Why not just right not to be poor

I have lost count of how many different rights I have. And how many different government agencies there are, to protect and enforce my rights. Now some people, well intentioned and good people I guess, want food to be a right.

Surely the poor need one right: right not to be buried under an avalanche of rights and schemes.

Before some of us climb our morally superior high-horses, and proclaim to be holier-than-thou, let us acknowledge that all of us feel equally pained by the deep and wide poverty around us. By the fact that hunger is a real issue. Everyday millions, that too millions of innocent children, go to bed hungry. We must make haste to make hunger history.

So instead of all these positive rights (Negative and Positive Rights,  Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty) why not just one positive right:

right not to be poor.

Say, person A is considered poor if he earns below Rs X per month. Then why not just give A, Rs X or multiples of X. Multiples to be decided by democratic institutions.

By not taking this approach, we flood society with campaigns, departments, layers of bureaucracies for monitoring, enforcing, etc. etc. Check out Right to Food Campaign

See how many departments, schemes and audits they have listed. All this just for one “right”: food. I suspect not more than a handful of people know the existence of such schemes, their rules and regulations, how to avail of benefits, etc. Surely these schemes provide ample employment to scheming NGOs and officials, no pun intended. One can only imagine who the real vested interest is.

Last decade was all about right to education. All the people who campaigned for right to education have a moral obligation to list the results of making education a right. How many thousands of crores have been spent? More importantly how many children actually got educated because of their new found right?

The problem with such a debate is that proponents of making everything they consider dear a right, start accusing others of being less caring, instead of being objective about their achievements and progress.

Not to trivialise the issue, there are nuances to the poverty debate. Income versus asset, etc. But none of these schemes really do anything in those aspects. These schemes are all meant to be ameliorative. No food, give food. No education, give education. No colour TV, give colour TV.

We are not talking about building asset, bank balances, trust funds for children, etc. So let us not go there.

If you change this into: right to be rich (ala Causes of wealth, not causes of poverty), then the debate gets even more complicated. You have to drag poor late Lord Peter Bauer in this. Poor guy, let him rest in peace, for now.

All positive rights activists must do an objective and ruthless accounting of their achievements. If they are honest, all these rights must be folded into one: right of NGOwallas, activists and officials to be perennially employed, at the expense of others, in the name of the poor.

Waiver of mass debt

Great alternatives, to the recently announced loan waiver,  from Vijay Mahajan in Waiver of mass debt How that money could have been used to really change lives.

Mr Policeman, what will you be watching tonight?

Whew! No ban on ‘cheerleaders’, organisers to face action if dance found vulgar

Poor Mr Ramrao Wagh and friends, you know what they will be doing tonight. Keeping an extra close eye on those cheerleaders.

Whatever happened to switch off the TV idea? IPL is happening in a stadium. You need tickets to enter. It is shown on channels that can be changed by the viewer. But no. I want to see the cheerleaders and I want the police and politicians to protect me from myself.

Of course, there is that ever present, difficult to answer question: what about the children. Well. What about adults only cinema? Same rules.

In some places on earth movie industry self polices. Rates the movies and private cinema theaters prevent underage viewers from watching movies they shouldn’t be watching.

I would any day prefer self-policing to politicised censorship.  But, for now, in India government appointed men and women to censor movies. They give the A or U ratings. Why not give IPL, with cheerleaders, the same A rating. Which means IPL can be shown on the same channels that show A rated movies. Or rate them PG-something. Kids above certain age can watch with parental guidance. Father can advise the son on how to observe the cheerleaders.

If that hurts the pocketbook, IPL will decide whether to have cheerleaders or not.

My opinion, cheerleading should be banned for stupidity. Not obscenity or vulgarity. Unless you think vulgarity is another form of stupidity.

By the way, I love obscenity, vulgarity, nudity and all other forms of titillations as much, probably more, than most humans. (Note I didn’t say men. I just scored a point with women by acknowledging that they can be as lecherous and voyeurs of filth as men. Men….. watch and learn the ways of currying favours with modern, feminist women.)

Always thought cheerleading was an act of stupidity. Now I find it even sillier to have cheerleading for cricket. What next, cheerleading for chess? Most of the time they are just distraction. Watch them next time when the game is tense. Even the most hormone charged fool is focused on the game, not on these women. All the while these poor women, all sexy, beautiful and very athletic, jump up and down, only to be ignored. What a waste!

I know this is blasphemy. But cricket is a boring game. Loved it when I played it as a kid. But watching it? It is acknowledgment of the boringness of cricket that we invented the one-day. One-day turned out to be only so much better that we morphed it into a 20 over game. Add some silly rules to it, that no one can figure out who is foolish enough to invent them, still not exciting enough. Now add some glamour by installing some celebrities, who probably have never hit a ball, in the stand. Add some sexy, skimpily clad women to jump up and down and sideways … still boring.

