exists and you want it. You do not need to work for it or earn it; government should provide it to you. The question arises, from where will the government get it? What will the government do to the free individuals and their individual rights to make it possible to shower free gifts, free lunch, free education, free health-care etc on you?
Let us assume that tomorrow, government and politicians assert that you are born with a moral right to hair-care and that government will benevolently provide free hair-care services for all those who want it. Haircuts and shaving would be free. Some people will show up everyday for a new hair-style, eye-brow setting, beard and mustache setting, government will keep showering the governmental hair-saloons with more and more governmental funds collected by taxing middle class citizens. Every bald man would love to come to the governmental hair-saloon to have a hair seeding and implantation. Nobody would be bald and there will be as many hair styles as there are citizens in India. Government will govern the profession of barbers and they will make huge incomes, every second person would like to be a barber, there would be competitive examinations for Indian Barbers Services (IBS). The government will pay for all expenses. Obviously, there will be government schools and colleges providing specific training, certificates and degrees for professional barbers. Government will install a huge administration for the maintenance of the hair-cut sector. The dishonest barbers will make huge profits and so, will the honest one. They will work and spend like mad, trying to satisfy every second person’s desire regarding his hairs, which certainly can be a millions worth specific hair care and services. The budget will start going out of control, government will suffer the pressure to provide enough budgets to maintain the proper services for hair-care. Corruption will rise , soon government will start providing directives regarding hair cuts to control the budget, government will limit the number of barbers, the time spent for one hair-cut, government will start licensing an permitting only certain type of hair cuts, taking away the individual’s liberty regarding his own hairs. Government will start limiting the number of hairs a barber can split, the number of razors a barber can buy. There will be inspectors to check the corruption in governmental barber shops, there will be a new department just to keep records of barbers in a definite constituency and the profession of barbers will be thoroughly red-taped.
It is the case of education. Government controls the education sector and tries to establish education as a right. Obviously, government fails to provide any sort of education to the masses and whatever education it provides always remains way below the required standards. Also, government doesn’t produce the required resources for the provision of free lunch and free education, so who will pay for all that?
The rich people are very few in India and even if government snatches away all the property of the top 100 richest families of India, it cannot sustain the expenditures required for free education. So, who will pay for that? It is us, we poor and middle class people who pay as slave for the government’s immoral desire to provide free education through the taxation system. By stressing free education as a right, government makes all Indians as the slaves who are obligated to pay for the governmental education program without questioning anything about it. By befooling us by the term free education as an individual’s right, government robs us of our very basic right to earn and to hold the fruits and results of our work and efforts. Government taxes us and takes away our hard earned money an in return; we get nothing but a highly imperfect education system. There are no free lunches, but there are lunches being paid for by somebody else.
Conclusion: Rights does not confirm anything freely available for anybody at the expense of others. By terming education, or health-care, or free lunch as individual’s right, politicians try to enslave the public and rob them of their very basic individual right of life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. In a free society there can be only the right to live freely, to work and earn freely, to enjoy the produced an earned property freely and to pursue one’s happiness by furthering his efforts and results of his efforts freely. Other than the man’s free will, he has to earn everything honestly in a free society, no other one, not even government is obligated to feed, or cloth or educate him freely.

1. It is a common trend going on these days. School children commit suicides because of the “oppressive school system”. It is “Oppression” that some students get higher marks while some fails. Thus, there should be a grading system. Anybody getting 80% and above, should be graded A+. Alas! So, there is no incentive for a student to master a subject and gain 100% marks. Even if he gets 80%, he will be at the top. In addition, he can never fail. It is the making of mediocre.,ReasonForLiberty
2. Division of labor, ReasonforLiberty

Division of Labour and Benefits of Talent

A division of labour system provides enough space and incentive for the individuals occupied in different sets of knowledge of specialization and sub-specializations to devote all their human intellect and efforts to not only use the current knowledge but also to discover, invent and innovate new ways and knowledge to increase production. Division of labour enables a society to use the benefits of geniuses to the maximum extent, while it provides maximum incentive for the genius to use his intellect in development, innovations and entrepreneurship. In a collectivist society, this is not possible, as the genius in such societies, along with other common individuals, must devote most of his time in attaining self-sufficiency first. In India, some decades ago and even at present, division of labour is not definitely present; most of the young students devote their time to achieve degrees from governmental education system in order to gain some or any sort of job in government or private service sector. Hardly anyone devotes his intellect and abilities to any set of specialization of knowledge based on his interest and abilities. Hardly anyone think of devoting his time in research works and furthering knowledge, hence, Indian society lacks innovators. That doesn’t mean that Indian society is or was incompetent of innovations and inventions in present or past, the lack of it only represents the partial slavery imposed by the collectivist system and socialist government under which, the genius amongst the collective is wasted upon. Even if some genius struggle such situation and still manages to radiate his intellect, he never gains the full essence of his own efforts and hence is lost due to the lack of incentives.
In a free society with division of labor, geniuses are able to devote their time to science, invention, organization and direction of productive activity of others and thus instead of being lost in obscurity, they becomes Einsteins, Darwins, Brails and Fords. In a free society not only the genius but everyone is enabled to concentrate on the kind of work he is best suited and that promotes his self-interest based on his intellectual capacity and body endowments. Hence, such a society helps the individuals with rare talents in music, arts, sports, medicines, engineering, etc. In absence of division of labour, along with productive geniuses, such people with specific talents to be athletes, or painters, writers, philosophers, actors, sculptors, musicians, surgeons, engineers etc often lacks enough opportunities and are forced either to forget about their specific interests and talents, or to pursue their talents and suffer poverty and scarcity of opportunities. Since division of labour provides enough opportunities and complete freedom for the innovators, inventors, developers and directors of labour, such a free society necessarily provides enough space for machinery usage and modernization of process of production, also, it provides complete freedom for the genius and common producers to use the resources with utmost efficiencies hence increase the wealth production manifolds. Division of labour increases the efficiency of learning process in connection with production by making education and communication and all activities concerned with transmission, storage and development of knowledge into specializations. In a free society with individual sovereignty, individual may remain unemployed only because of his own choice; otherwise, market provides enough opportunities for the individual to engage in any productive process or service to earn self-dependency. Such few, who by nature lacks any potential to attain self-dependence (naturally disabled or victims of accidents etc) can easily attain benevolent support from the free individuals of the society in attaining self-dependency. As a free-society essentially represents most beneficial conditions for wealth production under division of labour, individuals in such society prospers with ease and further their life in the pursuit of their happiness.

