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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society with very strict IP Rights

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

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

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

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

Society with no IP Rights

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

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

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

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

Vertical vs Lateral Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

In the recent illegal liquor death related tragedy in Gujarat about 136 people have been killed and about 150 more are in hospital, getting treatment. Gujarat is one of the states of India where the sale and consumption of liquor is banned. One might expect after such a tragedy that now people understand that prohibition does not benefit anyone, but it harms the same group of people it hopes to benefit, but there is no limitation of number of people coming out and supporting prohibition in Gujarat. Not only people don’t understand that prohibiting consenting adult activities never work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1950s-80s Gold and Import restrictions in India

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

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

Coal Mafia of Bihar

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

From Wikipedia page on Coal Mafia² :

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

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

Sandalwood smuggler Veerappan

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

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

Drug prohibition in United States

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

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

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

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

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

Someone forwarded me a link to this video:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVrHW2suW2A]

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.

While whole world is blindly running for the goal of being green, the latest annual survey of National Geographic Society has announced India as the winner. The Greendex of Indians is 59.5 and India is at the top. The Greendex indicates the consumer behavior of a certain region or country and compares the sustainable power consuming behavior of the consumers.¹
For some environment crazy folks, this might prove to be an encouragement and they might feel great about the fact that Indians have been declared as the forerunners of the campaign Green Earth, yet, the question that is to be asked is, what keeps India at the topmost position of that green index? How come one of the most populous country is the least power consuming too?
Some will believe that Indians are naturally environment friendly and they care for earth, some may say that Indians are well-mannered about their consuming habits, yet the reality is different. The topmost position of India on that Greendex also indicates the poverty ridden situation of Indian power sector and the consumers’ plight.
Despite an ambitious rural electrification program, some 400 million Indians still have no access to electricity. While 80 percent of Indian villages have at least an electricity line, just 44 percent of rural households have access to electricity. According to a sample of 97,882 households in 2002, electricity was the main source of lighting for 53% of rural households.²
Now the reality comes out to be clearer, Indian consumers are not consuming lesser power by will or because of their habits, rather they have no electricity to use, their nights are as dark as they were before Edison invented the first electric bulb. They cannot use fans, coolers or heaters, they cannot imagine of an air conditioned bedroom for their kids.
The situations are no better in urban India. Even the most busy and important metropolitans of India constantly suffers 3-4 hours blackout everyday.
All Cities in Maharashtra like Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, Navi Mumbai,
Thane, Kalyan-Dombivali, UlhasNagar, Nashik..the list is endless have 20 hours per day electric supply. Pune is the 7th largest city in India and Navi Mumbai and Thane are also very large cities too. Most of villages in Maharastra face power cuts for 16 hours a day. In some states like UP, Haryana and Bihar even cities are no better than villages and suffers heavy power cuts for 6-8 hours every day. Almost all Indian cities suffer a minimum of 2 hour power cut. Even Delhi and Mumbai suffer power cuts, can we expect a power cut of 4 hours in Las Vegas or New York?
Obviously when there is no electricity, how can anyone consume electricity?
That is obviously one of the reason of why India lacks domestic consumption of electronic appliances too.
The result is the higher position of India on that Greendex.³
Electricity is not the only issue. Indians are the most frequent consumers of self-grown food, with 35% eating what they grow several times a week or daily. No wonder there is lack of awareness of nutrition content and that is the reason why India faces maximum cases of malnutrition, Indian mothers faces maximum cases of miscarriage and infanticides.
Indian consumers obviously are least likely to own a car or any private transporting system, rather they uses public transportation system. One can check the troubles of local trains and blueline buses. Would not any Indian prefer to have his own car if he could? With the advent of Nano and other smaller and cheaper cars, things will change fast. So yes, Indians are most likely to use a scooter or motorcycle or at the most, a compact car and hence the mileage of Indian consumers is pretty lower than the average of consumers of other countries.
All this proves that the Indian Green-ness is driven out of compulsion rather than conviction. India is green because Indians do not have access to electricity, Indians cannot afford to have personal vehicles although they want to, and the luxurious cars are still beyond the reach of common Indians. Indians are greener because they are addicted to malnutrition.
Now the question is, should Indians try to remain green, or will Indians like to remain green? Should not all Indians have access to electricity, nutritious food better health-care system? Should not a middle class or lower middle class Indian have the potential to buy a car or a motorcycle?
Green is synonymous of poor. Yet crazy environmentalists keep shouting for Go Green and for their crazy ideas of global warming catastrophic fear mongering⁴ they tend to implicate poverty and malnutrition on masses.
Basically, the major carbon dioxide emitter is the power sector of any country. In India, 63.3% of electricity is produced by coal or oil or gas based thermal power plants. Merely 7% of power is produced by renewable source of energy, and that cannot be increased anyhow because of geographic positions and inconsistency of solar power or wind mills, the options left are either hydro power or nuclear power. Hydro power is obviously dangerous as they pertain to increase tectonic tensions and cause massive earthquakes as one was seen by China⁵ recently. Hence, the remaining is nuclear power, and that too is not so proper, as nuclear wastes are much more hazardous than any waste the thermal power plants can produce.
Nobody want to remain poor, nobody really want to remain without electricity too, they do want to own a TV, a computer, a fan, an air cooler and other simple electric and electronic appliances and they do have a right to have one if they can earn and afford. Thus, even though India is at the top of Green Ladder at present, it is not going to last long.
Should we worry for it? Or ask, should we keep Indians to remain poor always with no access to electricity, and a better life, or should we just forget about the crazy idea of “Go Green” and global warming?⁶
Climate is meant to be changed, evolution and technology makes it possible for us to bear any sort of change.

