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What does it mean to be free? What do individual rights mean? And where do they come from? What
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values should we use to guide our behavior? What is the relationship between citizens and the state?
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Why is taxation equal to part-time slavery? What does it mean to be libertarian?
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics,
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and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. This is a special episode in the sense that the conversation
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you will hear was not recorded for this podcast. And I am the interviewee, not the interviewer.
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About a month ago, I appeared as a guest on the Prakriti podcast. I edit an online
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magazine of commentary called Prakriti at thinkprakriti.com. And one of our podcasts,
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hosted by my colleagues Pawan Srinath and Hamsini Hariharan, is called the Prakriti podcast. Now,
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I am known as a libertarian, although I try to avoid labels these days because they have
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all become debased and caricatured. But when Pawan invited me to talk about my libertarianism,
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I figured that is a good chance to explain what my first principles are and where I get
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my values from. Forget all the isms. My beliefs revolve around respect for the autonomy of other
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people. And it all boils down to one word, consent. I elaborate on that in the discussion. But
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before we go there, I'd like to apologize to all listeners of The Seen and the Unseen who have
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already heard that episode of the Prakriti podcast. Our data shows that there is not much overlap
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between listeners of the two shows. And The Seen and the Unseen gets a lot more listeners at the
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moment. So I thought it's a good chance to introduce the Prakriti podcast to you guys,
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as well as put this conversation up. So without much further ado, here's a chat I had with Pawan.
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Amit, thanks for coming on the show.
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Pawan, thanks for having me on the show. Our roles are reversed, you might note,
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since I've interviewed you so many times for The Seen and the Unseen and now it's the other way
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around. Yes, it's a pleasure to have you on the Prakriti podcast. I think you were there on the
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first episode and then now you're back after quite a few episodes, I think.
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Yeah, but I was only ever a guest host, never a guest per se, so be nice to me.
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All right. So Amit, tell me, are you a liberal or a libertarian? What description do you prefer?
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Well, you know, I could call myself both, but I don't like using any of those terms now. The
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thing with liberal is that I am what you would in the 19th century have called a liberal and
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in Europe still in the European sense had be a liberal, but is today called a classical liberal
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because the term liberal has mutated meaning so often and means something completely different,
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if not the opposite in some places. And classical liberalism really started with during the
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Enlightenment with John Locke. And that's really the foundation of libertarianism as well. They're
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kind of very close together and I think both classical liberalism and libertarianism fit me,
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but I don't like using either of those terms anymore.
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Okay, but it would be safe to say that you are in favor of more and more liberty.
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Yes, but you know, let me let me indulge me for a moment and I'll just elaborate on why I don't
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like even the word libertarian because, you know, people talk of libertarianism as, you know, just
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another ism where you have a certain worldview and a way of looking at the world and you believe in
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certain things which, you know, other people believe in other things and maybe they can be
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falsified and what you think of facts right now might not be facts tomorrow, but none of that really
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fits where I come from. Like for me, it's not a way of looking at the world, but adherence to a
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certain value and that value can really be summed up in one word and that word is consent. So all of
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libertarianism or all of what I know it to be or all of what I believe in eventually circles around
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and comes down to the word consent. Okay, expand on that a little because usually when we talk about
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libertarianism or liberty, I think people come back to the idea of freedom, but you are, you seem
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to be reframing it as consent. Freedom also works, but again freedom is a sort of a nebulous thing
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and people define it in various different ways. While consent to me seems to encapsulate it
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perfectly and there's really no perverse way of using it, but let me then go back to first
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principles. Now, you know, you can come to libertarianism through two parts. I'll take you
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through both of those parts and the first part begins by going back to first principles as
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articulated by John Locke during the Enlightenment, where John Locke spoke about what we now call in
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brief the right to self-ownership. Now, this is part of a body of what is called natural rights,
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where people believe that, okay, these are rights that we are all born with and no one may take them
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away from us and so on and so forth. And it's perfectly fine if you don't believe in natural
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rights, if you believe that rights have no meaning in and of themselves, but are instead a system
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that are given by society to its members and so on. Even if you don't believe in natural rights,
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the fact of the matter is that you have to have some framework of rights which is agreed upon by
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society or states at large and what should that framework be? And for me, that framework corresponds
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pretty exactly with John Locke's articulation of natural rights. So let me go through what that is.