Division of labour and consistency with freedom

Private ownership of the means of wealth production is the fundamental pre-condition of the pursuit of self-interest. Division of labour essentially depends on private ownership of means of production, which is based on the nature of gains of free division of labour. The most important ones are the multiplication and transmission of knowledge and benefits of the talented. The rational idea of private property ownership comes out from the fact that individuals possess unique independent minds, which permits and necessitates them to have separate independent knowledge and to make independent judgements, decision, and act on them with his separate independent calibre. In a free society every individual gains from the fact that other people possess knowledge that he does not and an intelligence separate and often much greater than his own. To maintain maximum benefits, it is necessary that others be able to acquire and apply their knowledge in production on their own initiative with perfect decision making freedom, without having his approval, orders, permissions or license, as he would be certainly unable to give in any rational way as he necessary lacks the knowledge and intelligence that would be required to make such decisions. To act, work and produce, people must possess material means of actions and production, In order for them to act independently from one another, they must possess wealth independently from one another that is there must be private property, including private ownership of natural resources and other means of production. Private property rights are essential condition for proficient production, prosperity and more importantly individual freedom as it provides maximum space for efficient usage of resources in virtue of producing wealth hence eradicating poverty of masses.
A libertarian society provides property rights in order to provide peaceful, justified, conflict-free and productive usage of resources. Unlike human body, external bodies and natural resources are not directly controlled by one’s will and initially they are unowned. In order to provide a rational, conflict-free rule of assignment of property rights, a libertarian society prefers the Lockean law of homestead that provides the relevant objective link of appropriation that is the transformation and using of the previously unowned resource. This approach provides the relevant objective motive of justice as the first user of a previously unowned resource naturally have a better claim than the second or consequent users. This is pertinent with independence of Individuals as the first owner of the resource can definitely let others to possess the resource for production at some rent or dealing for a period, or he may completely sell-off his property rights to other. The relevant question in such situations is not that who possess the resource; rather it is who the owner of the resource is. As explained earlier, a natural resource is not wealth until a man uses his talent and labour to make the resource productive and useful for the men, as the first user transformed that unowned resource into wealth making it possible to be used for the benefits of men, he naturally is the reasonable owner of the resource and deserves complete property rights over it. Obviously all the consequent wealth produced by the help of that resource is also inadvertently the rightful property (in fact, the results of his labour and intellect) and he holds complete right over it. In case, he suffers lack of talent to use the resource to maximum beneficial extent, he obviously gains the chance to sell-off his property right freely to other individual interested and able in using that resource proficiently. Such a system essentially provides justice and peace as it avoids any specific conflict, it is based on reason as the first user of the resource definitely posses a far important link with the resource than the later users. Once the first comer sells his property right to others, he naturally abolishes any objective link with that resource, wealth or property. Self-ownership and property rights essentially provide complete freedom for individuals to possess and accumulate wealth and further produce it freely and hence abolishes the common norms of partially slavery under government in the form of compulsory taxation, fiat currency, licensing system, censors, bans and criminalization of acts that in no way involves any aggression of a man by other.

The author begins by clearly stating that this is not a book about blaming Nehru. He doesn’t question the allegedly “good” motives of Nehru, and is of the opinion that he was an honorable man. It is not the ends Nehru had in mind he questions, but the means he used to achieve them. He takes for granted that not many would argue against helping the poor. Using violent coercive means to achieve this end, however, produces the exact opposite result. This should be obvious. Nothing good was ever done through coercive means.

Sabhlok, who served the Indian Government for eighteen years, knows from his own experience that such policies breed corruption, poverty and inefficiency. He remembers an IAS officer who joined with him in 1982 saying that his “sole objective in joining the service was to make money”. He was once asked by a young man whether he moved to the Assam cadre from Haryana cadre as more money is to be made in Assam. In all the years he served the Indian Government, he didn’t come across a single officer who even compares with the public officials he met in Australia, where he works now. I don’t have to quote extensively from his work. Everyone knows these facts.

I find it really sad that Sabhlok’s attempt to set up a liberal political party in India didn’t succeed. India badly needs politicians who have studied political economy from a Classical and Austrian point of view. India, needless to mention, has never known the concept of liberty. Even when our freedom fighters and other politicians used words like “freedom”, they never clearly understood what it really means. A hampered market economy was the intellectual default. This wouldn’t have happened if people who know better had spoken up for the cause of Individual liberty. And that precisely is what books like “Breaking Free of Nehru” do.

I have, however, several differences with the book. I would like to mention it here. I don’t think Nehru’s motives were good. I think we should be really careful when branding the motives of a person as good, when the end result is chaos. Good-By what standard? We should remember the words of Ayn Rand-“Do not ever say that desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither stupidity, nor power lust is a good motive”.

The author says that, in India, there was forceful expropriation of property and land in the manner of Robin Hood. Several thinkers, including Ayn Rand and her followers, have made this mistake. Robin Hood, in my opinion, was actually a good guy. I shall quote the philosopher Tibor Machan: “Often it is Robin Hood who is held up as the role model for justifying taxation: Didn’t he “steal” from the rich to “give” to the poor? Well, not, not really. In the original version of the legend, Robin Hood did just the opposite: He stole from those who stole from the poor and returned the loot to the rightful owners. In those days the upper classes, from the king to all his cronies, routinely engaged in extortion. They disguised this, however, with the phony claim that everything belongs to the king and his cronies. Yes, monarchs and those who rationalized monarchy spun this fantasy and managed to sell it to the people that they where the rightful owners “of the realm,” that they had a “divine right” to rule us. This way when the bulk of the country went to work on the farm or wherever, they had to pay “rent” to the monarch and his cronies.”

Like the author, I don’t think that progressive taxation is compatible with Capitalism. It is true that marginal utility of money decreases with increase in wealth, and a rich person cares far less for a thousand Rupees than a poor person. However, this doesn’t contradict my position. There is a limitless need for wealth. The total utility of the wealth a person has should go on increasing so long as wealth has any positive marginal utility to him. There is a need for more wealth so long as additional wealth has any marginal utility. Progressive taxation would only undermine savings and capital accumulation. Taxation is completely incompatible with Capitalism. There is also the Inherent immorality of taxing Peter to pay Paul.

There are some statements in the book, which libertarians like me can’t agree with. Freedom, the author says, is good, and anarchy is bad. I can’t disagree more. Anarchy is the logical end result of total freedom. Anarchy and Capitalism are fully compatible. There is no justification for a bunch of robbers to take money forcefully from you and providing you services, forbidding that you buy from others. All services, including defense and security services could be provided by private individuals. Government is in fact a criminal organization which robs murders and drafts the citizens in a particular geographical area.

The author makes a case for Government regulations quoting an example of a coal miner working under dangerous conditions. However, it is not at all evident that there is a need for a Government to ensure safety for the worker. In case a worker dies in a free society, the Insurance Company of the employer would have to compensate the employee’s family. Insurance companies, hence, would have a policy to make sure that its customers ensure safe working conditions, as their profits would depend on it.

Another point where I disagree with Sabhlok is on social security and public funded education. We libertarians don’t want the poor to starve or children to go without education. Quite the contrary! We believe that the society would deal with these issues in a better manner in the absence of Government coercion. Under Capitalism, people who deserve such aid would not be many and could easily be taken care of by private organizations and voluntary charity.

All said, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand Individual liberty in an Indian context. Also visit his Freedom Team Of India website, and consider joining the Freedom team.