1. Indians are world’s greenest, Times of India [↩]
2. Indian Power Sector, Wikipedia [↩]
3. Indians are world’s greenest, Times of India [↩]
4. Global Warming is cooling down to ice Age, Reason for Liberty [↩]
5. China, Communism, Corruption and Earthquakes, Reason for Liberty [↩]
6. The Catastrophe lovers want to return to Dark age, Reason for Liberty [↩]

Are you a rational being? This is a question, which should be asked to one’s self regularly. All activities a man can perform like listening, sore sacking, wearing, writing, reading has to be kept in close observation to one’s self.
For a rational being, if he does not find any satisfactory answer to his question (why?), then he should not do that.
If one talks about Indian dresses then immediately suits and saris (SS) come into picture (for girls). It gives you a typical Indian look.
Hindus come to know about these dresses after the invasion of Muslims. In ancient India (from early to 12th century), women wore no upper garment to cover their breasts. Whether villagers or queens, housewives, townswomen or milkmaids. All of them remained bare above the waist just like men. To prove this thing one can take Ajanta caves as a significant example. Ajanta caves have pilgrims , ladies in waiting, dancing women, nurses attending the sick, idle townswomen looking out of their windows, all wearing no upper garment. This all are the facts of clothing of that time because painters and sculptors of those time cannot lie for over 2000 years. Also, there is a fine sculptor of king Mahendravarman ( 6th century) with his two queens bare above waist. If they wore anything above waist to hide breasts then can any sculptor dare to delineate them like that.
Today’s sari came into existence around 1780. Ancient India has much more amazing fact about its culture and standard of living. Indians of that time were much more civilized than rest of the world. When Europeans were in barbarian stage India had fully planned and civilized cities. The status of women and men was also equal. At that time many panchayats also used to be handled by women. India also contributed in science, mathematics and many fields.
But now India’s mentality and culture has got distorted in many forms. Moreover, it is of no use looking back and feeling proud of such things. We get nationality, serve name and mother tongue by default and it is useless feeling irrational responsibility for that. Capitalism teaches us survival of the fittest. It is very absurd to be emotionally attached to your mother tongue, nationality, dress code etc. Because of globalization we came across many new and different innovative things and as we always want the best for ourselves, something which is compact and can come under our budget; so if one can purchase the best quality and compact form of a thing which is also easier to handle then why shouldn’t one go for that!
Now things are changing, young crowd has a high and modern thinking about almost everything but still they argue for some things that it should be traditional because it reminds of their culture and sovereignty associated with it, Why? Because they do not accept this fact: survival of the fittest. For example, well educated girls in India also wear suits and sari some times in spite of having many other better option because they want to remind themselves and to people around them that although they are modern and highly educated they still have that traditional stuff. As if, some household qualities will come automatically to them after wearing suits. Why Indian men donot wear dhoti kurta once in a while to prove their traditional feelings? Because, not only Indian men, but Indian women too feel themselves inferior to men. They do not understand that clothes cannot purify their image in front of their selves.
SS are made to cover the best part of a woman’s body,the most attractive one. Sari can be compared to an old age computers: very big and very complicated to handle and carry. Nowadays we use higher technology of computer i.e. laptops. Why? Because it is compact, easy to carry, trendy and one take it anywhere one wants to easily. Similarly western dresses are compact, trendy, and easy to carry. Sari has unnecessary number of turns. Everything is becoming compact and modern because of technology that’s why we are bending towards western dresses (something better to wear).
One should pursue each and every action of one’s life with rationality whether it comes to friends, music, marriage, clothes or anything else.

Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels say in their famous work ‘The Communist Manifesto’:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.”

So according to Marx and Engels, capitalist economies suffer from an inherent trait of periodic depressions. They go on to explain further:

“Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property”

According to them, the root cause of a depression is too much prosperity. For better understanding of this subject, I would also like to cite the Marxian crises theory, which revolves around the concept of the falling tendency of the profits in capitalist economies. Marxist writers often use this in various ways to put forward their theory of Imperialism. However, I would restrain myself from explaining that here.

The basic premise of the overproduction doctrine is that a capitalist economy, as it gets more and more efficient with labor-saving machines introduced for the production of goods, moves towards a state of increased efficiency which leads to overproduction and that overproduction causes losses. Therefore the core reason behind the losses are overproduction and increased efficiency. Because of overproduction, there are no more profits in the economy, and hence the economy goes into a deep depression. So, it is the lack of profits which causes depression.

In order to debunk this Marxist proposition, we need to understand what causes profits to exist in the market. I will explain how profits never cease to exist in a non-stationary economy where consumers’ preferences and production conditions change so often. I will start of by quoting Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises from his famous work ‘Human Action’:

“Profit is not related to or dependent on the amount of capital employed by the entrepreneur. Capital does not “beget” profit. Profit and loss are entirely determined by the success or failure of the entrepreneur to adjust production to the demand of the consumers. There is nothing “normal” in profits and there can never be an “equilibrium” with regard to them. Profit and loss are, on the contrary, always a phenomenon of a deviation from “normalcy,” of changes unforeseen by the majority, and of a “disequilibrium.”

What Mises says here is that the origin of profits (and losses) is due to the “disequilibrium” phenomenon. So how does this “disequilibrium” phenomenon actually express itself like in a real economy?

Suppose that a market is dumped with millions of tonnes of potatoes much more than the consumer’s desire to purchase. This causes the market gets cleared only when the prices decrease to a large extent. This might lead to immense losses to the farmers, but can these losses caused by the overproduction in one sector of the economy cause a recession? The answer is no.

Lets go further and ask, does this overproduction in any way lower the average rate of profit in the economy. Again no, it doesn’t. The partial overproduction in a particular sector of the economy leads to partial underproduction in some other sector of the economy. Like in our example, the overproduction of potatoes means that the equipments and labor that were used in growing potatoes could have been used better in some other sector of the economy.

How would this show up in the price levels? The prices of the commodities that are underproduced(because of employment of resources in overproduction of potatoes) will rise proportionately and lead to higher profits. The losses that are made in the sector where overproduction causes havoc is compensated by profits in the sectors where commodities are underproduced. In simple words potato farmers will be making huge losses and the wheat, rice, barley farmers will be making huge profits.

This is what Mises calls a “disequilibrium” phenomenon. The market always moves in a direction to minimize this disequilibrium, but almost never reaches equilibrium because of various factors like the change in consumers’ preferences, natural causes etc.

Having explained the basic misconception, I would also like to deal with such speculations which contemplate the possibility of an overproduction in every sector of the economy. People argue overproduction everywhere could lead to losses everywhere completely wiping out profits from the economy. But there is no need to worry, the market has answers again. An overall overproduction everywhere in the economy still doesn’t set the “disequilibrium” that exists between the preferred quantities of various goods into equilibrium. Here one needs to understand that people’s needs are humongous and can never be satisfied. The market can only try to provide the proportionate quantities of various commodities according to the consumers’ preferences. Profits (and losses) are nothing but the signals that guide producers to adopt to the consumers’ preferences, and they never would cease to exist.

Being a Socialist up till a few months ago, I spent countless hours figuring a way out to enable a central planner to somehow manage to order the exact amount of production required to satisfy the maximum demand for the maximum people, and I did reach onto some complicated unrealistic solutions, but nothing beats the simplicity and realism of the Free Markets.