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Locke believed that the most basic right that everyone is sort of born with is the right to
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self-ownership, because when you're born, you're not owned by anyone. You're not owned by your
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parents. You're not owned by society at large or whatever. All of that makes no sense. You own
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yourself. And he framed that as a right. And to him, all legitimate rights arise from that.
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Your right to self-ownership exists as long as you respect the corresponding rights of others
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and all rights which arise out of self-ownership. For example, your thoughts are yours alone. And
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therefore, when you express them, the right to free speech, that comes out of the right to
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self-ownership. If you mix your labor with something, you get the right to property.
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And that again arises out of the right to self-ownership. And all these kinds of rights
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are called negative rights in the sense that to respect these rights, somebody has to not do
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something to you. So your right to free speech means that no one can shut you up. Your right to
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property means that no one can steal from you, which is why these are called negative rights.
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And again, rights is one of those terms which has been sort of become corrupted over the years,
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because today rights, you know, there's another class of rights taking off from Isaiah Berlin,
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which are positive rights. He spoke of negative and positive freedoms, pretty much the same thing,
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positive rights, where people talk about the right to food or the right to education and so on.
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And all of those rights are actually entitlements. And giving them the language of rights is
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problematic because the only way you can fulfill a positive right is by infringing someone's
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negative right. For example, if you say that XYZ has a right to food and therefore the government
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has to provide him food, to get him that food, the government then has to get the money for
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the food from someone and infringe his negative right. So while it may be desirable that everyone
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should eat and everyone should get educated, framing it as a right is problematic. But I've
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kind of taken a sort of a digression. So I'll go back to what I was, I'll go back to negative rights.
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And just to clarify on this, so if you're saying that you have a right to life, a negative version
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of that right would be that no one can take away your life. But a positive version of it could be
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that in order to live your life, you might need a few things and the government of the state might
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provide them. Bang on, precisely, precisely. And that's a very good clarification. All of
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negative rights imply that nobody should be able to do anything. You know, the right to life means
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no one should be able to kill you. Now, the problem arises that if you claim these rights,
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you know, you can have a society where it's not as if everyone will agree to live this way.
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Someone, and therefore the classical liberal view is that someone needs to be there to protect
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your right and that's the government or the state per se. And the state needs to be able to
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protect your right. It needs to exist only to the extent that it protects negative rights and does
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nothing else. And it's almost what I call the liberal paradox, that on one hand, you say that
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your rights should not be infringed, but on the other hand, your rights cannot be protected
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unless they are infringed to at least some extent, which is the extent that the state needs to exist
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to take taxes from you, which is the origin of sort of the classical liberal construct of the
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state, which is called the night watchman state, for example, that this is all they do. They
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protect the rights of their citizens and otherwise they let their citizens interact in whatever ways
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and they don't interfere unless somebody's rights are being infringed. Right, so this night
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watchman formulation is very interesting for me. So can you expand on that metaphor? So what does
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a night watchman version of the state look like? Right, so a literal night watchman is someone who
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protects something, right? So a night watchman version of the state would basically be the police
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in the defense. They would protect you against external threats with defense and the police,
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which would have a monopoly on violence and would make sure that nobody's rights are infringed and
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there would be a justice system, you know, making sure that the rule of law means something so that
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if someone does infringe someone's rights, you have a way of dealing with that. You have a
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way of punishing the offender and, you know, reducing incentives for further offenses to happen
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and so on and so forth. Now, a lot of people would say that, no, no, no, no, but the government job
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is, you know, education is a good thing. The government should provide education or roads are
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a good thing. The government should do roads or statues are a good thing. We should have statues
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of great leaders and the government should build that. But the important thing to note is that the
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government is not a benign presence which exists on its own. Every act of government is an act of
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violence. Everything that a government does is funded by money forcibly taken from individuals.
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Now, think of it this way. We take the government and therefore the resultant taxes for granted,
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but if you're being taxed 30% of your income through direct plus indirect taxes, what that
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basically means is that if you're giving one third of your income away in tax, you're working one
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third of the year, four months for the government. For four months, you're effectively a slave.
