It is probably an often thought question, but rarely answered correctly by most of the people. What makes a country like India poorer than a country like say America? I have tried to answer this question since I was a kid, then as an adult.
Lets see, most people might answer to that question as “India is poor because it lacks so and so “, the effect being something India does not have because its poor, and US has because its richer, and not a cause of Indian poverty. For example, some people might answer
“India is poor because it lacks infrastructure western countries have”, or
“India is poor because of lack of education among people”, or
“India is poor because its very corrupt, and it has politicians who manipulate people etc etc”.
The problem here is simple, almost all these answers are effects, India does not have the infrastructure of western countries because India is poor, it doesn’t need that infrastrucutre, you cannot spend Rs 500 million per year on a road which brings per user cost is Rs 5,000 per month, and the average salary of people using that road is Rs 10,000 per month. Why not? Because if you did build a luxury road like that for people this poor, you are wasting resources more than you are creating them. When India becomes richer better infrastructure will follow, even if govt is the only entity building it, they will have more money to spend on infrastructure. You cannot create prosperity by creating one effect and hoping other effect will follow.
Similarly, the stuff about Indian people being educated, well if you are going to work on a construction site for all your life(someone has to work there), there is no point in spending so much money on your education which could have gone towards creating more job opportunities for you. By trying to create this effect, by educating 100,000 workers who will be working on manufacturing all their lives, and then ending up with having jobs for only 60% of them isn’t really a better outcome.
A bit matured people who understand how things worked, they will come to the conclusion that India is poor because it has less money than America, therefore India is poor and America is richer. But then that was incorrect too when you will find out that Indian govt has the power to print any amount of money possible. Why can’t Indian govt print more money, give some to everyone and make everybody richer. Apparently its not that easy as it may sound, when money supply is increased, prices of commodities rise soon thereafter. So even if poor people are given a lot of money, that will just raise the prices of the various commodities they might buy thereby bringing them back to same level of poverty as before(more or less).
I know a lot of people who know the correct answer to the question stated in the title. India is poorer than US because it has less capital than latter, and capital isn’t the same thing as money.

What is Capital

So the question comes, what is ‘capital’ and how is it different from money? To understand it we must understand first what is money. Money is nothing but a medium of exchange, we don’t really intend to consume money, we only keep money because everybody else accepts it and then we can acquired the final resource which we really intend to consume.
Capital is essentially any commodity or goods, or even service, which is used to hold value across time. In simple words, if you do not consume a good or a commodity, but only keep it for later consumption then that good serves as capital. Because in most of the cases we keep money for the future consumption therefore money is the most common form of capital, but if you bought a car which you intended to start using only 2 years later then that car is your capital(although I don’t see any reason why you would want to do that, but that’s beside the point).
When I say India has less capital than US, what does that really mean? Does that mean Americans can defer their present consumption more than Indians can? If we look at savings rate of both the countries, Indians can definitely beat Americans savings rate hands down, so shouldn’t that mean Indians must have more capital than Americans? The truth is, America has a lot more capital buildup than India, therefore despite of not deferring a lot of their present consumption for the future one, they can still manage to create more ‘future resources’ than India.
For example an American family may only save 10% of their savings for future or invest 10% of their income for future, but because the total amount of capital they have is much more than an average Indian family which might save about 40% of their income, their capital results in more consumer goods than what an Indian family’s capital results in.
Simply put, in order to be as rich as America, India will have to accumulate as much capital as America has. Artificially achieving the same literacy rate as US by govt spending will not make India as rich as US, because people won’t have as many jobs to do. Building an infrastructure through government spending will also not make India as rich as US as it won’t be worth spending so much on infrastructure when there isn’t enough capital to put that infrastructure to proper use.
This may be a very simple thing to say, because its like saying ‘in order to be rich you need to acquire a lot of bank balance’, which sounds like common sense, but in this case its like most people seem to think that if you take thousands of dollars of loan for education, you will automatically become rich, or if you buy a bigger house, you will become automatically rich.

