The Hindustani Libertarian Papers

This place is for men and women with common sense who are also fiscally responsible, socially traditional and ideologically laissez-faire. Like our Facebook page :- https://www.facebook.com/hindustanilibertarians/?fref=nf

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The Cleaning From the Inside Fallacy

By Jaimine N. Vaishnav Students want me to join #politics because they see the qualities of politician in me. I hear this recommendation during my classroom session. I don't disrespect their suggestion but am not political. I am apolitical. I am an anarchist. Anarchists need not join politics to change "politics". Anarchists believe that "politics is a waste of time, energy and money". Politics is antithetical to freedom, since you are conceding that you require a master. Anarchists challenge "politics" through various means. Some choose violent means. I choose peaceful means. I choose education, discussion and networking to critically challenge the establishment. It is an absurd logic to believe in the fallacious philosophy i.e. "to change politics is to join politics". The best way to change politics is to counter the politics than complying with the idea of joining politics. Would you join ISIS to change ISIS from within? In fact, there are more than 49 ways of changing the political process, countering the political absurdities and challenging the political pundits. Review: https://fee.org/articles/50-more-ways-to-leave-leviathan/ Well, Do you remember the time the slaves banded together to beg their masters for freedom and they succeeded? Or, the time the Jews pleaded with the Pharaoh to let them free and they were successful? Or, that time, the American colonists asked their British overlords for independence and their wishes were granted? Or the time the prisoners of the Barbary Empire voted for their captors to set them free and they emerged victorious? Such events never happened, and it’s easy to understand that such scenarios are silly. Sadly, many of the loudest voices for freedom believe that doing the same thing here in my nation i.e. India–asking our masters to voluntarily cede their power–is the only way of achieving liberty. They believe that if you just vote for the right people, all of our problems will be solved! Libertarian philosopher Lysander Spooner once said, “A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” To vote for a man is to give him authority over you in hopes that he will one day voluntarily relinquish that authority. It is to accept captivity so long as he is benevolent. You are a free, beautiful, and independent human being. Nobody owns you; you own yourself. Harriet Tubman recognized this universal truth, and instead of sitting around waiting for slavery to be voted away, she brought hundreds of slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. Instead of voting for permission to sit in the front of the bus, Rosa Parks recognized that she was a free human being and sat there anyway. Mahatma Gandhi didn’t sit around waiting for the British Salt Acts to be repealed either. Instead, he recognized that he was a free human being with self-ownership and decided to produce salt himself, without the king’s permission. Last but not least, While politics may be an important tool for those who are introduced to the ideas of freedom, it will never be the solution to attaining freedom.

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A Viewpoint on Scarcity

By Jaimine N. Vaishnav (http://jaiminism.tumblr.com/)

 The mainstream definition is that "the basic economic problem that arises because people have unlimited wants but resources are limited. Because of scarcity, various economic decisions must be made to allocate resources efficiently."

 Sounds stupid, though. The last sentence in this wording emphasizes that the central planning (human design) is more crucial than spontaneous order (human action), in my view. 

 All means are scarce, i.e., limited with respect to the ends that they could possibly serve. If the means are in unlimited abundance, then they need not serve as the object of attention of any human action. For example, air in most situations is in unlimited abundance. It is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfilment of ends. It need not be allocated, as time is, to the satisfaction of the more important ends, since it is sufficiently abundant for all human requirements. Air, then, though indispensable, is not a means, but a general condition of human action and human welfare.

 Secondly, these scarce means must be allocated by the actor to serve certain ends and leave other ends unsatisfied. This act of choice may be called economizing the means to serve the most desired ends.

 This article is beautiful and offers a solution https://mises.org/library/why-we-need-private-property-deal-scarce-resources

 Now,

 Which is best for man and for society, abundance or scarcity? What! you exclaim, can that be a question? Has anyone ever asserted, or is it possible to maintain, that at the foundation of human well-being?

 Yes, this has been asserted, and is maintained every day; and I do not hesitate to affirm that the theory of scarcity is the most popular by far. It is the life of conversation, of the newspapers, of books, and of political oratory; and, strange as it may seem, it is certain that political economy will have fulfilled its practical mission when it has established beyond question, and widely disseminated, this very simple proposition: "The wealth of men consists in the abundance of commodities."

 We remark that a man grows richer in proportion to the return yielded by his exertions, that is to say, in proportion as he sells his commodity at a higher price. He sells at a higher price in proportion to the rarity, to the scarcity, of the article he produces. We conclude from this that, as far as he is concerned at least, scarcity enriches him. Applying successively the same reasoning to all other producers, we construct the theory of scarcity. We next proceed to apply this theory and, in order to favour producers generally, we raise prices artificially, and cause a scarcity of all commodities, by prohibition, by intervention, by the suppression of machinery, and other analogous means.