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So all taxation is really part-time slavery, which we take for granted. And the liberal paradox is
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that to be able to live as free citizens, we accept a certain amount of this infringement
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on our property and this part-time slavery because, hey, that's almost a necessary evil.
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But then the question is that everything that the government does is at that cost and therefore
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we should think about it very carefully. It's not enough like, Pawan, if you were to tell me that,
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hey, Amit, we should build a statue in Bangalore of so-and-so, a great hero of mine. And my answer
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to that would be that if you think that the government should build a statue, then do it
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with your money. Why force me to part with mine? And not just me, every citizen of this country
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plays indirect taxes. Even a beggar at a traffic signal will buy some salt or buy some soap at
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some point in time and they're paying taxes on that. So to build your statue or to do whatever
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your vanity project is to fulfill your values, you are taking money out forcibly from somebody else.
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And the morality of that is questionable. And the reason we can do this is that there is a
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disconnect in our minds. We think that we don't realize, or it's not explicit, that everything
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that the government does is at the cost of money taken from us and at the cost of our freedom.
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Amit, I understand the security angle, right? So the government has to have sufficient resources
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to maintain a monopoly over violence. But what about other things like public goods?
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I understand your argument that if the government wants to build a statue or if they want to do
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a handout, if they want to make a scheme of some sort, they do end up taking taxes. But what about
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pure public goods? For example, connectivity, clean air. There are lots of things that governments
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inevitably will end up having a role in playing, right? Because markets are not necessarily very
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good at providing for these things. People don't necessarily want to pay for something like this
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and want to be a free rider. That's a great point. That's a great point. I mean, I think everyone can
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agree that look, a statue is a waste of money. Everyone can also agree that there are certain
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public goods, which it's hard to envisage them coming about through markets. So I would actually
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argue there's no such thing as a market failure if you allow markets to function. But I think
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leaving that aside, I think rather than take a hard stand on this and say that no, the government
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should only do this, what I prefer to do is I prefer to get into any kind of discourse with
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the common understanding that let's understand that every government action has a cost. And then
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once you recognize the cost, then you can debate the benefits, because then you are taking those
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counterfactuals into account. And you're saying that, okay, so if the government spends its money
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on XYZ, it has a cost. This is a cost. And once you keep the cost in mind, then you can have,
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you know, a reasoned conversation and reasonable people can disagree on the extent of what the
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government should do. Everybody agrees no statue. Everybody agrees that yes, police, but should
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there, for example, be more airports. And that's something where you can have a reasoned argument.
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But all those arguments should have at its basis, the understanding that there is a cost to any
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government action. All right. But you know, the sometimes I wonder if we can look at the government
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in a slightly different way in that it is a another institution, which is a mechanism of
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cooperation in society. And so government is one type of a cooperative system with different roles
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and responsibilities, a corporation would be something else. So how do they conflict with
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the freedoms of an individual? I mean, a lot of the times your employer is also infringing on
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your freedoms quite a lot, right? So here's the deal. First of all, I agree with your,
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I agree with the articulation of government as part of, you know, that whole thing that helps
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society to cooperate, but insofar as it maintains a rule of law, the difference is in what is
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voluntary and what is not. And here again, like, you know, eventually by the end of this episode,
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I'll come to why consent, but the cardinal sin for any classical liberal or libertarian is
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therefore coercion. Now, the thing is, when I join a company, I join a company voluntarily,
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it has certain rules and regulations. I join according to that. I promise to abide by that.