How do we build up more capital?

Lets first take an example of Robinson Crusoe who got stranded on an island. He catches fishes everyday from 8AM to 5PM and eats them. Since he just landed on the island, he catches these fishes by hand and he is able to catch 25 fishes everyday. Since Crusoe came from a modern society he realizes that he can build a net, and that will enable him to catch a lot more fishes. Unfortunately, he also realizes that he cannot just blink and wish a fishing net, he must build it, and making a fishing net requires 5 days of his work. The problem in front of Crusoe is that if he starts to work for 5 full days to build that net, then he won’t be able to catch any fish therefore he will starve to death.
Crusoe in this scenario faces the problem of lack of capital. He needs capital to sustain himself until he extends the structure of production(that is from using only hands to catch fish, he uses hands to build a fishing net, which he uses to catch fishes. He realizes that by building that fishin net he will be able to catch 300 fishes everyday.
So Crusoe has 2 options, he can either:
a) Consume only 20 fishes everyday, and store the 5 unconsumed fishes; Keep on doing this for 20 days, which will accumulate him 100 fishes, which are good enough for him to sustain himself for five days he won’t be able to work.
b) Catch only 20 fishes each day and spend that extra time in building the net, so he will be spreading his 5 days of work, over 20 days.
In either of the two cases Crusoe has deferred his present consumption of 5 fishes everyday so that after he builds the net he is now able to produce and consume a LOT more fishes everyday. He can either catch 300 fishes and maybe consume them all, or make more dishes out of them, etc etc, or he could continue to catch only 25 fishes everday, work less and have more leisure time, and spending the remaining time in working on art, literature, maybe music etc.
India is exactly like Crusoe without the fishing net, and America is exactly like Crusoe with a fishing net. Because its easier for America to produce a lot without giving up a lot of present goods, America has a lot of time to spend on art, literature, music, etc. This is the exact reason why American atheletes and sportsmen win so many medals in Olympics, they have the disposable income and time to train themselves for sports, whereas in India we still spend most of our time catching fishes by hand.
In order to build more capital, you require two things:
a) People should be willing to put a lot of present goods for later consumption
b) When they put their present goods for later consumption, nothing should reduce or steal away their capital from them
The first task isn’t really that difficult for India, since we already have high savings rate. The second task is actually the most difficult task in India. You may ask, why? The answer is simple because the way we understand reality, we don’t think people should be allowed to accumulate capital.
Let me elaborate what I meant by nothing should reduce or steal away the capital from people who are deferring their present consumption for future. In the above example of Crusoe, lets say Crusoe’s fishes got rotten because they weren’t stored properly, so his capital has been destroyed, now to achieve the same earlier result he will have to build his savings again.
Take another scenario, lets say Man Friday, is another cast away, who drifted to the other part of the Island, he also catches fishes by hand, but he is able to catch only 10 fishes because he is not that good with catching fishes. When Crusoe was saving 5 fishes everyday, Man Friday decried that Crusoe was being unfair and hoarding fishes, also Crusoe being more dexterous with fishing, must feed Man Friday some of his fishes. So everyday Man Friday raids Crusoe’s extra fishes and consumes them in the name of making the society more equal. In this case again Crusoe’s capital has been depleted, and he will never be able to build that fishing net, and although Man Friday and Crusoe will be a bit more equal, they will remain poor. In fact soon Crusoe will realize that he has no incentive to really starve himself by 5 fishes, so he will either consume all 25 fishes or will catch only 5 fishes each day.
So how does capital get depleted, or stolen away, or reduced from the person who is building it? The answer is simple, because the way most Indians think, and always thought, was that we cannot allow one man to have all the wealth of the society, even if he built it all. So we like Man Friday in the above example, continously rob Crusoes of the Indian society, through taxation, which ‘we’ consider perfectly ‘justified’, or through a fiat currency and fractional reserve banking system, about which most of us don’t even care, its left for economics students who were educated by the western economists who don’t even understand how capital works.
What ends up happening is that we never grow rich. It was only until 1991, when Indian economy was liberalized and a lot more capital accumulation was allowed, and since then we have seen a LOT of economic progress, but still most people do not see or understand the function of capital, for them, capital means something to do with capitalism(which is technically correct, capitalism is a system where capital reigns means of production), and under capitalism ‘rich grow richer and poor go poorer’.