 The same thing holds of abundance. We observe that when a product is plentiful, it sells at a lower price, and the producer gains less. If all producers are in the same situation, they are all poor. Therefore it is abundance that ruins society. And as theories are soon reduced to practice, we see the law struggling against the abundance of commodities.

 This fallacy in its more general form may make little impression, but applied to a particular order of facts, to a certain branch of industry, to a given class of producers, it is extremely specious; and this is easily explained. It forms a syllogism that is not false, but incomplete. Now, what is true in a syllogism is always and necessarily present to the mind. But incompleteness is a negative quality, an absent datum, which it is very possible, and indeed very easy, to leave out of account.

 Man produces in order to consume. He is at once producer and consumer. The reasoning I have just explained considers him only in the first of these points of view. Had the second been taken into account, it would have led to an opposite conclusion. In effect, may it not be said:

 The consumer is richer in proportion as he purchases all things cheaper; and he purchases things cheaper in proportion to their abundance; therefore it is abundance that enriches him. This reasoning, extended to all consumers, leads to the theory of plenty.

 It is the notion of exchange imperfectly understood that leads to these illusions. If we consider our personal interest, we recognize distinctly that it is two-sided. As sellers we have an interest in dearness, and consequently in scarcity; as buyers, in cheapness, or what amounts to the same thing, in the abundance of commodities. We cannot, then, found our reasoning on one or the other of these interests before inquiring which of the two coincides and is identified with the general and permanent interest of mankind at large.

 If man were a solitary animal, if he laboured exclusively for himself, if he consumed directly the fruit of his labour — in a word, if he did not exchange — the theory of scarcity would never have appeared in the world. It is too evident that in that case, abundance would be advantageous, from whatever quarter it came, whether from the result of his industry, from ingenious tools, from powerful machinery of his invention, or whether due to the fertility of the soil, the liberality of nature, or even to a mysterious invasion of products brought by the waves and left by them upon the shore. No solitary man would ever have thought that in order to encourage his labour and render it more productive, it was necessary to break in pieces the instruments that lessened it, to neutralize the fertility of the soil, or give back to the sea the good things it had brought to his door. He would perceive at once that labour is not an end, but a means; and that it would be absurd to reject the result for fear of doing injury to the means by which the result was accomplished. He would perceive that if he devotes two hours a day to providing for his wants, any circumstance (machinery, fertility, gratuitous gift, no matter what) that saves him an hour of that labour, the result remaining the same, puts that hour at his disposal, and that he can devote it to increasing his enjoyments; in short, he would see that to save labour is nothing else than progress.

 But exchange disturbs our view of a truth so simple. In the social state, and with the separation of employments to which it leads, the production and consumption of a commodity are not mixed up and confounded in the same individual. Each man comes to see in his labour no longer a means but an end. In relation to each commodity, exchange creates two interests, that of the producer and that of the consumer; and these two interests are always directly opposed to each other.

 It is essential to analyse them and examine their nature.

 Take the case of any producer whatever, what is his immediate interest? It consists of two things; first, that the fewest possible number of persons should devote themselves to his branch of industry; second, that the greatest possible number of persons should be in quest of the article he produces. Political economy explains it more succinctly in these terms: Supply very limited, demand very extended; or, in other words still, Competition limited, demand unlimited.

 What is the immediate interest of the consumer? That the supply of the product in question should be extended, and the demand restrained.

 Seeing, then, that these two interests are in opposition to each other, one of them must necessarily coincide with social interests in general, and the other be antagonistic to them.

 But which of them should legislation favour, as identical with the public good — if, indeed, it should favour either?

 To discover this, we must inquire what would happen if the secret wishes of men were granted.

 In as far as we are producers, it must be allowed that the desire of every one of us is antisocial. Are we vine-dressers? It would give us no great regret if hail should shower down on all the vines in the world except our own: this is the theory of scarcity. Are we iron-masters? Our wish is that there should be no other iron in the market but our own, however much the public may be in want of it; and for no other reason than this want, keenly felt and imperfectly satisfied, shall ensure us a higher price: this is still the theory of scarcity. Are we farmers? 

 So true is this that our protective tariffs have no other purpose than to hinder all these things from reaching us, to restrict the supply, and prevent low prices and abundance.

 Now I would ask, Are the people who live under our laws better fed because there is less bread, meat, and sugar in the country? Are they better clothed because there is less cloth and linen? Better warmed because there is less coal? Better assisted in their labour because there are fewer tools and less iron, copper, and machinery?