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If my employer insists that I stay in office between nine to five, then he is not infringing
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on my freedom. I have agreed to that. And if he forces me to do something that is beyond the terms
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of my contract with the company, then I have recourse. I can sue, or I should be able to
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sue in India. The rule of law is so bad that often the legal recourses can become meaningless,
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but I should be able to sue. It's a voluntary interaction with the government. On the other
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hand, nothing is voluntary. Everything is coercive. And the whole approach of the government is not
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that we are here to serve you. We are here to protect your rights. And, you know, you are our
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masters. That's not the approach of the government. And especially in India, we take granted this
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MyBarb government that rules over us. They are our rulers. I mean, what happened in 1947 was
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we replaced one bunch of rulers with another bunch of rulers. Only the color of the skin was
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different. And we went on like that. And I would argue in many ways, the bunch of rulers who
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replaced them. And I'm not talking about specific political parties, because every single political
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party that's ever been in government has this approach. But in many ways, post-independent
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Indian governments have been far more oppressive than the British were. For example, the salt tax
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that Gandhi protested when he went on the Dandi march was a fraction of what it is today in
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independent India. So fair enough. But how do I put this? It is like, how do we look at
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the system where, look, it is not possible to engineer a government where consent is there
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through and through, right? For example, we are born into this world. So say there is a constitution,
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there's some rule of law. As we are born, it's not like we can consent to the existing state
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of affairs and say that we have opted into this ecosystem, right? So everyone sort of starts
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without consent. So how do we engineer this right? That's absolutely right. And you know,
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whenever people accuse me of chasing some libertarian utopia, I have to point out that,
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no, I'm not chasing a utopia in the sense that I am not saying that we should be in this,
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that the world should suddenly turn into this ideal world where everybody has complete consent
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and no rights are infringed. The fact of the matter is that we are born without having a choice in the
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matter in this country, in this current system that we are in. And we have to then negotiate that.
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And as citizens who care about freedom, it's then important to raise our voice against any kind of
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injustice in any context. For example, as a writer, I don't in my columns try to give utopian
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solutions. Instead, I try to move one step at a time. Like, you know, when I propose, for example,
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a reform or a public policy, I'll always try to make sure that the reform I'm proposing either
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reduces the role of government or if it keeps the role of government the same, it makes it more
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efficient by introducing market mechanisms, for example. And so you've got to kind of do this
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fight one step at a time. You can't just withdraw from the world and go into a cave and, you know,
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that doesn't work. This is the world we are in. And it is our duty as citizens and as individuals,
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it is our duty to ourselves to constantly keep fighting for our freedom and keep reminding others
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that we are not free. And that's important. But you know that this is just sort of one aspect of
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it. Like I said, that when I arrive at consent or when I arrive at libertarianism, you can arrive
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at it from two directions. Yes, tell us about the second one. Yeah, you can arrive at it from two
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directions. And one direction, of course, is the one I just articulated, which is where you're
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coming at it from first principles and the right to self ownership and so on, whether or not you
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regard that as a natural right. But the other direction is the direction of outcomes. Now,
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I'm not a utilitarian. I don't like utilitarianism because you can really rationalize anything with
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it. You know, utilitarianism, I think, runs up against Hayek's knowledge problem. And to put that
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in simple language, utilitarianism means that you judge events by their outcomes. But the problem is
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that outcomes are always messy. Every action has unintended consequences. You never know what they
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are going to be. And utilitarianism can be used to justify absolutely anything. But if you take
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a broad sweep of history and you look at what freedom does, I would argue that freedom leads
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to the best outcomes for society in every sense, but not just for the economy, but for cultures.
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And the reason for that is something that is counterintuitive. You know, we evolved,
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humans evolved in prehistoric times when they lived in small tribes and times of scarcity,
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and we evolved to instinctively think of the world in zero sum ways. So if I gain something,
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you necessarily lose that something because there's only so much of that. And the truth is
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that the world is positive sum, in the sense that, you know, the example I keep giving,
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so much so that people who read me probably find it tiresome by now. But I cite the libertarian
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thinker John Stossel, he had written a column where he spoke about something called the double
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thank you moment, which is basically this, let's say I go to Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee,
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which costs 180 bucks, a tall Americano I have, I buy the cup of coffee. And as I hand them the
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money, they say thank you. And as they hand me the coffee, I say thank you. And both of us mean it.
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And the reason is that both of us benefited. It's not that only one party benefited. So it's a double
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thank you moment. And every voluntary interaction in the world, whether economic or monetary or
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otherwise, every voluntary interaction between two people takes place when both people benefit.
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No one has to lose for the other one to win. In this case, I value the coffee more than the
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money I paid for it. They value the money more than the coffee that they made for me.