No amount of cheerleading at the funeral can bring the dead man back to life for me. At least for me. So I what do I do? I don’t write letters to the editor complaining about the women’s uniform. I don’t appeal to the politicians to watch the cheerleaders ever more closely. I don’t .. well you get it. I don’t watch the game!

If only we were a football loving nation. My guess is that cricket is the only game that the Sports Ministry does not sponsor or minister. So until then ….. entertain yourselves by watching naked women while cricket happens!

Can Environmentalists and Economists Agree?

One of my pet themes–perils to the environment when you ignore economic principles and the power of incentives. One of the reasons why I respect the work of Nature Conservancy.

Art Carden and Mike Hammock in Can Environmentalists and Economists Agree? March 31, 2008  Contra Costa Times address some interesting issues.

The silent tsunami from Economists

The silent tsunami from Economists  on the food crisis.  Good short term and long term solutions:

• Merely to distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should get—an extra $700m.

• In most places there are no absolute shortages and the task is to lower
  domestic prices without doing too much harm to farmers. That is best
  done by distributing cash, not food—by supporting (sometimes inventing)
  social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor.

• Then stop the distortions:
  In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene
  in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn,
  from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to
  leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is
  to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed
  out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food
  chain: the international market.

The vanishing common sense

Some points TVR Shenoy makes in The vanishing food stock shows you how even well informed columnists think and gives you a glimpse into why the so called food crisis exists:  Shenoy writes:

• our economist prime minister and his team of experts had done a poor job of managing food stocks
• Forget two years ago, was
  anybody in the central secretariat paying attention even four months
  ago? India then had the opportunity to pick up three million tonnes of
  rice from Myanmar (Burma). The great economic experts in Delhi
  dilly-dallied. Today, there is only a million tonnes left — and the
  price is over 40 per cent higher.

Questions for the Shenoys of this world:

1. Why are handful of people (PM, his team of experts and the Central Secretariat) managing the food stock of a billion strong nation which includes millions of farmers and traders? I thought Soviet Union collapsed few years ago and with it the idea that handful of central planners can be substitute for million of humans and their thousands of institutions and organisations, collectively called the market. I guess I was wrong.
2. If three million tonnes of rice was just waiting in Myanmar to be taken, while prices in neighbouring India was going up, what were the millions of evil traders and businessmen, who supposedly put “profits before people” doing? Why didn’t they “exploit” the poor farmers of Myanmar by buying low and “exploit” the poor Indian consumer by selling high?  Are all Indian traders and businessmen as dumb as the Central Secretariat? Or are there some barriers to such trade ?
3. Does the Central Secretariat include the central Agricultural ministry, the food processing ministry, the zillions of central and state government employees in rural areas to “help” farmers, all the state government agricultural ministries and their staff, the gram this and the gram that, krishi this and the krishi that, my favorite the FCI, the zillions of PDS shops, rural dev ministries, the social security ministries, the zillions of subsidies that go directly to inefficient fertilizer companies, the fertilizer and chemical ministries, the panchayati raj ministries, the zillions that go to indirect electricity, water and other subsidies, the loan melas that go to mostly rich farmers, all the nationalised banks that supposedly was nationalised to serve the rural poor whom the evil private banks won’t serve, zillions of barriers to even a simple common market inside India, let alone with the outside world, ………?
4. If yes to question 3, then what more do you expect the Central Sec to do? They have tried all complications and distortions humans can come up with.
   
5. Come to think of it, if yes to question 3, then Central Sec must be full of all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipresent gods. Is it legal to worship them? If so, when can I start?
   

Wait for few weeks and we will be on to the next fad. The current food crisis will fizzle out just like the last big crisis–the rising oil price crisis. The world, thanks to globalisation, liberalisation, technology, etc., has learnt to do more with less. The world could do better, if only the governments–eastern, western, rich and poor–stop distorting the markets with indirect and disingenuous subsidies, putting unnecessary barriers to trade, playing god and market by predicting and subsidising the fuels of the future, etc.

Some Don Quixotes in government will chase windmills of private monopolies, hoarders and exploiters (see earlier post Of men, mice and monopolies).

Traders and speculators will continue to outwit every government plans and scheme. They will buy low from the government and sell high, back to the government. I don’t blame them either since they are usually not allowed to do anything else.   

So while we live in this blameless, Kafkaesque world, doing the tango and the Kabuki with various incarnation of plans-crisis-plan, the world figures out ways to move on, get around stupidity and vanishing common sense.