A society with more capital takes care of its poor better

Lets look back at the previous example of Crusoe, had Man Friday allowed Crusoe to build his net, Crusoe would have been able to produce a lot more fishes everyday, and then Man Friday could then provide Crusoe with some other services, in exchange for his fishes. Lets just say all Man Friday is good at is dancing, and creating stories and telling them passionately, since they both are stranded on an island, Crusoe might value this entertainment service a lot, so Crusoe works all day catching 300 fishes, and gives 100 fishes to Man Friday in exchange of Man Friday’s entertainment services.
Had Man Friday stressed on equality, all the way along, Crusoe’s net wouldn’t have been built, and Crusoe would have remained relatively rich(because he caught 25 fishes everyday and consumed 20), and Man Friday would have remained poor(because he caught only 10 fishes everyday and was able to consume only 15). Please note that in the society with more capital(ie, when Crusoe built a net), Crusoe was consuming 200 fishes everday, which is almost double of what Man Friday was consuming(100 fishes), and socialists decry that rich has gotten richer in capitalism and poor poorer, but Man Friday in the society with more capital is much more well fed and richer than Man Friday in society with less capital. This is exactly what we see in America and in India, a poor in America is still richer than even the average guy of India. All this is only facilitated if we stop believing in the redistribution of wealth and start allowing building up of capital.

Often people suggest that free-education is a moral, well-intentioned noble idea that somehow fails to work. Free education obviously is impractical but the issue of free education is really a noble moral idea? Can education be designated as a fundamental right and more than that, is education compulsorily needed?
Socialized education just as socialized health-care is not a case of dignified speculation but failure in practice; rather it is a case of inhuman hypothesis that is impractical. Yet, politicians always keep pushing the issue of education upfront for their political motive, painting it as a moral obligation for all and for doing so; they often try to declare education as an Individual’s right. Moreover, by doing so, politicians ensure a very productive education sector under totalitarian governmental control.

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.

Man is a rational being by nature; he strives for comfort, well-being, prosperity, progress, security and happiness using his intellectual and physical talents for his proper benefits. Nature created man for a social set-up. His natural necessities remained greater than his individual capacities to fulfil his wants. No one individual is capable enough to supply his own demands without the help of others. He cannot fulfil his wants without the aid of society and those wants, which acts upon every individual drives the whole of them into society. Furthermore, man is naturally selfish, as to fulfil his wants and to pursue his happiness, he is dependent on the reciprocating aid of the society, and he naturally tends to feel affection towards the social set-up, which is necessary for his pursuit of happiness and secured life. Without the aid of society, one may survive, but he cannot be happy and he cannot prosper, that is why, there is no time in a man’s life when his love for the society ceases to act. A man remains a social being throughout his life; society begins and ends with our being.
The property owner, the farmer, the technician, the plumber, the manufacturer, the merchant, the dealer and every occupation prospers by the help that each receives from the other and as a whole; they constitute a society that is regulated by the common interests of every entity. As every individual of a society is well concerned about his personal interests and rational well-being, the society itself evolves the essential sets of natural laws that obviously depends on the mutual benefit of every part, every individual of the society. In most of the cases, a society itself creates a well-arranged mutually beneficial system to avoid any coercive interference from any individual or group of individuals over others, that is, the free society itself denies any necessity of government or any governing coercive body to interfere in the social free domain. If one examines the basic nature and constitution of man, which is the basic unit of the society, he can easily notice that most of the part of the coercive regulatory system that is known as Government is very redundant.

