logic from India

Hitchhikers,

Saw this in a blog and decided a large quote was in order:

"Whenever I speak of free markets, empowerment and liberalization to be the best solution to India's poverty problems, I am almost always told that it is easy for me make armchair arguments. Have I ever experienced life in a village, the hunger, the desperation? How can someone who has been an urbanite all his life ever know what is good for the rural poor? There are some basic flaws in this argument. The first one, I think it is somewhat presumptuous to merely go by my present attire and speech and lifestyle, and make conclusions about my economic history, especially for people who have known me for a few minutes, maybe a few months, or at the most a couple of years. The more important flaw in the argument is that these very people suggest that some wise, know-all bureaucrat and regulator who has exactly as much or less knowledge or experience of hunger or poverty or the rural struggle for survival should sit in Delhi, and decide on which district gets how much of the centrally planned monetary allocation for that year to spend on "his" subjects. The whole argument reeks of hypocrisy. In my armchair "solutions", at least I don't presume that I am more intelligent than the poor farmer. I don't underestimate his ingenuity to use his empowered mind to alleviate himself from his impoverished state."

On a personal note, I always wonder why some politico thinks he knows what is best for me, and he has no concept of who I am.

If I put in another quote it is getting away from research and getting into lazy theft, but the blog had some real good points.

"Isn't it true that if you throw enough money at a problem, it will go away? If it does not go away, then you just throw more money at it. I will digress at this point and go back to third year of college, when Mr. Mahajan - the only decent instructor we had back then - used to say," When you blow the fuse in the circuit, your problem is not the blown fuse, it is what caused the overload that blew the fuse. But all we ever do as a solution for a blown fuse is to replace it."

This is good stuff and only part of a well done rant, this is a blog I now have bookmarked,

Allan