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Business News/ Opinion / Views | The duplicitous language of the economic left
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Views | The duplicitous language of the economic left

Views | The duplicitous language of the economic left

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No strain of the modern left – in India or elsewhere - believes in individual freedom as an end in itself; for the left more equal material outcomes within a country are ostensibly paramount. While it is always problematic to generalize - for the left, freedom means freedom from the state when it comes to personal matters (though there are many qualifications there too), but when it comes to economics, the state is suddenly transformed into a benign institution. For the left, then, freedom is the fulfillment of human needs like food, healthcare, and a minimum income by the government. To use the language of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the left does not believe in “negative liberty" or freedom from the state beyond protection of life, liberty and property - but instead in “positive liberty" or material freedom through the state. Yet, ensuring Ram’s negative liberty does not significantly affect Shyam’s negative liberty unless one calls Shyam’s potential stealing or killing as “liberty". But ensuring Ram’s positive “liberty" of a cradle-to-grave statist support does mean downgrading Shyam’s “negative liberty" with respect to his personal property.

Again, to press for state-enforced egalitarianism is a legitimate position to have and one for which we have some sympathy in a still poor nation like ours (although we would like more taxing-and-spending by the States through public-private partnerships in the social sector too, and less socio-economic engineering by the central government of a billion-plus country through top-down bureaucracies hoping for some benefits to “trickle down"). But to pretend that mandated redistribution is somehow consistent with liberty and individual freedom – indeed is the very essence of liberty or freedom itself - is to indulge in Orwellian sophistry.

Yet, this is precisely what the left does. Unfortunately, Amartya Sen, India’s most well-known economist or indeed public intellectual, is not above this either. One of Sen’s book titles is a good example – “Development as Freedom". According to Sen, land redistribution, government-run schools and hospitals, public make-work schemes constitute development. That may or may not be true. But these programs are not consistent with individual freedom – especially of the taxpayer who funds all this (indeed, the poor are also taxpayers because they indirectly pay excise/sales taxes, and even more perniciously the “inflation tax" as a result of our constant deficit-financing). Of course, the said taxpayer could be simply “greedy" – or she could simply have a better way to at least partially donate that money, but what is undeniable is that her private property has been expropriated for redistribution.

We suspect the left understands the natural attraction to freedom in the hearts of all humans. Hence the paradoxical need to constantly discredit the idea of individual freedom, while still co-opting its message. In the above mentioned book, Sen writes that “The uncompromising priority of libertarian rights can be particularly problematic since the actual consequences of the operation of these entitlements can, quite possibly, include rather terrible results." That may be so – for example, a government that refuses to redistribute during a famine would be a good example, as I am sure Sen would agree – but two points remain unanswered.

Firstly, what is preventing noble individuals like Sen (pun intended) from getting together and helping others during such crises? It would be presumptuous to assume that only well-off people who agree with his statist philosophy care for the poor, while others do not. Of course it would be hypocritical too, because we do not know of many leftists who voluntarily pay more in taxes than they are required to, although we hear many of them (like Warren Buffett asking for tax increases - on capital gains/dividends without explaining how that is already double taxation because of the extant corporate taxes). On the other hand, most defenders of freedom have said that freedom requires responsibility that must be voluntary discharged – towards your self, your family and the larger society. But even here, Sen has a masterful answer. He writes, “Responsibility requires freedom". What he means is that if you do not implement his kind of welfare state, people will not be “free" to be responsible enough!

Secondly, if one were to discredit a philosophy based on extreme conditions, would it be unfair if somebody were to remind Sen, a self-confessed card-carrying Communist, about what turned out to be actually “problematic" in actual Communist countries like China and the former Soviet Union where around a hundred million humans died because of forced collectivization of agriculture? But was not the British policy of laissez-faire responsible for the deaths of almost five million people during the Bengal famine of 1943? Not exactly, as Sen himself documents, government policies that were anything but laissez-faire greatly exacerbated the situation and were put in place by the British – such as a ban on inter-province trade in rice and wartime deficit spending. That is, free trade and sound money would have kept food prices much lower, but such policies were not followed. In any case, most real-life libertarians actually support decentralized redistribution and are not opposed to some centralized transfers in the form of food stamps or cash transfers etc., which can avert more deaths in similar situations in the future.

The contortions leftists go through though to depict state coercion as freedom are impressive. As Jagdish Bhagwati wrote in his magnificent In Defense of Globalization about this garbled state of affairs - “Deconstructionism... amounts to an endless horizon of meanings… Derrida’s technique will deconstruct any political ideology, including Marxism. Typically, however, it is focused on deconstructing and devaluing capitalism rather than Marxism… Foucault’s emphasis on discourses as instruments of power and dominance has also led to what is often described as an “anti-rational" approach that challenges the legitimacy of academic disciples, including economics, and their ability to get at the ‘truth’."

Rajeev Mantri is director of GPSK Investment Group and Harsh Gupta is a Hong Kong-based co-author of an upcoming book on financial derivatives.

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Published: 05 Jul 2012, 02:33 PM IST
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