Failure of Government

Often government is considered as obligatory for the working of a society, yet, the more perfect and free a society is, the less it needs a government to govern it. A free society obviously governs itself and provides enough free domains for each individual the right to self govern. All the specific laws of any society or country are basically the very natural laws based on the rational mutual self-interests of the individuals involved. All the laws of trades and commerce with respect to intercourse of individuals or different groups of individuals are based on laws of mutual and reciprocal self-interest. Individuals or groups of free individuals are tend to follow such natural laws of peace and prosperity not because of fear of any formal government, but because of the inherent mutual benefits and profits they are seeking for.
It is quite obvious that if a society is left free, and each individual of that society is provided complete freedom to pursue his progress and happiness, there seldom will be a need of any governing authority. Yet how often is the case where various operations of government destroy the natural peace and mutually beneficial state of free society?
If one look back at the riots and tumults that happened in India at various times, he will find out that government did not want any of those riots, but the government itself was the generating cause. Instead of consolidating the society, government divided it; it deprived the society of its natural cohesion and engendered discontent and disorder. That is, the government itself became the cause of chaos. The riots of 1948 were not because of any misgivings between Hindus or Muslims, both of them were living peacefully in India since hundreds of years, those riots occurred because of governmental want of divide and rule. The bloody conflict of Kashmir is not because of some Islamic group of militants, it is because of the want of two governments to control a peace of land and rule over the people living there. The militants of Punjab demanding for Khalistan were not inspired for any better cause of Sikh community, rather they were looking for making another coercive government, the 1984 riots against Sikh’s again were not because of any sect of society, but they happened because of the impulsiveness of government. The emergency period and all the killings in that period again were because of the government. The opening of Babri Mosque gate was obviously a political step of the government that infuriated the society and became the cause of Hindu-Muslim riots, Babri mosque was demolished because of aspirations of government, and whole society suffered the consequential riots and killings. The burning of Godhra train was again a consequence of the division that the government and the aspirants of government created and that became the cause to further Gujarat violence.
Overall, there seldom occurs a riot or act of violence within the free individuals of a free society, but whenever a self-imposed government intends to interfere within the society; it becomes the cause of riots, tumults, destruction and violence.
The various acts of government, tax-impositions, caste reservations, reservations based on religion etc ultimately divides the society and creates an environment of dissatisfaction an frustration that ultimately leads to violence in various forms and to avoid that, government again tend to divide the society further and deprive it of the natural strength and mutually beneficial state a free and self-governed society may achieve. The recent case of Telangana struggle is also nothing but an example of governmental act going sour, and the very infamous Mumbai riots against the people of UP and Bihar are also nothing but the ill-effects of governmental ill-policies and the war-mongering character of the political aspirants.
What good a farmer ploughing his land will find in leaving his peaceful pursuit of prosperity and happiness and going for a war against a farmer of other religion, state or country ploughing his own land? Why will a manufacturer of a certain religion, caste, state or country wager a war against the manufacturer of another religion, caste, state or country? Does any such war, riot or struggle adds up any acre of land for that farmer, does it increases the productive capacity of the manufacturer, does such wars and tumults and bloodshed increases the venturing probabilities of any entrepreneur or enterprise? No, it adds nothing for any common man, it do no good for any common folk, rather, all such wars, riots, strikes and tumults deprives them of their peaceful pursuit of happiness, their basic right of freedom and security. Though this reasoning is good for a society or a nation and its people to avoid and hate wars, and try to maintain love an peace to pursue their progress, yet it is not so for the government. A society earns nothing from divisions, wars, strikes, tumults and riots, yet a government earns a lot. War is the game of government and the nation and public are the pawns.
In spite of all these depressing and destructive acts of government, the individuals keep striving for their progress, for their living. No matter how high inflation may go, the poor man seeks out a way to feed his children. It is obviously a wonderful attribute of the society that in spite of being ruined and ruled by the government keeps providing enough aid for the individual constituent to survive the harshness and inhumanity of the government.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil, in its worst state, an intolerable one. Thomas Paine