Those who do not wanna watch it, its an investigative report on Chennai private colleges where Taliban-style rules were enforced on the students. There is so much segregation among guys and girls in those colleges that Americans are going to be reminded of the Jim Crow laws era when blacks and whites were made to attend school separately.

This did not come to me as news, I had friends from those universities who told me about these things years ago. I went to a much more liberal private college so all those things came as a big shock to me. I was told that if a guy was found talking to a girl, he was fined(not always through money, but through social service etc etc).

Contrary to the natural reaction(which would be appalling at the horror of these policies), my topic is different. Considering the fact that all the colleges covered were Deemed Universities(they don’t receive any funding from the government, but only have accreditation from the government regarding their course work), that is they are private colleges, it begs the question, would free market serve Taliban and enforce Talibani rules if its participants demanded things that way? Would salons refuse to cut beards? Would private roads refuse to allow cars with female drivers in them? Would a private pond owner refuse to allow Buddhists to drink water from their pond?

The answer to all these questions is a shocking YES. The truth is, for all theoretical purposes, it is clearly possible that the Market would serve those things. There can be salons which refuse to shave men, private roads where women are not allowed to drive, and ponds which do not serve Buddhists, blacks, or the lower caste people. Just like in Chennai Deemed universities do not allow their boys and girls to mix socially.

But to understand why it is so, we must first ask the question, are any of these an act of aggression against anybody’s private property rights? Second question is, if it is not an act of aggression against private property rights of any individual, is it any kind of moral violation of an individual’s right to equality(if not right against his liberty). The answer to the first question is clear, when a salon refuses to employ its employees and its property to be used in a manner they don’t deem fit, when a private road does not deem fit to allow a certain type of individuals to use their property, when a pond owner does not allow the people of a certain religion, race or caste to use his property, none of these actions are a violation of anybody’s private property rights. In fact the whole point of “property” is to restrict non-owners from using the object against the wishes of the owner.

If I can prevent you from entering my house without actually violating your rights in any manner, how come by not allowing you(a black guy) in my saloon a violation of your rights of any kind.

Similarly when the Chennai private college owners refuse to allow their male and female students to mingle with each other, its their private property rights to enforce any laws they deem fit. If the parents do not think that their kids should be brought under this rule they are free to take their kids out and put in a more liberal college. The only place where this kind of rules would be private property rights violations if parents were forced to pay for these colleges through taxation and they had no choice.

In addition to that, the college cannot beat the students, or physically punish the student in any form for any kind of non-aggressive violation, because the body of the student is his property, irrespective of where it is located. Colleges have full rights to fail such a student or kick him out from the college for violation of their rules.

Second question which I asked earlier whether it is some sort of moralistic violation of an individual’s right to equality, well the answer is, that there is no such thing as universal “right to equality”. I might be a barber who promises right to equality to all my customers, but that does not mean everybody must be obliged to do the same in a free society. A white supremacist should be equally free to serve only white customers.

In a liberal(and free) society there will be standardized label adopted by the companies, claiming to be “equal treatment business establishment”(that is they serve all customers equally), and liberal minded customers would flock to businesses bearing such labels. Just like there will be “Whites Only” labeled restaurants who would shoot in their foot by not serving all the non-white customers, and white liberal customers.

What is the Market’s nature against such discriminatory institutions?

Market forces clearly work against the discriminatory institutions. The road owner refusing to allow women to drive through his road is directing all that traffic to other road owners. Since private roads will operate on subscription basis, families with women drivers will have even their male drivers using the non-discriminatory road networks, clearly damaging the male-drivers only road owner.

Similarly a college institution which pops into Chennai which puts no such Talibani restrictions on their students will attract all sorts of liberal students. The conservative schools must find other ways to actually attract the market. For example in America private catholic schools are more desirable even among the non-Catholics because of their performances. Also if you are a liberal, there is no more liberal school than the public schools in America. So all the Market demand for a Liberal school is crunched in by the public schools, therefore most of the good private schools in America are run by conservative Catholics.

Conclusion

If a newspaper editor refuses to publish your opinions, it is not a violation of your constitutional “freedom of speech” or “first amendment” rights. There is no right to equality on private property, because guaranteeing a right to equality means violating the right to liberty. Only one of these can be upheld at a time.

The market serves its participants. If there are enough number of irrational individuals who wanna follow their own irrational way of life, the market will serve them without prejudice. It may be an issue of rationality vs irrationality, but it is not an issue of Libertarianism.

About the above mentioned Chennai colleges, they will have more to worry about in the coming years when they will realize that Gay and Lesbian rights movement get huge support from their colleges.

1. China joins India against Protectionism, Times of India
2. GM Genocide, Reason for Liberty
3. Water Scarcity in India, Reason for Liberty
4. Population, Poverty and Production, Reason for Liberty
5. Indian Health care requirements, Reason for Liberty

Education is a valuable tool required for survival of which the formal education forms a very small part. There isn’t anything special about education which makes it a birth right. Yet, I have found that a lot many libertarians make exceptions for education. Inspired by economists like Milton Friedman, they support programs such as “School Choice”. It makes one wonder whether they have any real understanding of the market economy. If they really believed in the superiority of the market in providing for the society, they wouldn’t have supported School Vouchers. They would have let the market take care of the situation.
There are several problems with the voucher system. The most important one is that School Vouchers don’t eliminate taxation. Public funded education is the exemplification of the Marxian idea “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.¹ Every one, including homeschooling parents, and childless ones are forced to pay for the education of the children who they may or may not care for. Tax payers pay according to their ability. Parents who recklessly produce children get according to their need. Nothing can be more monstrous than that. Taxation diverts production to fields which may not satisfy the needs which are more urgent for the people.
What most of the supporters of the voucher system pretend not to understand is that if Government is to fund the education of children in private schools through taxation, it is obvious that Government would have a say in how these funds are being utilized. One who pays the piper calls the tune. It would eventually lead to a total control of the education system by the Government. It goes without saying that under this system most of what children would be taught under this system in the name of Social sciences would be mostly Government propaganda. There wouldn’t be autonomy even in the case of private institutions. There would be a call for more accountability and regulation which would lead to stagnation and less innovation in the field of education.
On an entirely free market, schools would have to compete with each other in providing better education at a lower price. The voucher system clearly tampers with it. It reduces all incentives for cutting costs as the fee is not given out of the parent’s pocket, but from the Government. The result would be inefficiency and a high cost for maintaining the system. It in turn leads to less children receiving quality education.
Some schools would be out of business due to the voucher system. Schools which don’t accept the vouchers would find less people to pay for the education which it provides. Voucher system, needless to mention, breeds parasitism and dependency.
What most libertarians forget is that the voucher system is against the founding principle of libertarianism: The Non Aggression principle. No one has the right to take from other in the name of noble motives. To begin with, it is not a noble motive to take from the producer to give to the parasite. Coercion is hardly a libertarian principle.
It is interesting that the supporters of this program call it “School Choice”. What does that mean? Should the tax payer be molested in order to provide parents with enough choice? There are always enough options to choose from under a free market. The voucher program would only reduce this choices by leading to Government dictated syllabus and curriculum. It is utterly naïve to think that Government would fund the education without having a say in it. Notice the secret admission of the proponents of this policy that the government is a failure in providing its citizens with quality education.
Why are these libertarians calling for free food, housing or health care when it is well evident that these are more important and urgent needs than education? If they have real faith in the superiority of the market, why don’t they call for an all-out privatization? The answers are not obvious.