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And therefore what happens is that the more you allow these voluntary interactions, the more
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people gain. This is both true socially, where you ideally want a lot of free speech where people can
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interact with each other in various ways and so on and so forth. And also in terms of economics,
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where you have the more of these voluntary transactions you have, the more little positive
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some games which lead to benefits for everybody. And that's how economies grow, countries grow,
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cities grow, which is why there's almost a direct correlation over 250 years that as free
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markets spread across the world, prosperity spread in exactly that way. This is why cities,
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for example, are the most prosperous places in any country, giving a lie to the absurd notion
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that population density is a bad thing. Population density is a great thing because it leads to
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more such voluntary interactions, larger networks, more value for everybody being created.
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And the corollary of this is that the more the government interferes in such voluntary
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interactions, the more it harms society. So when a government interferes in the free market,
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for example, it's bad in two aspects. One, of course, is a moral aspect, which I spoke about
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earlier, that if two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want with each other,
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that should hold true whether it's in the bedroom or in the marketplace. It's morally wrong to
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interfere between those two consenting adults. And the second argument is a consequential argument,
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the utilitarian argument, that you're reducing the amount of value in the world when you do that,
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which is why government regulation of markets is so problematic and always counterproductive.
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Thanks for saying that, Amit, because I think even in India where you can argue that our
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freedoms are severely restricted in many spheres, there's always been some amount of intellectual
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support for the idea of your social and personal freedoms, about speech, about your right to live
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your life the way you want to, where you live, where you work, et cetera. But the idea of
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economic freedoms somehow has never become very important in the Indian political landscape or
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in the public imagination. Why do you think that is? Why is there no public support for increasing
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the freedom for us to engage in the business that we want to buy what we want and to sell what we
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want? Because we build narratives that separate them. For example, it is common for the left to
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support all the personal freedoms that you and I support, but oppose free markets on various
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different reasons and say, no, the government needs to regulate this or the government needs
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to regulate that and get in the way of voluntary interactions there. And equally on the other side,
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the right might pay lip service to free market, though in India, we've never had an economic
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right. In India, every single government, including the current Narendra Modi government,
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is a far left government, which does not believe in economic freedoms. But the right doesn't believe
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in personal freedoms in India also in terms of free speech and so on. And it's because this sort
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of narrative of left and right has been imposed upon us, or this narrative today of nationalist
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versus liberal, which is a ridiculous binary as well. And the thing is that these narratives,
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to me, make no sense. Looking at the world in terms of left wing and right wing is nonsensical,
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especially in India, where there is really no right wing when it comes to economic freedom,
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everything is left. But the way I prefer to look at the world is more in terms of freedom and
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in terms of freedom and coercion, authoritarian and libertarian, so to say. And using these terms
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is problematic because people associate terms like liberal and even libertarian today is become a
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tarnished term because people who call themselves libertarian in America, some of them have gone
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over to the alt-right, and there will be people who call themselves libertarian here who have said
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they support Modi, which is absurd to me. It doesn't make any sense because, hey, consent,
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coercion, those principles. So now I'm known as a libertarian, and that's what people call me,
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and I wish there was some other label. But the truth is that I just go back to first principles
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all the time. And therefore, everything for me comes down to being against coercion and giving
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importance to consent. Okay. I want to bring broach upon another topic that's related, where
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no matter what values you believe in, there is some sort of a locus of identity that is there
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and part of any philosophical outlook, right? So for example, the communists think of the worker
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and a collective of the workers as an entity and sort of focus on how they can be benefited best.
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People who believe in Hindutva think about the larger Hindu population as one
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somewhat monolithic community, which needs to be given special importance to. In this
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sense, what would you focus on? Well, I absolutely abhor
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identity politics of any kind, whether it is on the left or the right, which is why in their ways
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of looking at the world, I don't find the bhakt very different from the voks. They're dividing
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the world into categories and identities and somebody's an enemy and someone's a friend and
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there is oppression somewhere and blah, blah, blah. The truth is, as the old cliche goes,
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the smallest minority is an individual. So I look at everything from the point of view of every
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individual. And one binary that is true and is not a false binary is group rights and individual
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rights. You can either believe in group rights or individual rights if you believe in group rights.