Shanbaug , a 61 year old woman¹ , who suffered a brutal rape 36 years ago and has been lying in a vegetative state since last 36 years wants to culminate her pain and misery, her life. Her “Next Friend² ” describes her as

Her bones are brittle. Her skin is like ‘papier mache’ stretched over a skeleton. Her wrists are twisted inwards; her fingers are bent and fisted towards her palms, resulting in growing nails tearing into the flesh very often. Her teeth are decayed and giving her pain. Food is mashed and given to her in semi-solid form. She is in a persistent vegetative state.

She has a right to live, should she be punished for that right? How human is it to force her to suffer all the pain regularly? Does the “right to live” include the “right to die”?

The right to Live

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly declared in article three:
“Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”
One must understand that “right to life” just like any other right, is not an inalienable, rather it is a subjected of the liability of the right holder.
It is not only an axiom underpinning the concept of freedom, but rather the necessary means to fulfill man’s ethical requirement to achieve a life in accordance with his nature. That ethical requirement derives first of all from the fact that we are living entities facing, like all living entities, the fundamental alternative of existence or non-existence, life or death. By our nature, our specific capacity to deal with that alternative is reason volitionally applied to action. If one chooses to pursue the alternative of death, questions of first principles are moot. If one chooses life, then life becomes one’s goal and the standard of all values.
The complex and spontaneous nature of our lives requires us to identify those values we must seek in the service of our life and order them into a code of values to guide our choices – i.e. an ethics. The primary precondition is the freedom to exercise autonomy over the application of reason and action in the service of our life. Thus, the right to life and our need for freedom is based on what we are – on the fundamental nature of man.
The moral right to one’s life is not a social/political right. It is that which in principle is right for any individual in the context of his own life. When and if an individual chooses to live among other men and interact with them over the long run, he needs to preserve his ability to live by his moral rights. Nothing can prevent him from doing that except physical force or the threat of force, so, above all, his primary social need is the absence of coercion so he may apply reason and action to production and voluntary trade. Yet, what if a person does not want to be with others, he does not want to live anymore? Is he the soul owner of his life, is he the only decision maker for his own life? Yes, he is free, he is no one’s slave. That is why, human dignity and his self-ownership, his sovereignty is considered even above the right to his life.
A man surely possesses an inherent right to a dignified life and by virtue of this right; he certainly is the sole decision maker of what to do with his life. Society, as a cumulative function of many free individuals is a positive human structure to help the man to attain and enjoy the right to his dignified life, the society cannot dictate the terms of dignity or life to any person and it is his decision to be made, free of any social, political or legal coercion.
Thus, in a case of an individuals like Shanbaug, if she prefers to end her miserable and painful life, it is her decision to be made. She is the sole owner of her life and she inherently owns the right to end her life too.

