Auction Ayodhya: We'll Have Both Freedom and Justice

Auction Ayodhya: We'll Have Both Freedom and Justice by Sauvik Chakraverti

Nov 19, 2003, 12.01am IST Times of India

The judiciary is blocking India's liberals. The Bombay high court has been sitting on a public interest litigation filed by the Indian Liberal Group for over five years.

ILG is appealing against the section in the Representation of THE People Act restricting electoral competition to socialist parties. So let us attack socialist jurisprudence, for we have the longest constitution in the world but little justice.

Obviously, there is something wrong with socialist law. An economist commenting on law what cheek, the legal community will cry. I must inform them that great economists have all written on law. Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence are a classic. Frederic Bastiat's slim volume The Law has been published in India. I guarantee that anyone who reads the book will be convinced that the Constitution of India is not quite all right. Friedrich Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty, a book Margaret Thatcher swore by; and there is Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty.

Let us begin by understanding the origin and purpose of law. It is because of property that law was necessary. That is, it is not because of law that property exists; it is because of property that there is law. The common law evolved to sort out disputes related to the natural right to property. Liberal judges take this as their guiding principle so let us apply it to important issues before our socialist judiciary and see what results we get.

Take, for instance, what a liberal judiciary would do if Parliament passed a law banning cow slaughter: It would simply tear up the law on the grounds that cows are private property. Each man must be free to do what he wants with his own cow and the state cannot interfere. Did any legal luminary speak this language? Now, apparently our rulers want to de-politicise Ayodhya and the issue is before the courts. What did the courts do? They asked the Archaeological Survey of India to dig up the disputed site and discover what lay underneath. Is this the application of our principle? If a temple is discovered under my house, can anyone lay claim to my property? Certainly not.

If liberal jurisprudence is applied to Ayodhya, the solution is clear and simple: There is no clear title to the site; there are various claimants, each possessed of little legitimacy; therefore, the site must be auctioned. Socialist jurisprudence is not justice. Socialists reject the natural law of property and believe that the purpose of the law (and the state) is to redistribute property. Theirs is a Robin Hood ideology but it is time we stopped looking at their legal plunder (what they call redistributive justice) as romantic.

Rent control, for example, is the only cause of slums. They have destroyed the market for cheap rentals. They do not like landlords so they created slumlords. And they did not settle disputes, the first purpose of law. Rather, they prolonged disputes. My uncle spent 20 years of his youth battling a rent control case. A long-term solution is to promote the teaching of law and economics. We have few economists in law schools all over the country. This must be tackled. As far as the short-term is concerned, there is no solution. We in India must face up squarely to the fact that the socialist state which we placed on the commanding heights is reporting symptoms of multi- organ failure. This is entirely because socia-lists apply completely wrong principles to government. Behind this multi-organ failure lies a far deeper knowledge failure. I can personally testify to the poor quality of teaching at the IAS Academy in Mussoorie. I went through my son's ICSE economics textbook and advised him to drop out of school.

I find it amazing that Amartya Sen is recommending mid-day meals in state schools: It is a prescription to assuage physical hunger while ignoring the mind. If, in the short-term, we wake up to the fact that we are faced with a powerful, centralised, nuclearised state that is reporting multi-organ failure, then the medium-term solution would be to challenge what is being taught in economics, political science (or civics), public administration and law. Let us include liberal jurisprudence in law schools. Let us have the political value of freedom included in civics textbooks. Let us teach students of economics how wealth is created, so they value freedom and understand markets. Let us make a bonfire out of Indian economics textbooks, a bonfire of the socialist central planners' vanities. The liberal only appeals to reason, and it is to reason that we must appeal, even if denied entry into the electoral fray.

In this way, liberalism will gain ground and someday soon we will have the critical mass necessary to re-invent every aspect of our government, including the law and the judiciary. A note of hope: We go through life, getting all our needs from the market, usually without recourse to either civil or criminal law. So we don't need courts that badly. Second, we have a proud history of private courts in the cities run by the East India Company. Sir Elijah Impey was a great EIC judge. With sound jurisprudence, simple law, and a short constitution, we can have freedom as well as justice.