 But it may be said, If the foreigner inundates us with his products he will carry away our money.

 And what does it matter? Men are not fed on money. They do not clothe themselves with gold, or warm themselves with silver. What does it matter whether there is more or less money in the country if there is more bread on our sideboards, more meat in our larders, more linen in our wardrobes, more firewood in our cellars.

 Restrictive laws always land us in this dilemma: Either you admit that they produce scarcity, or you do not. If you admit it, you avow by the admission that you inflict on the people all the injury in your power. If you do not admit it, you deny having restricted the supply and raised prices, and consequently you deny having favoured the producer.

 What you do is either hurtful or profitless, injurious or ineffectual. It never can bring any useful result.

 This is another beautiful article on scarcity and goods https://mises.org/library/goods-scarce-and-nonscarce

   �ADQ4���; �

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The Indian Meatban Hypocrisy

By Jaiveer Singh Sidhu (https://medium.com/@jaiveer)

Hypocrisy runs in the very veins of India. Mainstream Indian popular culture is dominated by right and left wingers majorly so there’s no question that sane dissenting individual voices outside the political dichotomy cannot have any impact on the social fabric of India, henceforth hypocrisy thrives in all aspect of the Indian lifestyle which the politicians and pressure groups exploit for their vested interests. The only difference is the talk employed by left and right leaning politicians and pressure groups. Various issues are raised by these power seekers to convince the targeted audience into accepting the enforcement of certain policies whether some other group of common people likes it or not and the implementation of these policies are obviously funded by the forcefully extracted taxpayer money. How can Indians be any less Hippocratic when the very system they enslaved themselves and others into is standing on the pillars of hypocrisy. Slavery works best when the slaves don’t know that they are enslaved and persecute anyone who believes otherwise.

The same hypothesis applies to the neoliberal (socialists disguised as liberals) Indians opposing the meatbans in various places of India (mainly Maharashtra) who a while ago were stern P.E.T.A supporters and the right wingers who wants to ban beef but not pork. The leftists won’t dare to realize that the right wing government was legally able to man meat for that four days due to a Jain festival was because of a Supreme Court ruling of the year two thousand and eight during which the UPA was in power and the right wingers won’t dare to accept the fact that the Jain community never asked for such bans in the first place.    

In reality, pressure groups from both sides of the political spectrum only differ in the things they want to ban for the rest of the populace. Similarly, the meatban controversy is caused and opposed by pressure groups who want to ban everything in conflict with their personal opinions. But when a person who does not believe the rhetoric of either of those groups and says something like “I think that all human interactions should be voluntary and the only condition should be that the personal liberties of both parties cannot be infringed”, people belonging to both rival ideologies speaks in harmony against that person and orders him to banish himself.  

Every time one says “there should be a law”, ”this should be banned” or “we should mandate this” he/she is basically saying that others should not be free to choose what is in their own best interest and that one knows what is best for others and it should be enforced at gunpoint. At that instant, one proves itself to be an enemy of liberty. One is saying that the definition of freedom should be changed to fit his/her personal beliefs at the expense of others’. If someone is not aggressing against another, one should have no interest in their actions. By advocating the controlling of their actions, one is aggressing upon others.                                                                                                                                      -    Anonymous    

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A Viewpoint on Government Welfare

By Jaiveer Singh Sidhu (https://medium.com/@jaiveer)

Welfare has become a grotesquely twisted word in our modern context. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “welfare” means; the general health, happiness and safety of a person, an animal or a group. But the modern sense of the masses believes the definition of this word to be, “Money that the government pays regularly to people who are poor, unemployed, sick etc.”. The Indian populace usually derive these classifications from their childhood school textbooks which are heavily regulated by the government.

This concept of an external authority paying the needy a fixed amount of income sounds soothing but in reality, it reveals to be an immensely horrible and mafia-like notion. This progressivist socialist idea claims that the governmental policy of social security helps people to exit poverty or at least survive it for the time being and it also supports the sick and old. It’s true that it do perform the above functions, but at a tyrannical cost.

Let us unravel this idea before exposing it. The hard fact of reality is that nothing is free of cost and every action has its reaction or consequences, be it positive or negative. Henceforth, “free” welfare is not free at all because the taxpayers had to involuntarily pay for it at gun point. It’s like a group of criminals robbing a person and then each of them describing their different intentions to spend that money and then asking the victim to decide about whose idea is better.   The deliberately ignored long term consequences of extorting money from hard working individuals or incurring debt to which no one is liable but the taxpayer who had absolutely no voluntary role in borrowing that money in the first place and then distributing the loot among those who don’t or can’t work just because they don’t or can’t work is an immensely disastrous and fascist scheme of populist government spending. The financial records kept by the government of Ancient Rome under Augustus’s regime illustrates about how Augustus spent the loot from his conquests in Egypt in lavish gifts to the aristocracy, public works and distributing it among the labourers and bankrupted the state. There is no such thing as a “free lunch” as they say.