Current norms of Right to Life

India is considered as a free nation, a land of free individuals.
Freedom is so little understood in this “land of the free” that it is often confused with its opposite. The current example of Shanbaug is evidence to that prevailing confusion. The Apex court of India that negated the pleas of termination of pregnancy of mentally retarded girl resulting from a rape at Nari Niketan in Chandigarh and a similar plea from a Mumbai couple for terminating a diseased fetus³ , raised questions against the plea of Shanbaug to terminate her own life. The objection was obsolete and rhetoric. ‘‘Do you mean right to life includes right to die?’’
In no way a man’s right to dignified life can be alienated from his proper right to die. If the society or legal codes of society rule over the individual moral code of life, than it means that the individual is not free and certainly have no sovereignty, rather the individual is mere a subject of legal socio-political norms of collective society.
The Apex Court of India now has accepted the plea of Shanbaug to be debated at Supreme Court. The question is why should the Apex Court be considered as more powerful than the individual’s own right to self-sovereignty and Freedom?
Most probably, Apex-court may dictate a directive to discuss the provision of certain amendment in IPC to include the provision of Physician Assisted Suicide; they may subject it to a public constitutional debate. The Supreme Court may totally reject the plea to voluntary suicide too. Yet, if Apex Court accepts Shanbaug’s plea, as doctors have told her there is no chance of any improvement in her state, will it be any positive step towards Individual Freedom? Will the Supreme Court of Free India ever realize that Indians are not a subject of rule of Supreme Court or national government rather they are entitled to individual sovereignty and a dignified life?
To keep a will of a person to end his life under the decision of Supreme Court or under the will of physicians to decide whether to let a man die or not is a direct breach of “right to live with Dignity” confirmed by the Article 21 of Indian Constitution. By force-feeding Shanbaug and treating her, as a vegetative entity for the purpose of medical tests and experiments is not only unjust, it is highly inhuman. She is not a mouse or cat dependent on the will of physicians.
In case, if Apex Court agrees to let Shanbaug end her life “if Doctors permits her to perform Euthanasia”, than again it would be a breach of individual freedom of Shanbaug and her right to her life. She is certainly not a slave to those doctors whom Supreme Court may consider as the decision maker of who should live or who should be allowed to die.
Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) is a mendacious issue; it confirms that the physician is principle and not the assistant, that it is the physician who will make the decision whether the person should be allowed to die. An assistant generally means the sub-ordinate that helps one in achieving his decision, but in case of PAS, the physician himself becomes the decision maker, the person superior to the patient. PAS simply empowers Doctors and not the individual to make a free decision for their own life. As a matter of fact, PAS is breach of right to life.

Economical Aspects of Euthanasia

Since last 36 years, government hospital is “force-feeding” Shanbaug, keeping her alive with permanent care, which technology has made an option in an overwhelming number of hospitalized cases. It is not the only case and it requires resources that someone must relinquish in order to make it possible. That is, Government is forcing a person to keep living miserably with no dignity against her will like a slave, while the same government is exceptionally unable to provide any proper medical treatment or help to millions of other Indians who often suffers health hazards and deaths because of lack of medical facilities. How proper it is to waste resources and money on simply forcing and enslaving a person who by her own will want to die, at the expense of misery and poverty of millions of other person who may need the welfare health resources desperately?
No matter how much Indian government spent on people like Shanbaug, they will remain vegetative and unwilling to live, they will keep suffering and feeling like encaged, enslaved, undignified things for governmental medical experiments, no better than rats and dogs. Obviously, we the tax-payers are being robbed for such inhuman acts.
In absence of government control over health care, the decision of life or death of Shanbaug would have been in her own hands. Had government not been paying for her hospital care, perhaps interested individuals would have been willing to contribute to her care. As long as private individuals were voluntarily giving of their funds to keep her alive, it would have been much more difficult for a court to order her feeding tube disconnected. However, because the state is paying for it, ultimately, life and death decisions is to come from a high arbitrary government power. Neither Shanbaug nor her close relatives have any say in that, they may keep pleading like miserable beggars for mercy and humanity to the Supreme Court.

Conclusion:

Right to a dignified life is a fundamental moral right that confirms the right to die itself. If right to life is left not as Individual freedom but as a subject of governmental legal whims of lawyers, magistrates and physicians, than it simply means that Individual is not free even to decide for his life, it would certainly be a breach of his right to life. Moreover, by means of coercive tax-collection and universal health-care, Government again breaches the individual’s fundamental right to dignified life at one hand; on the other hand, it is huge wastage of very limited and scarce medical resources.