1. Story of Socialism and Public Welfare, Reason for Liberty

while nearly 26.7 per cent of non-poor households have at least one graduate, just 8.5 per cent of ‘poor’ households qualify under this attribute.⁴

That clarifies the fact, that even a graduate can be a poor. As explained earlier too, poverty is comparative; we all are poor in some sense or other. A study on poverty in India by Planning Commission and NCAER under Mr S.L Rao⁵

In contrast, 8 per cent of ‘poor’ households own colour television sets, 4 per cent have telephones, 3 per cent have refrigerators, 3 per cent own cellular phones, and hardly 1 per cent have cars and credit cards each. But these ‘poor’ do own them.⁶

This shows that even many of us can be called poor by the measures of government, and even a “poor” can have cars and credit cards, refrigerators, mobile phones and colour television. This shows that the standards of poor are increasing progressively.
Obviously, the reason is the increased productivity of India through the liberalization process towards a more open and free economy as it was before under totalitarian socialistic system. As far as we go towards liberalism and libertarianism, towards free-market individualism, towards freedom from government and politicians, poverty reduces further.
Hence, political parties cannot make any of issues like poverty, education or employment as a political issue for the elections. What is left is again the dirty vote bank politics of caste, creed, and reservations, and religious differences and divide and rule politics, and unworthy ignorable issues of tussle like the Ram Temple.

1. BJP raising Ram Temple Issue, Times of India
2. GM genocide, Reason For Liberty
3. Population, Poverty and Production, Reason For Liberty
4. Planning Commission and NCAER study on Poverty in India, Rediff News
5. Planning Commission and NCAER study on Poverty in India, Rediff News
6. Planning Commission and NCAER study on Poverty in India, Rediff News

Is it the high promiscuity in our society which the left liberals are trying to point out?

No man should have the right to say that others should provide him with education or the means to it. Nothing is a birth right. No one says that everyone ought to be provided with food and shelter. No one asks whether people would walk naked if government is not to provide them clothes. Yet, no one opposes public funded education. There is nothing unique about education that would make it a birth right. If so, why is it that such a notion is widespread? It is because the state has emitted propaganda which would make it get a hold on children from the beginning of their lives. If they are taught right from their childhood that their life belongs to the state, it would be hard to take that notion away from them. They would cling to it, like a neurotic. If anyone later tells him that is not the case, they would act as if just a button has been pressed and they have suddenly turned helpless and neurotic.

Public funded education is just a trick of the state and its parasites to control the minds of its citizens. Remarque was right when he said the First World War was created by the tricks of schoolmasters. Bonheoffer was just being honest when he said the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling. Mises wasn’t amusing himself when he said “A healthy illiterate is always better than a crippled literate.”He most certainly meant it.

Education is largely controlled by the state in most part of the world. Even in private institutes, the syllabus is decided by the government. Currently, what is taught in schools and colleges as social sciences is mostly government propaganda. Competent teachers in the humanities either have to go without jobs or teach at lower rung institutions. If education were taken from the clutches of the government the schools would compete in deciding their curriculum and finally reach closer to the objective truth.

It is a wide spread myth is that due to government funded education, children who would have no chance of getting an education otherwise gets a chance-that they get a fair start in life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On a free market, where there is no taxation, regulations, unemployment and inflation-where there is free trade and high capital investment, no one other than lazy bums would be incapable of providing their children with education. Even in the hampered market that we have, there is overwhelming evidence that private unrecognized schools teaching slum children are three times as better as public schools. What the proponents of public education forget is that the money spent on public education is taken from the tax payer and taxation hampers production and reduces the incentives to produce. It reduces wages in the long run and hence makes private education out of reach of most parents who otherwise would have been able to pay for private education.

One of the most fallacious arguments in favor of public funded education is that all children should given ‘equal opportunity’. Left liberals have given their own twists to Adam Smith’s views on the subject. Some of the modern classical economists of now, and the previous century, including Milton Friedman are of the same opinion, which brings into contradiction all of their views. Even Bentham believed children are to be given a firm foundation in Utilitarianism. Come On. Let’s define our terms. What is meant by ‘equal’? What is an ‘opportunity’? How could two children born to different parents be given the same opportunity? Could they be given the same opportunity, even if they were born to the same parents, if born in a different time-space? Aren’t opportunities floating around us all the time? Are they to be thrown into ones lap or to be seized?
It’s usually asked “What would become of them who are not willing to educate their children? Such a question might as well be put as “What would become of the masters if the slaves were let free?”

And the answer is: They’d starve. ]]> http://www.reasonforliberty.com/education/education-a-birth-right.html/feed 0 http://www.reasonforliberty.com/education/irrational-equality-mediocre-shall-inherit-the-world.html http://www.reasonforliberty.com/education/irrational-equality-mediocre-shall-inherit-the-world.html#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:30:33 +0000 Fisherman http://www.reasonforliberty.com/?p=1567 So, it has come. Many have been awaiting it, to rejoice, a few, thought, it shall never come. Fewer never bothered. However, it is going to affect them all. I am speaking about the new education bill proposed. The first remark to it is, it is not a novel idea, in no way it is. It is the result of all the small ideas, the small steps taken. Now, with one sweep, it will be established, no one will oppose, no one will see what's going wrong, no one will say anything against, and no one will hear about the wrong. What is the name of this idea?....]]> So, it has come. Many have been awaiting it, to rejoice, a few, thought, it shall never come. Fewer never bothered. However, it is going to affect them all.
I am speaking about the new education bill proposed. The first remark to it is, it is not a novel idea, in no way it is. It is the result of all the small ideas, the small steps taken. Now, with one sweep, it will be established, no one will oppose, no one will see what’s going wrong, no one will say anything against, and no one will hear about the wrong.

What is the name of this idea?

“Free and compulsory education for children”

Yes, free, and compulsory. Through the 86th amendment, the children got the right. The children are human beings, from age 6-14.
If we dissect this idea a bit, we shall see that through this right, we are also introducing compulsory education. What does that mean? If you do not want to study, you shall be forced to study. You shall be educated, with or without your consent. You are not grown up enough to give consent. Who decides? The state, of course.

Now, the child, who worked hard in the tea shop shall go to school, his standard of living shall improve. The dream that he had, to work and open his own shop after a few years shall be erased. It is not right to have such dream for him. All men must have high ambitions. The child who worked, because there was nobody earning in his home, shall go to school. We must feel for those poor children. They work when ours go to school. They are earning, when ours are learning. What shall happen to his family? Who shall feed him? That shall be dealt when we bring a new law, making food a basic human right.

Now, when this bill is passed, all our children shall be educated. All shall be able to solve algebra, when they are lying hungry, because he does not have any money to buy food. He shall accept this philosophically, as he is educated now. Education is a virtue, it required sacrifices. He has sacrificed. He has been made to sacrifice.