Jobs are the means and not the ends in themselves, people work to earn and honest wage with which they could fulfil their desires and needs. People who had worked hard and saved extra capital, invest in another or their own venture. To recover the investment and earn more money to fulfil personal needs, invest further or expand the venture, one needs to produce goods and services which are cheaper and better than the existing ones otherwise consumers won’t have any reason to buy his/her products.

But the owner of the venture needs workers to produce those goods and services and particularly those workers who possess the necessary skills to produce products which owner of the venture has in mind. But he/she also has to offer those skilled workers more wages than what they already earn otherwise, just like the consumers mentioned above, they won’t have any reason to work in the venture.

On the other hand, the government earns zero income and produces zero goods and services because the people do not have any other choice but to follow this cohesively established organization’s orders. Thus the only incentive the government officials has is to serve the status que which includes preparing welfare schemes which punishes those who works to earn money (taxation) and rewards those who does not work at all and consequently does not earn anything (handouts), but this policy benefits the government because it harvest votes which further helps in maintaining the illusion of freedom and serves the status que.

Private charities had been proven way more efficient than the government in helping the downtrodden because the volunteers working for the private charities provide their services just because they themselves want help those in need unlike the government official who distribute handouts to unemployed voters just because a government official with more cohesive powers orders him to do so. Private charities are funded by those individuals who voluntarily sacrifices a portion of their hard earned money to those private charities which the donor believes to be helping in the way the individual donor considers most compassionate unlike government agencies who send armed personale to extort money from workers and producers or incur dept to which the politicians aren’t personally liable for.                

In the case of welfare schemes for the old and sick also the government only invests its loot to maintain the status que. Strangers aren’t responsible for life choices of those who hadn’t purchased a retirement or health insurance plan while they could or those who were ditched by their families or have no family anyway.

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Corporate Monopoly Explained

By Jaiveer Singh Sidhu (https://medium.com/@jaiveer)

The modern view of a corporate monopoly is of a greedy evil private corporation which controls the prices of the products it sells and exploits the consumers and its workers. In economic terms, such kind of corporate monopoly is called a cohesive monopoly. A cohesive monopoly is a monopoly which establishes its control over the market by the means of government granted privileges or regulations which hampers competition or makes it very expensive for any private individual to provide an alternative which threatens the monopoly of the corporation which had lobbied the government to protect its interests.

 Governments usually makes this possible by imposing rules, regulations, licensing laws, zoning laws, environmental regulations and most of all, the antitrust laws on the economy and on the private affairs of individuals. Cohesive monopolies are the symptoms of government meddling in the economy because there is no reason whatsoever for private companies to establish its monopoly over the market through government if governments don’t posses the powers to do so. Companies can only earn money by selling its products. Thus they are dependent on consumers to earn a living and on workers to produce those earnings. A cohesive corporate monopoly can exploit those consumers and workers only when consumers and workers have no alternatives.

 For example, coal miners in India have one of the most dangerous working conditions and low wages despite of so many labour unions. The Indian coal industry is fully controlled by a government owned corporation named Coal India and it auctions the mines to private contractors. The majority of the coal is sold to thermal power plants which are also mostly owned by the government and in some cases, partly owned by private corporations too. Since the consumers and workers have to alternative to turn to due the heavily government regulated energy sector, there are no incentives for the coal bloc owners or Coal India to satisfy the consumers and their workers. Coal India also don’t have to worry about acquiring coal mines because the Indian Government posses the legal monopoly to forcefully posses any property which contains natural resources. No wonder India is the largest importer of coal despite having the world’s third largest coal reserves.

 It’s childish to assume that strangers in buildings owned by a group of people which calls itself government and claims authority over our lives will design laws for the benefit of the people they rule over and would never ever use those same laws for their own personal gains. Absolute power not only corrupts absolutely, it attracts the corrupt only. Increasing the size of government is not the solution for corporate takeover of governments, rather giving governments more authority increases the incentive of corporations to control it. That’s why in an unhampered market economy, a monopoly affords no cause for alarm because even if a monopoly rises, it cannot survive unless it could kept satisfying its consumers and since there are no government regulatory laws which threatens an individual imprisonment or hefty fines if he/she fails to conform with government’s requirements for running a business, individuals are free to provide goods and services cheaper and of higher quality and compete with corporate monopolies.          

