Swarajya, March 25, 1961
Between ourselves, honest voter, these private monopolies created by the pernicious system of permits, licences, quotas and controls (to be extended now even to foreign capital which voluntarily comes into the private sector) make the Congress Party's rich friends richer, and the poor poorer. It is a close conspiracy; we have a battle between money and liberty, between dharma and atheism, between freedom and communism clothed in Congress robes.
The Swatantra Party is convinced that progress does not require the confiscation of freedom or of the fundamental rights which are essential for freedom. We have oddly enough to wage a battle for freedom under Swaraj! It is not a situation for which there is any parallel in history - especially, our effort to build up a new party and give battle to the Congress which has seized all economic power and is in effective possession of all State authority, and is bent on using it to the utmost extent for party purposes. As was said in America in 1789, "we are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us". We have, however, one precedent and a not very distant one for relying on the justice of our cause and on Divine help, the precedent of Gandhiji's non violent battle against the powerful British Government which ended in complete victory.
To quote what Graham Hutton has said about the nations of Europe, modifying it to apply to our own condition, it took a century of painful advance up to 1947 to achieve democratic self-government, but within a decade of it, that achievement is in retreat threatened by a monstrous regiment of State functionaries. State authority controls and regiments alt individual activities for which there is no parallel in our past history. This establishment of omnipotent, omni-competent State authority is more dangerous to personal freedom than anything done by autocrats in the history of India. Centralized State authority controls all the activities and enterprises of men, through its farthest extremities in local bureaucracy. The individual man or woman as producer and consumer, as citizen and unit of a family, is swamped beneath the rules and regulations of centralized authority. Therewith comes a narrowing of the bounds of personal development just when they should have been widened, a stereotyping of behaviour when new potentialities should have led to wider variations, and a banality which is vulgarity and materialism. Freedom is being whittled down by the extension of the economic ways and means of the State, inflation being the worst of all the instruments which subvert personal freedom. State expenditure and increasing taxation have become intolerably and inefficiently burdensome. Inflation has been adopted as a policy, on the basis of a myth that there can be no economic growth without inflation.
Too much and too rapid State action means too much State spending. Too much and too fast State spending means a rapid multiplication of controls, restrictions on production and consumption, plus higher taxes. The levying of excessive taxes on individuals and companies means a building up of costs all round. This leads inevitably to bigger supply of money and credit than of the things on which it can be spent, which is inflation. Roman and other histories have proved beyond doubt that this inflation must lead to national downfall and disaster. Graham Hutton's book on Inflation and Society, a copy of which is available in the library of the Delhi Parliament, deserves to be more attentively and widely read by members of Parliament. Those who would rather have a mixture of amusement with tragedy may draw the same lessons as to the limits of reasonable taxation from Northcote Parkinson's book, The Law and the Profits. In the grinding of the individual to nothingness, the most effective instrument is the steam-roller of taxation.