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And if you say that we should think of people in terms of groups and look for their welfare and so
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on, then you are necessarily ignoring individual rights. And that's a problem to me. And I think
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we need to go beyond identity and think in terms of individual rights. And of course, some might
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argue that, look, identity politics has dominated the world so far. If you want to protest a certain
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kind of identity politics, how do you do that without getting into identity politics? And my
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reply to that always is that you do that by fighting for individual rights, by insisting
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on individual rights. That's the only way you do it. To not think at the level of the individual
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is to then condescend to every individual and say that, no, I won't see you for yourself. You're
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part of a group. And therefore, the sins of your group must be visited upon you. And if we wish to
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give special privileges to the group, which will, of course, be coercibly taken from somewhere else,
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then that comes to you as well, and so on and so forth. And I think that's a dangerous way
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of thinking. I think it perpetuates hatred and ill will within communities and within groups.
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And right, I mean, I think that identity politics is one of the things that is really wrong with our
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political discourse today. Right. I think it's quite a bit more useful to think in terms of
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interests rather than identities, right? So for example, you follow a keto diet. So therefore,
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you have an interest in ensuring that, I don't know, the right kind of meats are available across
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the country. Somebody else might have a different interest. Somebody likes to run every day. So,
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you might have an interest in having adequate infrastructure for running. So in that sense,
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interests are multiple and people can align themselves differently in the political space
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with just interests, right? So because, I mean, it's not right to wish interests away,
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but the idea is to sort of try and move away from compulsory identities that are imposed on groups of
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people. That's very well said. And it's very wise. I couldn't have said it better. I agree
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with you entirely. Look, all of us have different interests and all of us voluntarily can do
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whatever we want as long as there's no coercion involved. So for example, I'm in Mumbai, you're
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in Bangalore and every time I go to Bangalore, I'm blown away because you have such a nice keto
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community there. You have so many keto options. I have less of them in Bombay and therefore,
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it stands to reason that I would want to sort of convert more people to keto. I say convert,
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like it's a religion, but it's not, it's the only healthy way of living. So bring people around to
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my point of view, but it should not at any point involve coercion. I mean, I don't even mind if you
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think in terms of identities because as long as there is no coercion involved anywhere else,
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and as long as you're not demonizing another class of people entirely or shutting them up.
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Right. Okay. So I think we've sort of circled around this, but can you walk us through
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how all is liberty important or how is it being infringed in India today? Right. So we are in 2018.
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We are sort of here after a decade of high economic growth, a couple of decades of some
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economic and personal freedoms being loosened, but at the same time, there are new threats coming in.
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I don't even know where to begin because our freedoms are infringed in so many ways.
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Number one, there is a myth that we have a liberal constitution in the good sense of the word liberal,
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but I'm not sure we do. Our constitution doesn't really protect free speech, for example, because
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Article 19A, you know, it pays lip service to free speech, but it also lays out all these caveats
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like decency, public order, and so on. And because of those caveats, we have old IPC laws that the
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British made to control us, like 295A and 153A, which essentially clamped down on free speech.
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And there's nothing we can do about them. I think it's, for example, unbelievable and shocking that
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in 2018, 377 is still on the cards and we are saying that an entire sexual orientation is
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effectively illegal. I mean, that kind of sex is illegal. It doesn't say that being homosexual
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per se is illegal, but effectively, that's what 377 does. And it's unbelievable that in 2018,
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we should be in that kind of situation. And equally in terms of economic freedom, I mean,
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first you look at, you look at two aspects of what the government does to us. Number one,
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in the economic sphere. Number one, you look at what they take from us. I mean, taxation is
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much higher than it should be, both indirect and indirect, and that's because the government spends
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a lot more on useless things than it should. I mean, our government is a large but weak state
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where it should be a small but strong state. It should be small, but as it is small in like
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law and order, like defense, it should be strong. Instead, it is weak in those areas and it does a
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hundred other things where it is basically a parasite state, figuring out ways to sort of
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suck blood from the people. I mean, I know that sounds dramatic, but that's really what it is.
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I mean, again, if you're paying one third of your income in taxes, you're basically a slave
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to the government for four months of the year. There's no other way of looking at that.