For example, Kodak was once the giant of photography industry, it controlled more than eighty percent of the market share. But when the age of digital cameras (which ironically it invented) came, Kodak failed to catch up with the trend and fulfill consumer preferences for this new technology. Kodak introduced its own line of digital cameras later, but it was too late then and their products failed to satisfy the consumers. Henceforth the once mighty corporation is no more.

 Ebay and Amazon have been in India for more than twenty years, but they failed to gain any kind of considerable market share. The problem was that the only mode of payment those websites provided was through credit cards and Indians don’t believe in paying a company for their product first and then just hoping that the product will arrive one day at their doorsteps. But then, two Amazon employees solved this problem. They resigned from their jobs and started their own e-commerce website called Flipkart and then introduced the concept of Cash on Delivery in India. In this service the consumers can order a product from Flipkart.com and then pay the deliveryman for the product when it arrives at the address given by the consumer. This business model has unleashed an e-commerce revolution and had also caused the emergence of many new competitors which has forced Klipkart to provide more new services like express delivery and such.          

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Do Consumers Need Government ?

By Jaiveer Singh Sidhu (https://medium.com/@jaiveer)

The rhetoric of “Consumer rights” is one of the most popular weapons for Neo-liberals, Marxists and Fascists alike to compel governments to impose their agenda on the populace. According to them, “we need to protect consumers from those giant greedy corporations and force them to provide good quality products to the consumers because if we give a free rein to them, they will all unite and will force consumers to buy inferior, expensive or even poisonous products”.  Such idiotic statements and all other such opinions are very distant from reality.      

Consumers can be forced to purchase a particular product from a single corporation only  if there are no other alternatives available and that also is only possible if someone is cohesively eliminating competition or preventing (through violent means) anyone from providing that particular product cheaper and in superior quality and that cohesive power is only possessed by government. Every consumer rights activist will agree that corporations lobby government into imposing policies which will be profitable for them and bribe government officials to grant them permissions, licenses, environmental clearances etc.

But why corporations do that? Because only this group of human beings called government, has the publically accepted moral authority to extort hard earned money from individuals to raise funds for various government branches established to control the lives of individuals residing in a particular territory and whenever someone won’t comply with the wishes of this group human beings, he/she gets kidnapped and are held captive for some period of time or for life. When an organisation holds such kinds of totalitarian powers, the human beings who are members of that organisation are obviously going to use their powers for totalitarian purposes. Ironically, the Neo-liberals, Marxists and Fascists also claim that human beings can’t administer themselves because they are too barbaric and violent but a special group of human beings are fully and selflessly capable of governing billions of unarmed human beings with a larger group of armed human beings which are trained to kill and never trust other human beings. But that’s another topic.      

Let’s take an example, suppose the government forces automobile manufacturing companies into providing air bags in their cars. What will happen due to this law is that the companies would have to increase the prices of their cars due to the additional parts and production machinery they have to buy without which they won’t be allowed to sell their cars. To fund the agencies which are responsible to impose these laws, the government have to increase taxes which decreases the spending power of consumers or the government have to print more fiat money which will cause the value of the currency to fall which further causes the rise of prices for all consumer products because people are forced to use only the government’s fiat currency, this phenomena is popularly known as inflation. As secondary economics illustrates, “the price of a commodity increases when its supply exceeds its demand.

Anyway, the surge in the prices of automobiles will also induce consumers into not buying a car at all, keeping the old car or buying a second hand car and common sense states that old vehicles are less safe than newer vehicles. According to the Automotive Research Association of India, there are total fourteen codes of standards for all kinds of vehicles allowed to be sold in India. According to a National Crime Records Bureau report, there are in total 135,000 deaths per year caused by road accidents in India, the number can be higher since many accidents goes unreported. Both of these statistics are just keep on increasing along with the prices of automobiles and various other consumer products.  

Corporations force consumers into buying their products by keeping out competition through government regulations and licences which makes it too expensive or even impossible for an individual to start a business and provide cheaper and better quality products. Safety regulations demanded by consumer rights groups works in the same manner. They force companies to install certain equipments and these equipments aren’t free and so the prices of products have to be increased which in result compel consumers to spend less elsewhere. This phenomena cause losses in the profits of companies, savings of consumers and wages of workers and the vicious cycle continues.      

Consumers are the only regulators who regulate to protect the consumers. A corporation cannot survive in a market cattalaxy if it can’t satisfy the consumers because  consumers always wants the best products for themselves and if a company’s product would not fulfil their needs, they’ll buy the product from another company which will force the former to provide better products from the latter if the former wants to exist.