There shall be a vast number of children going to school. Are there enough schools for these children? Oh yes, we have. We shall make the privet ones share the burden. Education is not a commodity. It must not be sold. It is a virtue. It must be given free. Then how shall the private schools exist? Well, it shall take money from the wealthy children. Why? Because they can afford to buy it, so they MUST buy it. Nevertheless, does not this kid have a right to free education? Well, he may come to government ones.
The schools shall not choose the student. They shall not screen. Some people are good students because of their genetic make-up, they have no right to be given preference. No body has any right to discriminate. Those who are not good enough shall have everything equal to the good ones.
“THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE WORLD”

There shall be no exams. Nobody has the right to decide whether one has learned or not. Nobody has the right to award the working, the studious. The studious has no right to celebrate his victory. He shall not be given a battle to have a victory. All shall be equal.
When they will come out of school, all will be equal, the good brought to the label of the inferior, through years where every single occasion when he proved to be better than others were erased. The good shall come out not knowing he is good. Thus, there shall not be anybody who is better than the rest. This is equality.

It has been six years since the 86th amendment was made. Why haven’t it been passed? Because, the bill did not mention the funds required, or was very vague about it. Now it is clear, it requires minimum of Rs 3, 21,196 crore to a maximum Rs 4,36,458.5 crore over six years. Not a small price to pay, but, when there are so many good things about to happen, the price shall be paid. By whom? Those who would not be benefited by it. Now, we should not oppose it. We are not.
Through out ages, mediocre have ate out of the hand of the creator. Now, India seems to feel that it can do away with creators’ altogether.

Why this idea is being criticized has been discussed in this site. The reader is being requested here to think, why the government never privatizes health and education.

I would like to draw a distinction firstly between literacy and education. A person who can read and write is literate. Literacy however by no means can be equated with education, and neither is literacy a precursor or a mandatory requirement for actually judging a person educated. The ability to read and write is nothing but just a tool, it gives us access to plethora of written material. We can use that tool to widen our sphere of knowledge, interact through books and other written media with people of our age and those who are no more amidst us but their thoughts, brilliance of ages that has percolated through books. This tool can be used effectively so to say in our process of educating ourselves. It is however wrong to claim that without it we could not achieve this feat.

Secondly I would like to bring out the difference between qualification and education.
I address the term educated to people who simply have two attributes. Firstly they have a mental faculty so trained and developed to apply it with reason and logic to any situation presented to them. Secondly some life skill they have mastered so as to perform certain useful role in society. One may ask is an illiterate farmer in some village educated, as per me he well may be. If he has trained his mind well enough to judge rationally and react aptly to his environment, which includes people whom he is dealing with. Along with that he is good at his chosen profession he is by all means educated. He may not be aware about Indo-American nuclear deal, but is aware of which crop to sow when, knows how to judge soil and skies, so as to be successful in his endeavors of agriculture, he is definitely educated.

One may ask that such a person however is unequipped and unaware of various new schemes that government is bringing in for farmers. He may also be duped by some conman to take loans that he cannot repay, so and so forth. Will all that not construe as lack of education. My argument on the issue is simple, we the so called educated people, are we aware of all the policies that government brings forth. Are we not equally susceptible to falling in debt traps? We all have a sphere of knowledge around us which we endeavor to expand to a level of reasonable comfort. At this level of knowledge we are able to perform almost every day to day activity without wondering as to how or being lost. This level however varies from person to person, and that makes our individual knowledge about various issues different. If the farmer feels uncomfortable with his level of knowledge he would by all means try and expand it. He will ask people whom he trusts. If nothing satisfies he would learn how to read and write and thereafter through written media increase his knowledge to this level of comfort. Everyone does that when we go to a new office first day of work, a bride when she goes to her new house. Education however comes into play as to how fast we become aware of the changing environment and gear up to tackle it and of course how we actually go about tackling it.
A farmer of Vidharbha and a techie of Bangalore who commits suicide at the same time lack education in same life skill, which make them, take such harsh and self defeating decision at the time of peril. Many may ask farmer may have been lured and duped by some conniving man on the pretext of him being illiterate and uneducated, well then what about the techie who was duped almost in similar manner by some bank or credit card firm or stock market?

A degree simply does not make any one educated. It’s simply a qualification that may be highly lucrative in a job market. Job market simply works on the principle of demand and supply, as long as supply is limited demand is high and there is value for a particular product. Suppose we manage to give everyone a particular degree, whatever it may be, it won’t fetch the money it does on today’s date.

With such an elaborate introduction as to what is education and what is not, I would like to once again raise question on the wisdom of Indian government declaring education as fundamental right and trying to ensure compulsory education (so called) to all children. Frankly it would be foolhardy to believe that a syllabus consisting a bit of maths bit of science, arts and literature is a foolproof way to educate whole of India. Indian education system was borrowed from the English, who had in turn developed this system not as some universal education scheme but more or less for aristocracy and office bearers I won’t include scientist and inventors because most of them during those days were school dropouts. I am not challenging the efficacy of the scheme, a fair blend of all subjects till the pupil is reaches a stage of maturity to understand what is really his liking and thereafter specialization in those specified subject is absolutely an excellent concept. It is however not universal, it caters only for certain specific job requirements and it definitely does not impart any specific lesson in the other vital life skills that I elaborated above. Most people do learn it, but education system cannot take credit for it.

The second requirement of education that I mentioned that is ‘qualification’ is a market based requirement. Society is a fabric, a well oiled machine; for it to run well free market principles need to be adhered to. Simply put, where ever there is demand you need to supply it with replacement. Now if we look at our society we would notice that it essentially does not consists of people with graduation certificates and various university degrees in hand. There are various kinds of jobs equally important that needs to be addressed so that we have this machinery up and running. Individual may choose for himself what task he likes to perform, but cannot relieve himself of the responsibility of performing one. If he does not then he is a dead weight on the rest. Now the jobs with degree and qualification appear lucrative and better, that is simply because there is high demand for these and we still don’t have enough of them. It does not however imply that this demand has no limits or saturation. They on reaching saturation will become less lucrative and excess products’ (graduates) will be rejected by the market (society) and we will have unemployment.

In democracy however government tends to get motivated by policies of mass appeasement. In our society such white collared jobs are held at very high esteem everyone wants that for their kids. In such scenario it seems like exceptionally people friendly policy to go about declaring education a fundamental right and spending billions on it. All short term goals work in incumbent governments favor, building schools, creating employment (as in teachers and staff), providing meals and economic incentive, all seems such a philanthropic act that the government can boast about. Results are visible in five years makes it even more attractive, what people fail to see and governments simply do not want to see is that they are simply destroying the social fabric of a period 20 years from now. Luckily our government is so inefficient they would never be able to achieve any task they set forth ;we may not fact this problem in such acute a way.