1. SC admits sexual assault victim’s plea to end her life, Times of India [↩]
2. Next Friend— a legal term used for a person speaking on behalf of someone who is incapacitated [↩]
3. The Issue of twisted Abortions, Reason for Liberty [↩]

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

Human Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automaton Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bugs

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

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

Virus

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

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

Conclusion

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

It has been a long accusation of the feminists that women are paid less compared to men for doing the same job because of sexism. Most of the men out there know it for a fact that we don’t have a secret pact amongst us men to pay women less wages, nor we actively discriminate against women in that regard. Yet statistically speaking women are paid less than men in many aspects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Walter Block, Loyala University, New Orleans [↩]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who rose to the chair in 1999, and since then been holding power despite the Washington backed coup attempt of 2002, is certainly in news now than ever before. Chavez has always been vocal about his aim of establishing 21st century Socialism in his country. Whatever that means, lets hope the almighty Marxist Praxis does not trust price controls as the economic tool towards that dream.

Venezuela is currently suffering from severe shortages in the supply of various goods, in particular rice. The nation reminds us of the erstwhile USSR in this aspect, as it does in many other perspectives. Only that direct physical force against the masses has not been let loose yet. Venezuela has been reeling under the impact of shortages in the supply of various goods since 2003, and now the crisis has hit rice supply as well. Keeping up with propaganda records, Chavez has launched a propaganda tirade against private suppliers. He has accused private suppliers of hoarding supply of rice. There could be a certain element of truth in it, suppliers could indeed be hoarding supplies to a certain extent. But that’s definitely not where the fundamental problem lies. The causal problem of this crisis lies in price-controls which have grown in size ever since 2003.

I will first explain the economic basics of prices, and then lead into the cause of shortages, inflation and hoarding.

What are prices, and what do they say? The price of a product simply shows how much money you should give up to obtain it. Then, what do you prices say? And why do prices of commodities change so often in markets? The answer is, people are willing to give up different quantities of money for the same homogeneous product at different points of time. This might sound vague, so lets get on with an example.

You are given 3 bags of rice. You have a particular preference scale based on your individual liking, and it shows those immediate needs that you would like to satisfy with the three bags of rice. The first immediate need that you fulfill with a bag of rice is to feed yourself. So, the first bag of rice goes to feeding yourself. You decide to use the second bag of rice to make some cakes. The third bag goes to feed your pet dog. This explains your preference scale. Your highest valued purpose is to feed yourself, followed by making some cakes, and finally feeding your dog.

Now imagine, you have only two bags of rice, and you are to decide what among the different uses of rice you are going to sacrifice. Since you have feeding your pet dog the least important of all uses, you decide to let your dog starve. Now suppose your neighbor has some extra bags of rice in his kitchen and he is ready to sell it to you for some money. How much would you be ready pay for that extra bag of rice which you would use now to feed your dog? You would see if the utility (or use) you gain from that extra third bag of rice is more than the utility you attach to the money you pay to your neighbor for that extra bag. Lets assume you would probably pay $2 to get a third rice bag from your neighbor, and you use it to feed your starving dog.

Lets further assume now that you have only one bag of rice. So you would have to give up on both feeding your dog as well as making tasty cakes. Now again, your neighbor has an extra bag of rice. How much would you be ready to pay for that second bag of rice? The same kind of reasoning as used earlier applies here as well, you would buy the second bag of rice only when the utility you achieve by buying it is greater than the utility you attach to its price. Perhaps you’d be ready to pay $5 to get the second rice bag from your neighbor, to make some cakes.

Now lets go further and assume that you have no rice bags with you. And again, your neighbor has an extra bag to sell. This time too you’d buy the bag of rice only when the utility you gain from the rice bag you buy is greater than the utility that you attach with the money that you spend to buy it. Now, you would be ready to pay almost anything to buy that bag of rice from your neighbor, and that’s because the utility you attach with the bag of rice is your life itself. You would have to starve without that bag of rice.

We have now seen three instances where the price offered to buy an extra bag of rice varies, quite drastically in fact. Economists explain this as the “law of diminishing marginal utility”. Marginal utility of a commodity is the utility that you gain (or lose at times) from an additional unit of the commodity.

