Freedom, not controls, will end graft

The government’s accession to the demands of those who want to draft the proposed Jan Lokpal bill is not a cause for celebration but for alarm. This action amounts to a promise by the government to abdicate its duties and transfer its powers to a small group of unelected people. The motives of those demanding that NGOs have a say in the affairs of the country are questionable, and will result in more rules and bureaucracies, making it counterproductive to the cause of rooting out corruption as the new setup will inevitably descend into another scheme replete with corruption. The key to ending corruption is not more controls — some of which will be concentrated in the hands of a chosen few — but a reduction in controls.

For several decades, the term ‘civil society’ has been used as a euphemism by the Marxist and Maoist varieties to refer to one of their own kind. This group’s proposed anti-corruption draft allows for foreign interference in Indian affairs.

The demand to include Nobel Prize winners of Indian origin as part of the proposed de facto courts, if put into practice, will potentially allow citizens of other countries to act as judges, and who could, at least in theory, owe allegiance to forces inimical to India.

The demand to include Magsaysay Award winners and Nobel Prize winners, if implemented, will allow foreign powers to determine who would control law enforcement in the country. The Magsaysay Awards’ organisation is based in Philippines, ranked as one of the most corrupt countries by Transparency International and several notches below India. The award is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which was once involved in funding the infamous eugenics programmes. The Nobel Prize Committee was caught in a corruption scandal when its members went on an all-expenses paid trip to China.

Even as ordinary Indians understand that secrecy is the cloak behind which corruption occurs, the anti-corruption draft overlooks the fact that the selection processes for both the Nobel Prize and the Magsaysay Awards are secret. In recent years, the Magsaysay award has been given to an unusually high number of Maoist sympathisers from India. It is well known that international awards are given to groups that lobby for them. Once they win, these groups gain an advantage as the recommendations of past winners carries weight in selecting future winners.

Every situation in which the government redistributes the country’s wealth to a few opportunists is made possible by the concentration of power in the hands of the government. The fact is that corruption in India is systemic; it isn’t merely the corrupt nature of a few individuals. A system that grants too much power and control to the government invariably deteriorates into a corrupt system when corrupt people take over the system and perpetuate their rule. Corruption all over the world stems from government control over the vast majority of the people while granting favours to a few well-connected individuals. In every act of corruption, at least one party involves a government or its agent.

The 2G spectrum scam could have been avoided if the government had not exercised control over the frequencies, but had applied common sense property laws and the principle of homesteading to determine ownership of a frequency in a specific geographical area. Government control of frequencies is based on the myth that frequencies are a scarce resource. The reality is that government control and regulations are the reasons for the scarcity. And even if we grant for the sake of argument that frequencies are a scarce resource, government interference only exacerbates the problem.

For example, as long as the government controlled telephone allocation, corruption was the norm. Once the private sector entered the arena, people not only got telephones in quick time, but also benefit from discounts and promotional offers given out by operators.
Thus, corruption can be removed with less control and more freedom. Only unfettered free enterprise can eliminate corruption. Even in market-based economies in which corporations receive unfair favours from governments, do note that one party is the government.

To remove corruption, we must not only dismantle the socialist institutions and other laws that create unnecessary restrictions, but also guard against vested interest groups that seek to seize control of India’s polity and channel public money into their coffers.
Unless we keep watch, we might also see foreign groups influencing India’s politics. It is for us to remain vigilant and prevent our freedoms from being further usurped, for, as it has been stated many times in the past, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Arvind Kumar is an energy trader and can be reached at
arvind@classical-liberal.net. Arun Narendhranath is an energy consultant.  The views expressed by the authors are personal.