Unemployment in white collared job sector will however be tremendously high in the times to come because of this non adherence to market principles. Other philanthropic argument which I need to counter is that governments actions ensure equality in society, even poor kids get an opportunity to study, well according to me had we had a non interfering government we would have had simply enough private schools coming up to meet the market demands. For sure no private school would give reverse incentive to teach children or force it down anybodies neck but definitely a competitive low price schooling market would have flourished in India. One which for sure would have been better than the present government schools for sure.
Lot of statistics are available on net freely for anyone to go through on net which depicts how government is mindlessly wasting billions of tax payers money on such self defeating philanthropic missions. Government however cannot be blamed for these in a democracy but we the people who somehow are led to believe that these actions would help in building a better nation. We overtly get philanthropic and emotional without understanding the true implication of such government steps. We are led to believe that only those who have entered the portals of schools are educated and more so with all these process we will build more prosperous and stable nation. It’s time we do a reality check on these stupid claims and refute it, not everyone perhaps but at least we the so called educated elites of India.

Update: I am adding this excerpt that happen to come across today….in brief words it echoes what I was trying to point out throughout my article. How a policy that seems excellent in short run especially in regards to a particular community is failing us in long run. Read it and try and evaluate the present education policy on Indian government in this perspective

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.
Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.- Henry Hazlitt ~ Economic in One Lesson

The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?

In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

Human wants are unlimited. There is no limit for the work to be done in this world. To assert otherwise would mean that we are in the Garden of Eden and have no need left to be satisfied. I don’t think that I have to state that we haven’t reached such a state and will never ever do so. It should follow from this that in a non-coercive society, there is no reason for involuntary unemployment. In a free society, free of government regulations and taxation, there would be employment for everyone who is willing to work.

Economists and other intellectuals who make a case for make work schemes pay no attention to this fact. I will let one among them to speak. “Take the case of education. There is an estimated under-supply of 400,000 schools. Can you imagine the number of jobs we would create if we decided to address this? Simply having one teacher per class, instead of the current one per five classes, would create two million jobs. The construction of the schools, canteen services for them, and all the eco-systems around each school would create millions of more jobs.” says the “brilliant” journalist, Sainath.

If there were truly an undersupply of schools, the market would have solved the situation (provided schools aren’t choked by government regulations which prevent them from making profits). Businessmen seeking profits would find the situation appealing and step in. The fact that they haven’t proves that it apparently isn’t the case. It is understandable that what Sainath would have meant is that there is a need for education. Need, however, is not demand. Need, to be demand, should be backed by adequate purchasing power.

“Government spending cures unemployment”, is an old fallacy in economics. It is backed by no theoretical or empirical evidence. The amazing naiveté with which the intellectuals push this theory is shocking indeed. I hope that everyone would agree that two and two equals four. If this much is understood, the fallacy in this view becomes evident. The government doesn’t create wealth. Everything that it spends is taken from the innocent tax payer-directly or indirectly. (Inflation is an indirect form of taxation.) If this very money which the government spends is let to the tax payer, he would have either invested it or spent it on consumption. Both would have created as much employment or more. There is no reason to believe that private spending creates fewer jobs than public spending. There is no reason to believe that a bureaucrat, who has only the moral responsibility, in general would spend the money more efficiently than the tax payer who has both moral and financial responsibility. Another fact which is being forgotten is that the money taken from the tax payer won’t be spent in the same manner the tax payer wants it to be spent. If it were so, there would be no reason for the government to step in. The tax payer would have managed by himself. The fact that the tax payer is being called to spend for some ventures is adequate proof that no one would willingly spend for these projects.

I have said that what the government spends is the money of the tax payer. How moral is it to tax individuals for ventures which they may not approve of? Wouldn’t taxing A to spend on B reduce incentives for both-the productive and the parasite? Wouldn’t taxation preventing employers from expanding production and prospective employers from being employers itself? Such coercive actions would indirectly lead to more unemployment, not less.

It is worth examining why the very problem of involuntary unemployment exists. If there is no limit for the work to be done, why should some people go without jobs? The answer is: Government regulations and labor union coercion. If a minimum wage is set at a particular rate, employees who aren’t worth that much would be laid off. The same goes for labor union coercion. Labor unions use coercion to prevent employees working a wage lower than they have decided. Intellectuals who advocate such measures are hurting the poorest among the workers-the very people they claim to protect!

P.S. Sometimes Arundhati Roy says the same thing that a free man would want to say. That does not mean they speak for the same cause. And the ability to find the root cause behind either’s opinion is education.”

Let’s see how viable is the idea of education for all?

If India is 100% educated with reading/writing skills to everyone, which educated guy will clean the toilets, work on the construction site, do the entire blue collar labor which do not require that much education?
Those jobs still do not require reading/writing skills. Although people might say that by educated they mean having basic reading/writing skills,and that does not really qualifies a person for a white collar job. So its overall good for the society to have 100% educated society.

The problem is that people in India don’t realize the economic costs of teaching everyone, we were brainwashed into thinking that if we study only then we will be able to make a future, so we presume if everyone studies then it will make their future. Unfortunately it’s not true. Just studying does not secure your future. You have to be really good. For that bottom 1/3rd, its better that nobody waste their money on them, and let them do blue collar jobs.
I know people would hate me for saying these things, but imagine this, lets say the cost of teaching all the kids of India is half the wealth of Mukesh Ambani, and since Mukesh Ambani will not come to street just because we take half his wealth and invest it in educating the kids below poverty line, most people will suggest that we should take half of his wealth.
But the problem is, most of his wealth is in terms of investments, he will have to shut down half of his business, now imagine half of the Reliance industries shuts down, do people realize how many hard working workers will be out of job because of that?
And so many people dependent on them, what are these people going to do?
In fact if we reduce the taxes on everyone, it will actually help in the creation of more jobs.
Would you like to be served by a cup of tea by a child during your lunch time?
Sure I would love to, in fact a child DOES serves tea in most of the offices. Serving tea is a much better job for children rather than working in coal mines or candle factory.
Many people die of hunger and politicians uses it for their propaganda.
Why a person dies of hunger if he is not a lazy bum?
I mean isn’t the sheer fact that they are dying of hunger an indication that they are useless or lazy bums?
Don’t get into societal propaganda that poverty is something written in your fate, or some people are just born with it. Its bull shit.
Indian Govt is airing a ‘public service’ advertisement on the Television these days. It goes on talking about the thousands of villages that are still there without any proper sanitation hygiene available, and the diseases the people are suffering from.
It then suggest the necessity for hygiene to build a nation.
At one point you might even wonder after looking at the public service ad, that we do need a hygienic environment in India for our society to develop fully. But if you think a bit more morally, a question arises, should we spend money on “development” and welfare by unfairly taking it from those who really earn it (the honest tax payers), rather than allowing those people who earned it to spend it on their kids and make their lives better?
An average Indian would say that education is necessary for all because people lacking this basic skill of reading and writing, the illiterates are being cheated in the every sphere of the society, they are deprived of what they are supposed to get . But the irony of the fact is that also don’t know what they are loosing.
The question is, in order to provide them the basic opportunity, should we rip off the hard working people who work hard just to be make the lives of their kids better?
We believe in equality and equal opportunity, our govt tells us to take care of our parents, it provides us water, electricity, and god knows what not.
It is this deep hand of the government shoved in our throat which stops us from speaking or doing anything, leave alone growing. We have a development fetish, we think that in order to have our Mumbai and Delhi be like New York and Shanghai we must do something, get rid of the slums, kick out those people from Dharavi.
But this is the sole cause of all our problems. We KNOW government is inefficient, we know no matter how many times we put honest people out there, still they end up becoming corrupt, YET we cannot think beyond government, its like our only option. But it is simply not true.
So all we do in the end is hope for an honest person out there.
It is not the corruption which is the enemy of development, it is the government itself which is the enemy of development.