Is This 'An Occasion to Celebrate'?

Is This 'An Occasion to Celebrate'? By Sauvik Chakraverti - August 27, 2003 12:00 AM

My friend Sunondo has four children. I asked him which one he loved the most and he said the youngest one. Now, this is contrary to Carl Menger's law of diminishing marginal utility, which holds that the more we have of anything, the less we love it. So, if it was cake you were consuming, the first slice would be heaven, but by the fourth you would be sick and want to throw the rest of cake into the waste bin. How come Carl Menger's law -- and law it is -- applies for cake and for everything else we have, but not for children?

I ask this question in a particular context: that of the so-called "population problem" which has had a host of Third World governments, including mine in India, taking out stringent policies in order to limit the number of children people have. Recently, in India, many states have debarred candidates with more than two children from contesting local elections. If every succeeding child gives us more pleasure, what sense does it make to penalize fertility?

In China, the "one-child norm" was enforced because, after several generations, there were millions of Chinese with no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, two parents and four grandparents. What is better for a child? A large family? Or a strong state?

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus worried that a growing population would outstrip a society's ability to feed itself. At the time he was writing, Malthus had many eminent classical liberal economists opposing his predictions of doom. Jean Baptiste Say and Frederic Bastiat both wrote tellingly of the mistake Malthus was making: assuming technology to be constant. In modern times, the economist Lord P.T. Bauer was a prominent critic of the "population problem" and, after him, Julian Simon proved convincingly that human beings are not a problem, but the world's "ultimate resource."

The planet Earth is bountiful. There will always be an abundance of resources, including energy, so long as we allow human beings the freedom to utilize the Earth's bounty and serve the needs of mankind through the free market and the price mechanism.

However, Third World governments and the United Nations are still on the side of Malthus. The Indian Parliament, in a unanimous resolution recently passed on the 50th year of independence, asserted that population was India's biggest problem. That is, the representatives of the people were united in saying that their constituents and their children were a problem.

And as for the United Nations, recently a baby girl was born and promptly billed as India's billionth citizen. The UNFPA representative in New Delhi said in a press statement, "This is not an occasion to celebrate." What should we celebrate instead -- the fact that tens of thousands die on our unsafe streets every year?

India is an overwhelmingly young country; 96 percent of the people are below the age of 59; 74 percent are below the age of 39; and 34 percent are below the age of 15. This young country is ruled by aged rulers who believe that our babies should not have been born. What could be worse than that?

Third World governments like those of China and India, which endorse the population problem and coerce citizens into having fewer children, should be disgraced, as should the UN. Every couple in the world should be free to decide how many children they can have. And every child should be welcomed into the world. Every birth should be celebrated and every death mourned. And it is not just additional children that give us pleasure: This pleasure is multiplied when we have more and more grandchildren. Carl Menger may have been the Emperor of Economics, but his "law" certainly overlooked the issue of reproduction. So let us have more children; let every child give us increasing marginal utility; let us have more and more grandchildren too, where marginal utility is even higher, and let us bury the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus who was, after all, a priest who disapproved of poor English people having sex.

Sauvik Chakraverti, is a winner of the Frederic Bastiat Award for journalism (2002). He was senior assistant editor at The Economic Times in New Delhi, and is the author of Antidote: Essays against the Socialist Indian State (2000), Free Your Mind: A Beginners Guide to Political Economy(2002), Antidote 2: For Liberal Governance (2003), Antidote 3: From the Hair of Shiva to Hair of the Prophet and Other Essays (in press).

Auction Ayodhya: We'll Have Both Freedom and Justice

Auction Ayodhya: We'll Have Both Freedom and Justice by Sauvik Chakraverti 

19 Nov 2003, 0001 hrs IST,  The Times of India 

The judiciary is blocking India’s liberals. The Bombay high court has been sitting on a public interest litigation filed by the Indian Liberal Group for over five years. 

ILG is appealing against the section in the Representation of THE People Act restricting electoral competition to socialist parties. So let us attack socialist jurisprudence, for we have the longest constitution in the world but little justice. 

