Swarajya, February 24, 1962
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.
Congress Party leaders profess devotion to the individual’s freedom and to the fulfilment of his natural urges. But every concrete proposal they make is for some kind of collectivistic action and to the ignoring and extinction of the individual’s personality.
They do not recognize any dilemma nor any need for choosing between the two evils. They disregard the old maxim ‘You can’t have your cake and eat if too’; they think they can do that impossible thing. They say they can bring about collectivization without loss of individual rights. They want us to believe they can give social security without loss of individual freedom. They plan to use tax money to give all kinds of government aid and tell us that the recipients will not be put under government control. No one can receive help and retain in dependence.
The Congress Party fails to realize (or pretends not to see) that for the preservation of the freedom of enterprise of the individual citizen, we should reduce government operations, limit regulatory powers of government officials, curtail the taxes, facilitate the exercise of the freedom of parents in regard to the education of children, increase privately initiated, financed and managed activities, and so on. On the contrary, they recommend increased government spending, government manipulation of thought, government controls, and an extension of collectivization projects.
By a manipulation of vague and undefined words all opposites can be made to appear reconciled. Mr. Nehru’s penchant is this. ‘Tighten the nut on the bolt, but leave it fairly loose’: this is the format of all his pronouncements One can make a list of the words and phrases that occur over and over again in his speeches, in order to serve this purpose of providing for opposites. They are not favourite phrases of his; they issue automatically out of the confusion of opposites in his mind.
Let us remember the individual exists by and for himself. He does not exist for the State; the State exists for the individual. Men are not just an ‘asset’ or ‘resource’ of the State. They are the reality and the State is an artificial intervention to serve the individuals. Freedom is the best Five-Year Plan. To allow a particular political party to interfere with that freedom is disastrous to welfare and is the opposite of happiness.
Socialism’s appeal, when it was first brought to notice, was the efficiency it promised and the elimination of the waste in the competitive system which it implied. All this has proved illusory. There is nothing so inefficient as public management of what private enterprise can manage. There is nothing so injurious to quality as absence of competition.
Statist collectivism in any form is a denial of freedom. The regimentation which socialism involves is based on the assumption that people are incapable of choosing what is good for themselves and on a misapplication of the theory of the greatest good of the greatest number. Some theorists’ notion of what is good for the greatest number, and for generations to come, cannot be accepted as proof. No tyranny can be more monstrous than what would be established on this basis. Socialism is based on an ignoring of natural laws and on assumptions of wisdom where it is far from being shown to exist.
The Congress claims to have achieved a lot through its Statist policy. The question is not how much money people spend. The question is, are people on the whole happier in 1962 than in 1900, when the people had more freedom to choose in everything than they now have under the present permit-licence-raj? There is no relation of cause and effect between the progress of this permit-licence-raj and the advance in private industries. On the contrary, the dead hand of the bureaucracy, with its partisan loyalty to a political party and the restraints of the planning economy, has so acted as to bar progress in many ways. What has been achieved by private enterprise has been achieved in spite of and not on account of the Statist policies of the Congress Party.
Big Business has, of course, been well served by Mr. Nehru. Big Business likes the soaring prices. It welcomes and fattens on the contracts and other opportunities furnished by the Plans. It delights in the want of vigilance implied in public management. The mystery of the well-known backing of Big Business for the Congress Party can be solved if this is understood.
In countries where production has reached a satisfactory level and the habits that led to it are stabilized, policies are legitimately initiated to remove disparities. This is the case in America, England and the Scandinavian countries. But where there is not enough production, what is absolutely essential is incentive for work. ‘Everything belongs to every man’ leaves no incentive to any man. Hence it is that Congress socialism is ruinous to progress. Freedom and what the Germans call market economy’ are the policies most conducive to production where this is the predominant problem. Post-war Germany is a great example and a convincing demonstration. The Congress Party has been drawn to the wrong path of priority to egalitarianism before incentive for production by the desire to gather votes in an adult suffrage Constitution. It is suicidal to adopt the Statist policy of production. The use of taxation for capital investment kills incentive for production or saving to build up private capital.
The proliferation of the bureaucracy, both administrative and industrial, results in greatly increased cost of administration and unrestrained resort to borrowing from abroad.
Says Mr. Nehru, “My socialism is not what is written in any book on socialism nor does it prevail elsewhere”. Mr. Nehru’s socialism is Statism. It consists of permits, licences and quotas, and all the favouritism and corruption inherently associated therewith.