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And as we've argued before, some amount of that may be necessary, but to me, it would be a fraction
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of the amount that we're giving out now. That's one aspect, what the government takes from you,
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and so on. The other aspect in the economic sphere is all the many infringements on the
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economic freedoms of citizens, all the interference that it does in markets. For example, look at the
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state of our poor farmers. You look at the state of our farmers now, 71 years after independence,
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and it makes you want to cry. And why is it like this? It's like this because our farmers
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have been trapped in farming by bad policy. I mean, I'd encourage listeners to go to sceneunseen.in
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and look at the very first episode of the Scene and the Unseen, where you were one of my guests,
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along with Kartik Shashidhar, and we discussed agricultural reforms. And in various ways,
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farmers are not allowed markets in any aspect, how they get their produce, where they sell their
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produce in terms of pricing or anything. They're kept in a constant state of dependency. They can't
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sell agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, so they can't even escape. A few
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episodes back in the Scene and the Unseen, my guest, Shruti Rajgopalan, had spoken about this
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being one of the ways in which the caste system perpetuates itself, because people find it hard
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to simply escape physically, and so on. And agriculture is, of course, the most egregious
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example, and it's somewhere where in 91, there were no reforms that touched agriculture or touched
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factor markets, and large parts of the country are still hugely poor for that. And the thing is,
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this link isn't direct. This link isn't obvious. You know, if you ask a farmer himself that,
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what do you want from the government? And he's in desperate states, and he'll say, oh, I want a farm
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loan waiver, which is all well and good. But a farm loan waiver basically traps a farmer in his
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current state of poverty, quite apart from the fact that it's also paid for by other people.
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You know, like, government does so many things it shouldn't do, like run businesses, run banks. I
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mean, who is paying for Nirav Modi Pavan? You and I are paying for Nirav Modi's and Vijay Mallya's
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theft, which is the only word for it. And it's a theft that has happened in collusion with the
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government. There's no way around it, directly or indirectly. So, you know, there's hardly anything
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I can not complain about. But what makes me most sad is that this is not in the public discourse.
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You know, I'm a completely lonely voice in the public discourse. This is, people are not
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questioning all these fundamental things about the government. The mindset that the government
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is a solution to everything, even when the government has actually created the problem
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in the first place, is embedded in people. You know, the mindset of the Maibab government is
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embedded. For example, if you think about, you know, just one example, which, you know, got a
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lot of public heat in the last few years, people talk so much about corruption. And if you think
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about corruption, what causes corruption? It's discretion. You give a set of people power over
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other people, they will use that power, because power corrupts, they will make money. And yet the
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solution that most well-meaning people come up with is, oh, you, the solution is more government,
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that you have a Jan Lokpal or you have a, you know, another committee over the 100 committees
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already there. And that doesn't help anything that adds to the problem. To solve the problem,
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what you need to do is you need to take away power from the government and give it back to
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the citizens. And that's how you solve that particular problem. And people don't have a
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consciousness of this. They keep looking at the government as a solution to everything. And I
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feel really sad about that. And I wish there was some way I could make these ideas a little more
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popular. Maybe this podcast will help, who knows.
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All right. But, you know, I've seen that, you know, people often have different fears and often
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that is also reflective of their philosophies, right? So, for example, if someone believes in,
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say, communism in India today, they might probably fear, I don't know, they might fear religion and
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the religious identity as a source of violence. They might fear, I don't know, big corporations
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coming and doing nasty things. So in that sense, is there a fear that is important to you?
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Can you rephrase that? I mean, what fear exactly?
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Like a fear of a very large government, in a sense, a fear of people taking violence into
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their own hands. What, I mean, I know that it's a slightly negative way of looking at everything,
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but there are often certain deep seated fears or concerns that motivate us, right?
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Yeah, because you know why? Because the government hasn't done its basic job of
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providing a rule of law. And from saving us from these fears is a wonderful thing.
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Saving us from these fears is the one fundamental role of the government.
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That, you know, if we knew that the government always will look after our rights and the rule
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of law will be maintained and my free speech will always be protected, then I would not fear anything.
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But if it doesn't do that, then of course, different groups in different places will
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fear things. You know, the Hindutva people who value their religion will fear that communism
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will erode away their traditions or left liberals will fear that, you know, the Hindutva parties
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will impose their views on the rest of the country, including them. But the point is that
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those fears are taken care of if there is a rule of law and if the government is strong enough and
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if the constitution provides enough safeguards, then they don't need to fear. Then the Hindus
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can celebrate their culture and the liberals can have the freedom that they should have
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and everybody is happy. But the government doesn't do its job at a fundamental level.