Obviously, there is something wrong with socialist law. An economist commenting on law what cheek, the legal community will cry. I must inform them that great economists have all written on law. Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence are a classic. Frederic Bastiat’s slim volume The Law has been published in India. I guarantee that anyone who reads the book will be convinced that the Constitution of India is not quite all right. Friedrich Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty, a book Margaret Thatcher swore by; and there is Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty. 

Let us begin by understanding the origin and purpose of law. It is because of property that law was necessary. That is, it is not because of law that property exists; it is because of property that there is law. The common law evolved to sort out disputes related to the natural right to property. Liberal judges take this as their guiding principle so let us apply it to important issues before our socialist judiciary and see what results we get. 

Take, for instance, what a liberal judiciary would do if Parliament passed a law banning cow slaughter: It would simply tear up the law on the grounds that cows are private property. Each man must be free to do what he wants with his own cow and the state cannot interfere. Did any legal luminary speak this language? Now, apparently our rulers want to de-politicise Ayodhya and the issue is before the courts. What did the courts do? They asked the Archaeological Survey of India to dig up the disputed site and discover what lay underneath. Is this the application of our principle? If a temple is discovered under my house, can anyone lay claim to my property? Certainly not. 

If liberal jurisprudence is applied to Ayodhya, the solution is clear and simple: There is no clear title to the site; there are various claimants, each possessed of little legitimacy; therefore, the site must be auctioned. Socialist jurisprudence is not justice. Socialists reject the natural law of property and believe that the purpose of the law (and the state) is to redistribute property. Theirs is a Robin Hood ideology but it is time we stopped looking at their legal plunder (what they call redistributive justice) as romantic. 

Rent control, for example, is the only cause of slums. They have destroyed the market for cheap rentals. They do not like landlords so they created slumlords. And they did not settle disputes, the first purpose of law. Rather, they prolonged disputes. My uncle spent 20 years of his youth battling a rent control case. A long-term solution is to promote the teaching of law and economics. We have few economists in law schools all over the country. This must be tackled. As far as the short-term is concerned, there is no solution. We in India must face up squarely to the fact that the socialist state which we placed on the commanding heights is reporting symptoms of multi- organ failure. This is entirely because socia-lists apply completely wrong principles to government. Behind this multi-organ failure lies a far deeper knowledge failure. I can personally testify to the poor quality of teaching at the IAS Academy in Mussoorie. I went through my son’s ICSE economics textbook and advised him to drop out of school. 

I find it amazing that Amartya Sen is recommending mid-day meals in state schools: It is a prescription to assuage physical hunger while ignoring the mind. If, in the short-term, we wake up to the fact that we are faced with a powerful, centralised, nuclearised state that is reporting multi-organ failure, then the medium-term solution would be to challenge what is being taught in economics, political science (or civics), public administration and law. Let us include liberal jurisprudence in law schools. Let us have the political value of freedom included in civics textbooks. Let us teach students of economics how wealth is created, so they value freedom and understand markets. Let us make a bonfire out of Indian economics textbooks, a bonfire of the socialist central planners’ vanities. The liberal only appeals to reason, and it is to reason that we must appeal, even if denied entry into the electoral fray. 

In this way, liberalism will gain ground and someday soon we will have the critical mass necessary to re-invent every aspect of our government, including the law and the judiciary. A note of hope: We go through life, getting all our needs from the market, usually without recourse to either civil or criminal law. So we don’t need courts that badly. Second, we have a proud history of private courts in the cities run by the East India Company. Sir Elijah Impey was a great EIC judge. With sound jurisprudence, simple law, and a short constitution, we can have freedom as well as justice. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/290069.cms

A Second Republic

A Second Republic -There Can Be No Collective Property by Sauvik Chakraverti

 30 Dec 2003, 0000 hrs IST The Times of India 

India's socialist judiciary, even after a decade of liberalisation, remains inextricably wedded to the notion that publicly held property is in the public interest: The collectivist ideal. 

This indeed must be the rationale for blocking privatisation in the oil sector and referring the matter to Parliament — the custodian of collective property in socialist thinking. 

