Let Us Free Ourselves

The function of agriculturists and industrialists, the function of all producers including the peasants and artisans of every class and grade, is to produce what the people want at as low a cost as possible and of as good quality as possible. When the peasants and the artisans are free and are left to their own choice, and are allowed to operate in an environment of mutual competition, they produce what the people want at the lowest real cost. The freedom of the producers to operate in this way is the swatantra which the Swatantra Party desires to prevail in the country’s affairs. The party is convinced by reason as well as experience that the maintenance of this freedom is essential for progress and prosperity.

     The patriotic urge, love of one’s country and the ambition to make it great are not enough, as the Fabians believed, to induce producers to put forth their fullest energy and give their best attention. It is necessary in matters not appertaining to arts and sciences, to supplement the spirit of patriotic vanity and enterprise—here comes the Government’s wisdom—with either coercion of various kinds or some personal gain, a significant and effective personal share in the profits of exertion remaining over after parting with a share of it to Government to meet its requirements for the fulfilment of the functions which it alone can and must perform. This motive of profit automatically generates positive and creative force, such as fear of sanctions imposed by the State can never be expected to do. Coercion causes an increasing distaste for the work itself, apart from the hundred ways available for evading the consequences of disobedience. Inertia is as natural as ambition and patriotism, and this can be overcome more effectively by the motive of profit than by mere fear of the State whose power and quality, and the composition of whose organs of authority, depend on the votes of the people.

     These principles are of universal validity; they do not vary by reason of locality or by wishful thinking. Some dictators (called by that name or by any other deceptive title) believe that they are in charge of a nation of lost sheep and that they know better what is good for the sheep than the sheep themselves. They imagine that they have come to authority with a divine mission, although most of them disbelieve in any Divine Authority. They are most of them sincere. Power-hunger begins with sincerity, as Irving Kristol has said in variation of the old saying, ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad’. The path of error is paved with good intentions.

     Intelligent people can always furnish reasons and help the tyranny and the folly of curtailing freedom in general and interfering with the principle of individual freedom in productive activities. But the laws of nature are not amenable to distortion. Once the State interferes with the free choice of people and the urge of the personal motive of producers, and the sovereign check of free competition is removed by State intervention, an endless chain of interventions becomes necessary in order to correct the mischiefs arising out of the first and each subsequent intervention. We have seen in our country how one control leads to another until a whole series of futile harassing interventions is ordered, leading to only one result - a sense of oppression and consequent evasion, fraud and corruption.

     There is no objection to government activity in and through the free and competitive market as buyer or seller; but government intrusion upon the free market as suppressor or controller, or delayer, is what is objectionable, as the late Mr. Theodore Houser, Chairman of the US Committee for Economic Development, observed. It is this kind of intervention that not only fails but positively damages production, and creates an unending series of further compensatory interventions which have a cumulative effect of converting a free and honest people into a servile and corrupt people.

     There is truth in the further observation of some eminent publicists that once interference with freedom has begun and establishes itself in the national polity, such as minimum wages and maximum prices for some products and services, and subsidies and discriminative taxation, fixed quotas for some imports and high tariffs, we get soon to a point of no-return; and it may turn out that the only thing to do is to organize more and more comprehensive government controls and, finally, a centrally planned economy. Opposition parties are forced to do what they had vigorously opposed. The question is, have we got to this pass? Men of firm conviction and faith in freedom may give a negative answer to this. But every year of folly and cumulative damage to public and private psychology makes a return to the free way of production and distribution more difficult than before. It is this that makes me sad and seem impatient and angry. Luckily the results of wrong policy, the failure’s of the erroneous conception of producing and controlling through coercion rather than through freedom and competition, have kept the people thinking, preventing them from falling into the condition in which people in communist countries have fallen irrecoverably. There the people do not know any other system but coercion and State-control. They cannot think of freedom at all even as fish do not know what walking on earth is. We in India have been saved from this total enslavement by reason of the very failure of the so-called planned economy. A little further thinking would make it clear that the failure is inherent in the methods; it is not due to accidents or disloyalties—or the monsoon.

     Our protest against the method of slavery should be kept alive. The nation needs to be continually educated to see the error in the ruling party’s ways which are a compound of unreasoned faith in an outdated doctrine and power-hunger. We have not yet reached the point of no-return. Our nation has an adequate number of producers and distributors who can under normal free conditions successfully achieve prosperity and progress, and raise the level of contented employment, if only those who are deeply concerned give effect to their conviction and withdraw their support to a bad regime, a regime which has demonstrated its unfitness to exercise the powers of sovereign authority over a cultured and enlightened people with a history of civilized life and productive activity extending over many centuries.