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So people have these fears and you name big corporations. So I'd like to kind of address
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another point that, you know, people often demonize free markets by saying, oh, but then
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big corporations will take over and they will run the country and all of that.
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But the truth is that big corporations hate free markets. What big corporations really want is
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their turf to be protected, which is why, for example, just before independence, when Nehru asked
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a group of industrialists, and this was famously known as the Bombay Club or the Bombay Plan,
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I forget which, to suggest what should be done for the country, they wholeheartedly suggested
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what he was going to do anyway, which was a closed economy, because that would protect them.
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So people don't get that free markets and companies are on two opposite ends of the spectrum.
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And what happens is a free market, the way I define it, is a market where all voluntary
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interactions are protected by the government. There is the rule of law.
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Whereas what you often see in crony capitalism or crony socialism or cronyism, to put it simply,
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rather than get into a argument, is that you have a very powerful government which uses
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its power to benefit big corporations, whether it's the Reliances or the Adanis or whatever,
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whatever you choose to believe in, but benefit different big corporations in different ways
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and not allow incumbents to come up, not allow the guy at the bottom of the ladder,
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the economic freedom that he deserves, while taking his money and redistributing it to
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richie riches at the top like the Nirav Modi's and the Vijay Mallya's. So big companies are
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not synonymous with free markets. They're in fact the very opposite. Free markets basically
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mean every common citizen of this country being able to voluntarily interact with anybody he
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wants to in any way, provided there is no coercion and provided, to get back to that magic word,
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there is consent all around. All right. So Amit, given that liberty
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and the values around consent and freedom are sort of reducing right now, at least in most parts of
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the world, is there anything that you are optimistic about? Is there anything that makes you hopeful?
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I think what makes me optimistic to some extent is a technology. I think technology empowers
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individuals where political struggles haven't. For example, commuters in all Indian cities have
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suffered for a long time because of scarcities of public transport, because A, the government
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provided public transport is so bad and because you have the government interfering in public
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transport in terms of limiting the licenses given to taxis and auto rickshaws and blah blah.
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So if you're in Delhi, for example, you would never go anywhere by meter. You would have to
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negotiate a price with the guy. In Bombay, sometimes a guy would just refuse to come where
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you want to. And suddenly, bang, technology came in terms of these app-based services like Uber
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and Ola and empowered individuals. Now, I don't need to worry at all about getting
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transport at any time of the day to go anywhere. I'm just giving you one small example. So in many
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ways, there is a hope that technology will empower individuals in ways that, ironically,
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political struggles have failed to do. But also going beyond that, I take courage from Martin
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Luther King's words to paraphrase him about the arc of history. And I think the arc of history,
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one would hope, does bend towards freedom. Right now, you have a lot of populism in the world and
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you have guys like Trump and Modi and Erdogan and so on in charge. But one hopes that in the long run,
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citizens will express themselves more and fight more, which I think is happening to some extent,
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and that they will be empowered by technology. And of course, it cuts both ways. And we can talk
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forever about all the trade-offs involved. And many of these things are unknown unknowns. You
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and I can't possibly imagine what the politics of the future and the technology of the future,
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even 10 years from now, will look like. It's beyond our imagination. But we can hope for the
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best. All right. Thanks so much for coming in, Amit, and about sharing values and making me
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think about consent a lot more than I used to before. If you enjoyed this conversation,
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I'd urge you to listen to more episodes of the Pragati podcast. Head on over to the site I edit,
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pragati at thinkpragati.com and click on the podcast tab. I'll join you again next week on
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The Scene and the Unseen from the familiar interviewer's chair. You can follow me on Twitter
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at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A, and you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen
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at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed listening to The Scene and the Unseen,
#
check out another show by IVM Podcasts, Simplified, which is hosted by my good friends,
#
Naren, Chuck, and Sriketh. You can download it on any podcasting network. He bends down to test the
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warm water for his bath. He comes here to quench his thirst for a hot shower and some podcasts.
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You can witness how he enjoys having other people talk about cool stuff in his bathroom. Indeed,
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it helps him with his loneliness. You can find more of his PCs on ivmpodcasts.com, your one-stop
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destination where you can check out the coolest Indian podcasts. Happy listening.