To understand the pitfalls of the notion that collectively held property actually exists, the reader should take a walk around Lutyens' Delhi. All the bungalows there are public property: They belong to the state. 

But does this mean that they belong to us, the people? Certainly not. If anyone of us were to try and enter one of these compounds, even if just to admire the flowers in the opulent garden (maintained at public cost), we would be turfed out pronto. 

From this, we arrive at a theorem: There is no such thing called public property. Whatever goes under that name is very much private property, in the hands of someone or a group that claims to represent the public. 

That person or group has obtained a lien on that property, and exploits that so-called public property for private gain. Thus, in the case of the bungalows of Lutyens' Delhi, various functionaries of the state have obtained liens on these public properties at rates far below market prices. 

Having understood this, let us extend this theorem to the public sector enterprises our socialist rulers have invested in: Are all of them public property by virtue of the fact that they belong to the collective — the state? Of course not. 

Indeed, we can analyse them in much the same way as we saw the bungalows of Lutyens' Delhi: Certain individuals or groups have obtained private control over these public properties and are exploiting this for private gain. 

In the case of the state-owned enterprise sector, we can even develop a public choice model of the political economy based on our theorem, as follows: All these firms are the properties of various ministries. 

Whoever gets appointed minister then rents these firms out to individuals or groups for private exploitation. Hence, totally at odds with the opinion of our learned judiciary, liberal jurisprudence will hold that publicly held property is a socialist myth. 

A truly liberal constitution would debar the state from holding property. 

What should be done with the vast properties of the socialist Indian state? Before we arrive at that decision, let us first inquire as to how these property titles were obtained in the first place. 

This is necessary because the title may have been criminally acquired. For example: If we see A snatching at B's wristwatch, this does not necessarily mean A is a thief, for B may have stolen A's wristwatch in the first place and A is simply trying to regain his just property. 

According to liberal jurisprudence, only just property titles are valid — there is always an ethical dimension to liberal law. 

So let us consider how the socialist state acquired these titles. It owns all these bungalows, all over the country, where its functionaries reside for free. 

It owns all these enterprises which it leases out to its cronies. It operates a land monopoly in most cities, including the Capital. It owns all the forests, all the rivers, all the mountains, all the oil under the ground, all the minerals: It practically owns the entire country. 

For the rest of us, property titles are extremely insecure. We really own nothing. Tribals get booted out of their traditional homelands, which are leased out to forest officials and contractors for private gain. 

In Karnataka, the state government is passing law to take over temples: God is being nationalised! 

At this point, let us pause to reflect on the fact that there can be some truly public properties which every citizen and even every foreigner is free to use like a public thoroughfare or a public park. 

Liberal economists call these public goods and call for public investments in public goods alone. This is because businessmen will not invest in goods which everyone can use for free. 

In India, although this is a planned economy, the state has not invested in these public goods at all. Instead of investing in roads, it invested in an automobile factory. It owns Scooters India. It owns oil companies. Hotels. Steel plants. Airlines. Should liberal jurisprudence hold these property titles to be valid? 

Absolutely not. These are all criminally acquired titles. The taxpayer's interests have not been represented in this planned socialist democracy. Instead of investing in public goods, they have invested in private goods. This is planned theft. 

All these properties should be seized and auctioned off. Those responsible for this diversion of public money should be prosecuted. The charge: Criminal misappropriation of public money. 

If the disputed site at Ayodhya is handed over to a Hindu group, then this temple will not belong to all Hindus. It will be the private property of that group of Hindus alone. Thus, as mentioned in these columns earlier, the disputed site at Ayodhya should be auctioned. 

And, with this de-politicisation of the saffron agenda, let us also bury the notion of collective property. We put an end to both fascism as well as socialism. Onwards to a Second Republic.  

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/394205.cms

Reassessing Nehru: Free India From His Evil Legacy

Reassessing Nehru: Free India From His Evil Legacy by Sauvik Chakraverti

12 Jun 2003, 0001 hrs IST, Times of India

It is very easy to prove that the great Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, who founded a democratic dynasty that still lives on, was an evil man. My logic is based on the writings of Frederic Bastiat. 