We should not forget that the population of whole USA is just around 310 million now and it has 99% literacy rate. We should also understand that with 61.8% of literacy rate in India, we have just double the number of literate people as there are in USA.

Second problem is our fetish with our culture. We must preserve our Indian culture, we must try to give our children some values. WE give them all the values but the ones really required.
Our kids copy all sorts of values from America, like dating, flirting kissing, but they fail to capture the most important value from America, that is, every man is for himself.
Do we teach the importance of “self-reliance” “self-importance”, “self-defense”, “self-respect” and selfishness? Do we teach them that they should not look for looting or begging from others for their own benefits?
If there is a vote, everybody must vote for everybody else. a farmer in Maharashtra must vote how the factories of UP must be run, no wonder people hate each other in India, and these differences are going to grow up real fast.
Our problem is, we are like a really rich man who rose from the rags, but still thinks like a slum dweller. We must vote for the guy who takes care of the poor, we are not poor statistically, but we must vote for a party which works for the poor.
We vote for a party which promises us everything in the world, but never promises what we really want. Why the politicians never fulfill their promises?
Because you want something they cannot give us, but since we want it, so they still give us the promises.
We want electricity without paying for it, we want education for your kids without actually paying for it. We want safe-drinking-water without actually paying for it, We want subsidized food without actually earning it.
If a politician promises to open a school for free education, for all, whom do you think is going to pay for the expenses of the school?
If politicians squeeze the tax payers too much they will simply revolt by not giving up their hard earned money to the government. Why will they accept the blatant loot of their hard earned money?
Seriously do we even think before we demand “we want education for all” that who is going to pay for it?
Money and wealth does not grow from trees. Some hard working businessman works for it, you demand more from him, and he starts to steal taxes (after all it’s HIS right to keep his money, not ours.)
Maybe its time when we should stop dreaming, stop drinking that Bhang every Holi and come down on earth and ask for something real. You cannot ask job for your son, because government cannot provide job to everyone, but ask something for the guy who would provide a job to your son, the businessman, the rich corporation.

Every week, in America alone, approximately 8,000 teenagers and children contract sexually transmitted diseases. Sexually active teen’s ages 15 to 19 have the highest STD rates of any age group, and nearly half of the 18.9 million new STD cases in 2000 were among youths ages 15 to 24. (Again in America, around 3,000 girls fall pregnant every week and the ratio is similar in Australia.) While gays and lesbians are quite simply just another (excuse this pun) fact of life. So, surely, the full scope of sex education is a good thing. It’s not as if sex education is, as some people seem to think, equivalent to giving kids some kind of inferred permission to engage in sex.
On the other hand, certainly everyone is entitled to raise their children, within the common boundary of what’s acceptable to the community, with the same morals and social values as themselves?
We live in a society where sex is everywhere. It’s used to sell everything from cars to choc milk. It’s there on everyone’s TV. It’s in every newspaper, magazine, and posted on every billboard. It’s talked about. It’s laughed about. You just can’t avoid it. So, I suppose it’s only fair and reasonable that some parents may want to make an effort to protect their children from, and at least have some control over, what they consider a deviation from their own good values and judgments.
Yes, politics, religion and sex… An atheist has the right to bring their child/children up without a belief in a god or gods. While a left winger is entitled to raise their child/children to be accepting of socialistic ways. Whether or not you agree or disagree with these things, they’re still freedoms everyone is entitled to. We tend to take them very much take for granted, so why should sex education be different?
Sex education is a health issue. I suppose, if you really wanted to, you could make it an elective course, allowing parents to opt out for their children. It may be a stupid thing for them to do (at least in my opinion) but they could do it.
As for the Church, theoretically more babies mean more followers. But how, then do you explain the marked decline in Catholics around the US, at least. And getting new priests (and, I assume, nuns) from this country is a serious problem for them.
It is my belief that better education combined with increased availability of information, through the Internet, cable TV, even cell phones, allows people to learn about other religions, or arguments against religions, and gives them more options. Unfortunately, it seems that many of those who are turning their backs on religion are placing their faith in UFO’s, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) and lake monsters, instead.
As for my school-days, I didn’t need anything graphic forced down my throat by the state/school system to understand what sex and STD’s etc were about and I sure didn’t need to waste time on it when I did go to school taking a class specifically for it.
I know not all children have good parents that taught them anything about the basics to being alive or procreation, and personally if your an orphan or fosterchild etc and raised by the state then by all means force feed away.
I personally believe this would be a non-issue if the courses on sex ed were “parent selected” electives in all high school curriculum’s, allowing those that did not wish to be assaulted with such to educate themselves and or their own children.
Unfortunately most liberal education systems and governments believe that the “people are incapable of self responsibility and or teaching their own children and go to great lengths to keep such activities from occurring.
Churches and protesters of such things have no business disrupting schools with demonstrations when it’s the government that’s responsible. Their time would be better spent attempting to buy off the politicians responsible for backing the legislation. After all that’s how the offending courses got put into the schools to begin with, (someone convinced or paid off a politician).
I know this sounds like I am against sex education…I am not, what I am against is the “State” forcing sex education on children whose parents don’t want them to receive the “States” version of it.
Once again about the Muslim’s views on sex, People tend to hate and fear that which they don’t understand. They also tend to hate those who are markedly (and sometimes even just barely) different from themselves. They tend to forget that those others will view them with the same fear and hatred, and for the same reasons: they are different.
In the US, and in much of western Europe as well, people tend to think of themselves as enlightened, modern, civilized people, and we tend to think of the followers of Islam as barbaric, medieval brutes. They, on the other hand, think of themselves as devout, civilized and enlightened, and think of US citizen as despotic, hedonistic, heretics.
Who’s right?
Sexuality in any culture or religion which is male dominated is going to be biased against women, simply because those men will have, to one degree or another, taken the reins of power into their own hands, yet cannot help but view the sexual attraction of women as a threat to that power. As women gain more real power, like they have in the West, men tend to lose that fear of their sexuality, seeing them more and more as equals, in the boardroom and the bedroom. Admittedly, even in US, people are not quite at that point yet, but they are much farther along than most Muslim countries. And part of the reason that Muslim and Catholic leaders protest against sex education is that it demystifies female sexuality to some degree, allowing the young to see women more as equals and less as property.
This de-mystification can also all to easily lead to emasculation of a society and a trans-valuation away from natural bio-ethical truths.
Religious fundamentalism is all too often close minded.
The Islamic and the Christians both suffer from overt “fundamentalist” idealism and un-yielding dogmas that lead to direct confrontation.
The problem is not in the cultural identity of the individual. It is in the individual religious zealot’s resolution to continue along a chosen path without regard to logical observation that is the real culprit. Both east and west has too many examples to list.
It is a short sighted mistake to assume that a patriarchal society is also by default a misogynist one. Well established gender roles give structure to a chaotic environment and are often a necessity in economically poorer regions for survival.
Every culture in history that has lost touch with its biological orientation gender identity has fallen into decadence and decline.

