Road to Liberty: Markets Alone Reward Diverse Knowledge Forms

Sauvik Chakraverti, Sep 4, 2004, 12.00am IST

Socialists insist education will help the poor. Actually, millions are poor not because of ignorance, but because of socialist law. Unlettered tribals in the jungles of central India, for example, know how to distil mahua but laws prevent them from selling it. Millions of poor coastal Indians know how to climb the palm tree, harvest the juice, and brew toddy. They are poor because laws prevent them from selling the fruits of their traditional knowledge. In Sri Lanka, toddy is touted as the national drink and sold in tetrapak. No toddy is sold on Brigade Road, Bangalore: Excise law.

Similarly, millions of unlettered Indians know how to sing, dance and play musical instruments. But they languish in poverty because the socialists have outlawed nightlife. The poverty-stricken north-east is full of potential rock stars. Arun Shourie showcased many great north-eastern bands in Delhi recently but where do they perform, given all the restrictions on opening bars and clubs, serving alcohol and so on? In Mumbai, entrepreneurs have invested in thousands of dance bars which fork out crores in taxes, but cops routinely raid bars and arrest these girls who are just trying to earn an honest living with skills they already possess. In Maharashtra, legends recount the Peshwa Baji Rao's deep love for the dancing girl Mastani. Today, poor Mastani would be in jail or in a municipal school! Tamasha is an ancient Maharashtrian form of ribald popular entertainment, but it has been legally crushed, and the papers report that tamasha artistes today survive as mistresses of corrupt local politicians. Mujra is banned in Lucknow.

In America, black slaves made it big in music. New Orleans produced Satchmo and hundreds of jazz and blues stars not because of education, but because of liberty: The liberty to earn an honest living.

The socialist emphasis on education also demonstrates complete ignorance of how knowledge operates in the market economy. Main Street, Pune, is a busy market. Walking around, you find hundreds of small bakeries that turn out a dazzling array of breads, buns, biscuits, rolls and so on. There are scores of small jewellers, tailors and

expert darners. Many tiny establishments make picture frames. There are Irani, Parsi, Chinese, tandoori and continental restaurants. Budhanis is famous for its potato chips. There is a popular home-made softy ice-cream joint. There is a vada-pau stall that always has crowds of customers. There are bhelpuri and chaat-wallahs. A group of acrobats perform for passers-by. The street is lined with hundreds of shops selling diverse products ranging from footwear to sarees, from electronic goods to kitchenware. This is what Friedrich Hayek called the division of knowledge: Every economic actor is operating with distinct know-how.

Important implications follow the Hayekian view of knowledge. First, that central economic planning can never work, because knowledge cannot be centralised: What cannot be known cannot be planned. The socialist central planner, Hayek said, suffers from fatal conceit: He does not see the wonder of knowledge, and thinks he knows it all. It is because of knowledge failure that there are shortages of everything that is planned, from roads to power. There are no shortages in the market economy.

Second, Hayek showed how knowledge and education are entirely different things. Hayek found much of the knowledge used in the market economy to be inarticulate and uncodifiable. The bakers, tailors, expert darners, and bhelpuri-wallahs of Main Street possess this kind of knowledge. This shows the limits of formal education as a means to economic achievement.

Formal education churns out certain types of economic actors only: Bureaucrats, managers, accountants, doctors, lawyers and so on. The vast majority of successful economic actors get their knowledge elsewhere. That is why VJs, DJs, sports-persons, fashion models, and hotel chefs earn more than professors of economics.

Liberty matters much more than all the education the socialists can impart. Liberty means free trade and open borders. Liberty means there are no restrictions placed on economic achievement and it is this freedom that empowers the poor to enter the market, not education. Liberty beats education in another important way, for education requires us to pay a new tax, while liberty is free, requiring only that repressive laws be repealed and meddlesome, corrupt bureaus be shut down. So why have almost all educated Indians agreed to the education cess?

Perhaps their education made them forget liberty. In 1215, when the Magna Carta was signed, Englishmen were all quite illiterate, but they instinctively valued liberty: Every freeborn Englishman is the king of his own castle. Thus, we see the birth of constitutional democracy and the birth of capitalism. The merchants of cities and towns

extracted from King John constitutional liberties to self-government and trade by land and sea. The richest livery companies in London then were those of the fishmongers, grocers and fruiterers because they sold what everyone consumed. The merchants of England's cities and towns comprised the commons. But in every Indian city today, people in these basic trades have their surpluses robbed by parasitic state personnel. How can we believe we are a true constitutional democracy when we don't have liberty?