This explains why prices change at different moments in the market. When there is excess supply of a commodity in the market, people would have the liberty to use those commodities for less valuable goals, like how you used the third bag to feed your pet dog. So they are willing to pay only low prices. On the other hand, when there is deficit in the supply of a commodity, people are strained to obtain sufficient goods. They are forced to cut down on their frivolous expenses, like your preference to feed your pet dog. The price of the commodity in this case is high. This explains how prices are set in a market.

What the market does is it rations the goods that are available to the most immediate needs by raising prices when supplies are constrained. So, high prices enables everybody to satisfy their most intense immediate demands, while restricting them from using further units of the commodity towards less intense needs.

So when supplies are inadequate, the price of the commodity increases to make sure that the commodity is diverted towards the most urgent needs rather than being wasted in satisfying less intense needs. This means that suppliers would gain lots of profits.

The suppliers then invest this extra revenue to expand their production in order to gain more profits. Note, monopolies might restrain from producing more to maintain current profits, but they won’t be able to do it for long, until competing firms sensing profits enter the business to produce more of the commodity. This increase in supply would cause prices to go plunge. So high prices leading to high profits are market signals to encourage increased production. And this is how the free market deals with the economic problem.

Governments on the other hand have a very different way of dealing with high prices due to insufficient production of a commodity. They deal with the economic problem with price ceilings. The Government sets arbitrary prices to commodities whose prices are “too high”, and it thinks the problem is solved. But that’s exactly where the problem starts. The lower prices leaves no profits to be gained or even sends firms right into losses, and that discourages firms from increasing production. Witnessing lower prices, consumers demand more of the commodity than they would at the genuine free market price level. That is like, if a sack of rice were available for just 50 cents you’d probably buy hell a lot of rice bags and waste them for weird reasons. We have in hand a very critical situation, production of the commodity plunges due to decreasing profits or outright losses, but at the same time people are demanding more of the commodity. This leads to shortages.

This is what is being experienced in Venezuela because of price controls imposed by Chavez’s government.

The other fact to remember is that price controls which are imposed initially on a a few commodities are spread to other commodities as well. In fact governments are forced to spread the price control regime because of their initial mistake of controlling prices of a few commodities. Why does this happen? When the price of a commodity is arbitrarily set low, people are encouraged to demand more of the commodity but since there is not sufficient supply available, goods are sold to people on a first come first serve basis. This could have a very important side-effect. The supplies do not get diverted to the most intense needs because those customers whose demand for the product is extremely important is prohibited from bidding higher prices for the commodity.

So when such needs are not satisfied, consumers search for alternative goods to buy. People who failed to secure rice because of the shortages would try to buy wheat which is not controlled by the government’s price control regime. As more people who failed to get rice start bidding for wheat, the price of wheat skyrockets. And now the government steps in again to impose price controls on wheat as well. And thus, the price control regime keeps spreading and turns into a universal price control system, with no kind of free market pricing to guide production and consumption.

Now coming to the problem of hoarding. First reason why some people hoard supplies is because they are unsure about the availability of future supplies due to chronic shortages. The second type of hoarding is carried out by speculators who expect a higher price for the product in the future when the price control regime collapses, or they might sell the supplies in the black market at prices higher than the government set arbitrary ones. It must be realized that the problem of hoarding is definitely not the cause of the shortage, it is a minor side effect of the real culprit–price controls.

The Venezuelan economy is in the mud, and the price control regime is spreading all over the economy. The system is bound to collapse and cause serious problems to the Chavez government. It should also be observed if Chavez does a Stalin here, to use force against his own people. Reports emanating from Caracas already show the seizure of rice processing units, and also the spread of the price control regime towards other goods like meat, sugar ad other goods. Just another case of price controls bringing disaster.

Venezuela will not be able to reach Socialism because Socialism is an impossible theory, it demonizes the same tools by which pro-Free Market economies achieve efficiency in distribution of resources and satisfies the demand of the market. In the name of achieving more Socialism Hugo Chavez keeps on grabbing more and more power, and this is causing Venezuelan people to lose their Liberties.