Let us begin by looking at the difference between good and evil. Man is born into a difficult existence. To survive in this life he has to get a lot of things from the world around him: roti, kapda, makaan. There are but two ways of getting these (if we omit beggary): by working hard in the market economy, earning one’s honest living, and buying what one needs from the market. The second is by theft, by plunder, by stealing from others. The question Bastiat posed is: Which is good and which is evil? Which should we encourage and which should we seek to stifle? My reader will readily answer that the first is good, and people should be encouraged to work towards fulfilling their own needs; further, that the desire to live off others is evil and plunder should be stifled. 

In which case, let us now take a close look at the Nehruvian legacy: What did this socialist dynasty encourage? It will be instantaneously obvious to anyone who remembers those hard socialist times that this dynasty stifled enterprise and promoted plunder. Nehru put in place what Rajaji called the ‘licence-permit-quota raj’: he fettered enterprise in every possible way so babus could plunder entrepreneurs. He encouraged bright young people to join his public enterprises, which were funded by looting the taxpayer. His daughter even went on a nationalising spree, the effects of which are still with us. In her heydays, the only jobs available were under the state. Young people were not encouraged towards enterprise; they were encouraged to join the state and plunder the people. 

Gradually, as the socialist drama unfolded, it mingled with democracy to create a scenario of universal plunder. Every section of society, be it economic, social, religious or linguistic, was issued its own share of the spoils — something free or cheap at someone else’s cost. Or a job under a quota. Or some land plundered off someone else. Even the law was made to side with this plunder, and the property rights of the citizen were no longer guaranteed by the Constitution. What else is this but universal plunder? 

The history books tell us that Nehru fought for freedom. But are Indians free today? We are ranked 122 in the World Economic Freedom Index, 2002. We are still, after 10 years of this voodoo liberalisation, an economically repressed nation. Our natural ability to trade, to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ — a gift which every Indian child is blessed with in abundance — is still not allowed to flourish, and free trade is still a distant dream. Currency controls, trade res-trictions, high tariffs and continued licensing hinder our ability to generate wealth for ourselves. And they encourage a ‘rent-seeking society’ which the personnel of the state, under the Nehruvian system, have become. 

Indians are phenomenal traders: in London, the capital of a country once known as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, Indians own all the corner shops. There is an Asian pop band in England called Cornershop. One joke about Indians goes: Why can’t Indians play soccer? Because every time they get a corner, they put a shop on it! Legend has it that a Bania can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and still emerge with a profit! We are the world’s best traders, but we are not free to trade because of a worthless bunch of ‘industrialists’ whom Nehru encouraged to plunder their consumers. And so it was that great evils engulfed the land. 

To rid the country of these evils, there is no alternative but the formation of a liberal political party. Only liberalism can offer us an escape from this socialist plunder, now under a fascist dispensation. Only liberals believe in the free market — that all the people should be left free to earn wealth and the state should have a minimal role. Only governance under such principles can lead India back to her age-old prosperity. 

Getting there is impossible today because the Representation of Peoples Act proscribes the formation of parties that are not socialist. So the Shiv Sena is OK, but we liberals are not! Indians must realise that this democracy is not a true one if communists, socialists and Hindutva types are free to compete and liberals are not. And the Mumbai high court must immediately respond to a public interest litigation on this issue by the Indian Liberal Group which it has been sitting on for over five years: What are libe-rals expected to do if they cannot participate in elections? Take to armed insurrection? 

Having proved that this socialism is evil, and this democracy is false, let me conclude by informing my fellow citizens that it is far more important to have a free market than it is to have the vote. The market is where economic achievements are made. I cannot open a beer bar in my basement, but I can vote. What good is that vote to me? Tribals in central India can vote, but cannot sell their lovely drink, mahua. What good is democracy without the market? Democracy without free markets is meaningless. Illiberal democracy, we Indians must now realise, is a very bad system of government.

The country is in a horrible state. Corruption rules the roost everywhere. Every city is dying. Every town is decrepit. Evil ideologies hold sway. Will India’s liberals stand up and be counted?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/17770.cms