By – Amar Yumnam
I started reading about the Austrian School of Economics in the late 1980s, and have been fortunate to continuously receive literature from the Mises Institute committed to the Austrian belief of liberty as the core framework of Economics and study of society. While I had read Murray Rothbard much earlier, I have received a just published book, Murray N Rothbard: The Making of An Austrian Economist, authored by two Economists – Joseph Salerno and Patrick Newman. The discussion in Part IV of Rothbard’s three categories of policy intervention are particularly significant. The three types of interventions (government policies): 1. “Autistic intervention “occurs when the invader coerces a subject without receiving any good or service in return.” Examples include murder, forced salutes, and religious prohibitions.” 2. “Binary intervention occurs when “the invader forces the subject to make an exchange or a unilateral ‘gift’ to the invader of some good or service.” Examples are highway robbery, slavery, and taxation.”3. “Triangular intervention occurs when the invader prohibits “an exchange between a pair of subjects.” Price controls are the typical example. Significantly, Rothbard did not limit himself to investigating price controls but also included many other interventions in this category, such as grants of monopolistic privilege.” While examining, “the economist must investigate how a given intervention affects the utilities of the actors directly involved as well as its indirect consequences in altering prices, production, and income and wealth distribution.”
Simultaneously I received the latest Annual Report of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development which concludes: “The current polycrisis [“growing inequalities, geopolitical fragmentation, climate crisis, democratic backsliding, and rapid technological transformation”] shows that existing social development models are failing: too many are left out, and too few hold power. A new vision is needed—one integrating social, economic, and environmental objectives on an equal footing.”
Reading these two at the same time naturally made me lost in pondering on the institution of Government and governance at both the country and the Manipur levels. Here comes the relevance of a recent book of The Roosevelt Institute, Restoring Economic Democracy. The first paper begins: “One could spend a lifetime working through the complexities and contradictions of democratic theory, but democracy’s basic premise can be expressed simply: We are all fundamentally entitled to a measure of agency over the conditions that shape our lives. In a democracy, the people aren’t helpless victims of circumstance or the obedient subjects of a powerful few. They govern themselves. In so doing, they hope to exercise a meaningful amount of control over the society they inhabit and their own existences.” I am particularly quoting this for the seeming unawareness of the current governance. The lessons from the recent Cockroach happenings are yet incomplete as evidenced by the absence of the Home Minister from Parliamentary discussions.
Two questions are of key concern for me – one of Trust and another of Capability. The two terms need to be defined as the Government intentionally avoids being concerned about or are unable to understand them. Trust is a situation where “citizen trust in other citizens as a result, in part, of governmental institutions and citizen trust in government itself.” Capabilities, as the father of the concept – Amartya Sen puts – are” a person’s ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being; [it] represents the alternative combinations of things a person is able to do or be.” The person in this can be applied to the government as well.
Now the questions before us are: (i) are the Governments in Delhi and Imphal command trust of the people? (ii) Are they capable of performing the democratic responsibilities for the welfare inclusiveness of the people? For the Government in Imphal, there is nothing to be talked of; it scores zero in both earning trust and the performance of inevitable social functions of governance.
When it comes to Delhi, the recent happenings of the Cockroach phenomena establish beyond doubt that the pains of accumulated distrust, inequality and lack of opportunity creation are deep and wide. The most unfortunate dimension of this distrust is proven lack of Commitment for knowledge enhancement without which building capability is impossible. Thomas Sowell said – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” We are in a situation like “Democracy + Bureaucracy = Idiocracy” as a piece of a recent piece from the Mises Institute is titled. We the people of the country cannot afford to waste time and face social turmoil anymore. The elections for both the Lok Sabha and the Manipur Assembly should rather be held together sooner in the interest of the Nation. India needs to join the very fast global competitive race.