“The government has subsidized medical education in India. While studying in private colleges may cost Rs 4 lakh, the annual tuition fee of a medical student in a government college is just Rs 4,000 in Tamil Nadu. In AIIMS, it is just Rs 210 while in JIPMER it is Rs 125. So by asking them to serve India’s poor for just a year, we aren’t asking too much. Moreover, the stint will help them gain experience.”

According to the officials, MBBS doctors will have to spend four months each in a primary health center, community health center and district hospital. They will be paid a monthly stipend of Rs 10,000.

The World Health Organization(WHO) recognizes health as a basic human right. That means, every individual, irrespective of their caste, creed, religion, social and financial status, has a right to good health care. The WHO defines health as “the state of complete physical, mental and social well being and not merely an absence of disease and infirmity. [1948]”

From this definition, it can be clearly understood that, health is not a natural phenomenon, that is the health of a person is almost always in deteriorating condition until and unless proper action is taken to maintain it. Furthermore, to convert the diseased society into a healthy one, a large amount of money and human resources are required.

To realize the right to health, in Alma Ata declaration, the concept of primary health care was introduced. Primary Health care is defined as “the essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost that the community and the country can afford to maintain at every stage of development in the spirit of self-determination. [Declaration of Alma Ata, USSR, 1978.]”

So, the liability of providing the health care for the community lies with the community itself.

Indian Government introduced National rural health Mission[NRHM] in 2004 to realize the unfulfilled aspects of primary health care.

Let us look in to this matter a bit.

The concept of primary health care introduced so as to realize the right to health. But, health care is a service which requires service providers such as Doctors, nurses, laboratory-technicians, health workers and lastly, the research scholars.

From time immemorial , the physicians has always belonged to the strata of the most knowledgeable men in society. Physicians were great philosophers, mathematicians, and often social pioneers. In classical age, there were no distinction between a philosopher scholar or a physician. Society trusted its brightest and most enlightened men to serve as doctors. With the advent of modern technologies, the earlier philosopher physician, to whom medicine was just another way of understanding the world was replaced by a more dedicated and specialized physician. The result was an increase in the health expenditure. Today with the latest technology at disposal we have come to an age where there are specialists for almost every organ and every disease They devote almost half of their life in learning the process. And hence, the cost of health services has touched the sky.

But the government regards its subjects as resources, the human resources. The output from these resources is directly related to the health and happiness of their subjects. Health is an important deciding factor of citizen mood. So maintaining a healthy society is one of the most important objectives of the government. The government does this by categorizing health as one of the human rights.

How can a government force the service providers to serve in realizing this right? The service providers are, by the virtue of human nature, more prone to be profit oriented than to try to help the society into becoming a healthy society. Though the division between profit and common goal is non-existent, it is created by the government to assert its importance in providing the essential human requirements. Government proclaims that no provider will willingly provide health care to the poor.

In its effort to control the providers, it controls their education, i.e, it controls the service which they utilize. The government is the sole provider of training for the health professionals, and it controls them by giving this training at a subsidized cost. The government has not allowed a private boom in the medical education sector through the guidelines and actions of Medical Council of India(MCI), its working hand. The government argues that the quality of education will be degraded if it allows a boom in this sector. So what is the result?

Almost all the competent doctors are produced from a government institution, and they have made a bond of five years of service in government run health centers. Thus the government is controlling the health care providers.

Why is the government interested in adopting this new policy of appointing fresh graduates as trainees without actually employing them despite of the fact that it has a five year bond with every graduate?

The government clearly understands that it is beyond its payable capacity to employ doctors to fill up all the positions and improve the quality of health care provided. So, the government of India is handing the life and death matters of its beloved citizens to the under-trained graduates from its sub-standard medical institutions, and all that at a price of Rs 10,000($250) per doctor per month.

Even the junior most employee working at a Business Process Outsourcing(BPO) Office in Bangalore or Hyderabad earns more than this trainee. So, its clear the doctors are not willing to go for such a deal. Therefore the health minister of India cites humanitarian grounds to solve this issue and he makes it mandatory for the doctors who are willing to go for higher studies to serve in his rural PHCs for peanuts.

The important point is that the medical graduates from a foreign university would not need this rural stint to practice in India. This discrimination illustrates the government’s desire to eat the cake without having it.

Lets see what opening up of sector can do for us.

A privatized medical education system would result in opening of a number of private medical schools, and therefore the number of MBBS graduates graduating every year will increase thousandfold. Liberalizing the medical education system will also decrease the cost of medical education in addition to increasing the quality of the service provided.

In the present scenario those who can afford better quality health care almost always prefer private hospitals to government hospitals. Unfortunately, these are the same people paying the tax money used to subsidize the health care. It means that, the honest taxpayers paying for the subsidized health care are have to again buy it from private providers. The government argues that it is not forcing them to seek private health care, but they are choosing themselves to go to private health care. Unfortunately because of the high rush at the government hospitals, the low quality of service, and the huge back log of patients forces them to seek private health care. So, although the government is not encouraging the taxpayers to opt for private providers, they are discouraged by the condition of public providers.

A doctor working in a out patient department of a government hospital is examining almost 70 patients per hour. This rate of work will invariably result into mistakes on the part of the doctor. In additin to that the consumer is under the security of a consumer protection act which holds the doctor responsible for mistakes committed by him. The doctor is in a no win situation and hence has a little interest in a government job.

Under “Janani Suraksha Yojana” the government has decided to pay the BPL over 19 mothers according to the following scheme:

In Low performing states,

• Mother: Rs. 700 Accredited Health Worker( ASHA) Rs. 600 in rural areas and
• Mother: Rs. 600 Accredited Health Worker( ASHA) Rs. 200 in Urban areas,

up to 3 deliveries and another Rs. 1500 would be provided in case of a Cesarean section.

In High performing areas,

• Mother: Rs. 700/-

All this in a country that is facing population problems
The Indian government has been messing up the Indian health care system for a long time, and it can be clearly demonstrated by an assessment of failures of every health policies of the government. these policies failed due to unrealistic goals, faulty planning and uncoordinated use of available resources. Just when you thought that people might be now fed up of the government, or at least the government has finally realized its mistake, it comes with a brave savior’s face, its socialist health minister is trying to do what socialists have been trying to do for centuries, that is sacrificing the capable for the incapable.

India is now spending millions of rupees on the development of a dead rural health care system and on building up the infrastructure, without paying the producers.

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