Catallaxy, key to an Open Society

Catallaxy, key to an Open Society by Sauvik Chakraverti

For a market society, the appropriate political value is not a sense of ‘community’. Rather, it is ‘catallaxy’

The political value of “community” is collectivist. Community lies at the root of communism, socialism and nationalism. It stood behind Nazism, apartheid and white supremacy. It justified “ethnic cleansing” in Eastern Europe recently and promotes immigration barriers worldwide. In India, the idea of community lies behind the Hindutva and Marathi manoos agendas. The scheming politician loves a homogeneous community.

Yet, community is a bogus value in a market society, which, in order to succeed, must be urban and cosmopolitan. Community makes sense in a village comprising one caste or in a small, exclusive tribe where everyone knows everyone else. It makes no sense in a city where individuals operate, peacefully trading with complete strangers. For such a society, the appropriate political value is “catallaxy”, which means an open trading arena. But first, a little about this word.

In the 20th century, Austrian economists alone used the word “catallactics” to denote the science of exchange. In Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action(1949), the section dealing with traditional economic issues is titled “Catallactics”. Derived from the Greek word for “exchange”, Mises mentions that catallactics was first used by the British economist and theologian Bishop Whately in the previous century, which means the word was well known to the classical political economists. Mises’ student from his Vienna years, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, confessed to having “fallen in love with this word”, for which he discovered two additional meanings that the ancient Greeks ascribed to it: first, “to welcome into the community”; and second, “to turn from enemy into friend”. These connotations of the word indicate its importance to an Open Society.

The ancient Greeks traded and mingled with all nations around the Mediterranean. Their societies employed special people, called xenos, or “guest-friend”, who looked after foreigners and their wares as they went about their trades in the Greek city-states. At the pinnacle of their glory, in Athens, they achieved an Open Society, as Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” teaches us. There was no “xenophobia”, as in our modern world.

The success of any market society lies in its openness and inclusiveness, and not in a narrow sense of community. There is no “chief” issuing commands to all traders. A market society is not a “command economy”. Such a society is strongly individualistic, wherein each trader takes independent decisions and is responsible only to himself for his own gains and losses. Further, such a society is marked by “impersonality”. There are good manners, yes, but there is no personal relationship between trader and customer.

Going deeper, a market society is characterized by “competitive individualism”: we all compete as sellers; we all compete as buyers. We all realize that we prosper when this catallactic competition is at fever pitch. We gain when there are a huge number of sellers as we go to buy. We gain when there are a huge number of buyers as we go to sell. The bazaar that is humming with catallactic energy is the crowded bazaar, not the vacant one. Thus, we all realize that openness matters. A successful catallaxy is open to strangers from all parts of the globe and hospitable towards them. It is not a closed community.

As we witness the economic decline of Western nations, we must realize that the primary cause of this decline is their misplaced faith in community. All of them operate “national economies” with national fiat currencies, central banking, immigration barriers, protectionism and rampant interventionism. Socialist India follows the same path.

However, the great thing about India is that all our cities are cosmopolitan. They are truly “melting pots” of humanity. This is our inherent strength. If we are to use it to get ahead of the competition, we must ditch the political value of community and opt instead to become a nation of free-trading and self-governing cities and towns—all of them catallaxies that are open to strangers. We must do away with trade and migration barriers. Our bazaars must be possessed of the highest degree of catallactic energy to be found anywhere in the world. Our biggest industry must be tourism.

Hayek defines community as “a common recognition of the same rules”. Such rules can be religious or tribal—or they can be secular. In an open catallaxy, only one rule need be recognized by all: private property. Happily enough, as Hayek also points out, this rule has been the cornerstone of open markets for millennia. Whenever people exchange, they exchange properties. Thus, most trade takes place without legal paperwork of any kind. Hayek said that the rule of private property operates in all of us “between instinct and reason”. We follow the property rule without knowing why. We have given up the instinct to plunder, to snatch and grab—but we don’t know why.

Thus, there is a “natural order” in all cosmopolitan open catallaxies. Posses of armed policemen are not required to “maintain order” in any crowded marketplace anywhere in the world. This order exists on its own. Without the “narrow domestic walls” of community, the idea of catallaxy solves the social problem for all individuals, while also uniting humanity in a rational, natural order.

Sauvik Chakraverti is an author and columnist. He blogs at Sauvik-antidote.blogspot.com

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