Of men, mice and monopolies

This is what happens when you have monopolies. One distortion of the economy soon needs another. One destructive policy needs and equally destructive and unprincipled “remedy”. According to Railway
Minister Lalu Prasad, who presides over probably the largest monopoly in the world,

Read more

What about the other monopoly called FCI. This wonderful creation of central planning loses thousands of tonnes of food every year to men and mice.  It is my contention that FCI feeds more criminals and rats day in and day out than hungry people. An exaggeration no doubt, but not by much.

Who will save us from the exploitation and profiteering of anachronistic monsters like FCI?

Next time you encounter the following: use thousands of features on your computer; wade through garbage and human excrement in railway stations that looks more like refugee camps; read about farmer suicide, even though zillions have been set aside by taxpayers to aid them, via subsidies and food procurement, and that tonnes and tonnes of food  disappear every year from government shops and storage, chew on the following:

Microsoft, which delivers better and better products, every year, for cheaper and cheaper prices, is relentlessly hounded and accused of being a monopoly. But railways and FCI ……….

Before you conclude otherwise, I am a big fan of Mr Lalu Prasad. He is a shrewd politician and politics, especially in a complex democracy like India, needs more Lalu Prasads. Not naive fools whose only qualifications are that they speak English well and studied in prominent Engineering colleges. Maybe even did a tour of the West and are have come back to “serve and sacrifice” for their motherland. Clueless bull!

One more contention of mine: Mr Prasad knows fully well how destructive the Railway Ministry, the monopolistic nature of railways in India and FCI are to the development of India.  He knows well that his gimmick will not make any difference whatsoever.  But the price is rising, inflation is up, elections are coming, etc. etc. And he is a shrewd politician.  Man got to do what a shrewd man got to do!

Not just Delhi, Madam Sheilaji!

Good to hear a well respected CM and politician utter the words City State. Madam Sheila Dikshit thinks Delhi needs “City State” system. Why just stop with Delhi? Why not let other cities have the same status so they can govern themselves better. As I opined earlier in The coming mutinies, we will get there kicking and screaming. City states are inevitable and a must. But that change is not going to come easy.

Burning Mr Singh’s pump

One more reason why all sincere environmentalist should learn economics and a thing or two about incentives. Check out this pretty alarming piece India’s water shortage by Daniel Pepper. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Unfortunately, most concerned environmentalist I know just talk about these issues.  Then follow it with a speech on why we should love nature, conserve water, yada yada yada. Completely oblivious to the economy distorting and ecologically disastrous effects of indirect subsidies.

Hope he goes further next time. Just give the money directly to the farmers. They know how to buy pumps, electricity, etc. keeping costs in mind. The less electricity a farmer uses, the more money he keeps. Simple. Get government out of the pump buying business. I am pretty sure soon we will get to hear about a government pump buying scam. Let the farmers buy the pumps that is appropriate for their use.

Set up a transparent regulatory framework, if necessary, so anyone and everyone can produce and distribute electricity. Introduce competition, which in turn introduces accountability, to electricity and other services.  Put an end to government MONOPOLY. This way government does not have to be in the business of “utilities will be required to upgrade transmission
lines to cut losses and improve service”. Cutting losses and improving services are what businesses do when faced with competition. Appealing and pleading is not a substitute for free and fair competition.

Farmers like Darshan Singh, 55, who grows rice and wheat on 25 acres of
Punjab land that has been in his family for generations, say they would
be happy to pay for electricity if it was constant and didn’t burn out
their pumps.

Even if you doubt Mr Singh, giving tax payers’ money, to buy electricity, water or booze for that matter, directly to farmers like Mr Singh, will be politically practical and make questions about Mr Singh’s sincerity irrelevant. Directly subsidy would be far less distorting to the economy and thereby far less harmful to the environment.

Let us stop burning Mr Singh’s pump! And yes, as Mr Kumar says, “all these issues are interconnected”.

Ironies on the road to property rights

Please visit Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review, December 2007 issue for my article on property rights. When Nitin Pai, editor of Pragati, asked me to write on property rights the first thing that came to mind was the internet headline (tribal leaders had petitioned Tamil Nadu government not to lease out their land) and later my chance meeting with young tribal activists who had submitted the petition.

Enough has been written on property rights and how important it is for anyone with property. From my experience, giving lectures on liberalism and attending seminars, it is obvious that most people don’t think ‘poor’ when they hear the words ‘private property rights’. Usually they are pleasantly surprised when they get the link.

Finding examples of how poor suffer in the absence of property rights, included in rule of law and protected by it, was not difficult. Take the following: Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006; Janadesh 2007, A Peaceful March for Dignity; Dalit struggle to regain their lost ‘Panchami’ lands; and you get three sets of ‘the unlikely new heroes in the saga of the return of the right to property’.

I would have never heard of Panchami lands if it weren’t for the School Choice Campaign. Many of the Dalit activists who are part of the campaign are also involved in the struggle for their lost lands.

Please download full version of the article from Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review. Please subscribe to Pragati for monthly issues.