I am obscenely busy with some things, so I won’t be able to blog much till the first weekend of February. So I am sorry that all those amazingly great posts that I’ve saved as drafts won’t get published till then. I am sorry to deny my readers the benefit of my superior condescending intelligence. I regret that your education will remain incomplete as a result

Amit, who is enjoying life in Pakistan, wants us all to vote for him as the Best Asian Weblog at the 2006 Bloggies. Go forth and do his bidding. Desh ki Izzat ka sawaal hai…

Finally, Michael Higgins, who was an Indian in his previous birth, has given an interesting reply to a question I asked via email about when the culture of restaurants came about in the West. His post is here. I’ve posted my email to him and his reply in the extended entry, so you can read that up before you read Michael’s post to understand my thinking.

Anyway, help me out on this. Michael tells in his post that restaurants didn’t exist in the West till the 18th century or so. I guess India not having restaurants till the 19th is not as incongruous as I thought. But there were definitely inns in the West for long before that, but somehow I think that inns and hotels, i.e. places where you could pay and sleep for the night would be alien to India before the Westerners introduced it. I don’t mean the dharamsalas – I mean a place where you can pay and stay. Any guesses? Any cultural referents?
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Young Shivam wants to join the Cartel and as per plan, all the other Cartelians are confusing him about what exactly the entry requirements are. Now of course, a lot of people might want to join it and they will have doubts about how to get in. I can only tell them what I told Aadisht sometime back, when he wanted to join.

Aadisht!
Why are you knocking on door after door trying to join the Cartel? Look within you! The Cartel is right there. There is a little bit of the Cartel in each one of us. You don’t need to do anything to join the Cartel. When the time comes, the Cartel itself will reach out for you. Then you will be of the Cartel and the Cartel of you.

Aadisht has a brutal review of One night @ the call center.

It is Kaizad Gustad all over again. Write a mediocre first novel (or make a mediocre first movie). People go ga ga over it. You get encouraged, and your second work ends up as something so bad that people wonder what went wrong. I’ve said this before and I will say it again. Bad novelists (and film-makers) are not born. It is society that makes them this way. It is your toleration of mediocrity that makes them this way.

Vajpayee’s analogy is neither stupid nor mixed up. Parashurama went around the world 21 times trying to eliminate the race of Kshatriyas from the world. If you think, as Vajpayee probably does, that it was an unpleasant, thankless, but necessary task that was ultimately unsuccessful, then you’ve got perfectly what he thinks of the whole thing. He is tired and is now passing on the mantle to the next generation, but without really achieving anything that he hoped to achieve.
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Have a great 2006 all of you!

Yes, that’s an order from the Cartel. In 2006, we Cartelians will ensure that the Libertarian stranglehold over the Indian Blogosphere is complete. By December, We will ensure that you will be incapable of thinking any thoughts other than the ones We allow you, except on Sundays between 4 and 5 pm.

Incidentally, I don’t know how many of you have read the previous post, but please do. It is an important one.

You know what the greatest advantage of a democracy is? No, it is not that it gives us the power to elect the right person to power. In my view, the coolest thing about democracy is that it enables us to chuck out the wrong person after five years.

Democracy is a civilised form of civil war. In a real civil war, the winner can kill the loser – literally, not figuratively. Once the winner emerges victorious, he is more or less obliged to commit a huge massacre to give people a warning that any further rebellion will not be tolerated. That buys him some time – usually more than the five years that democracy gives its rulers. But sooner or later someone will plot against him. If not against him, they will plot against his son who, though he is a weakling, has ascended the throne after his father.

Now, in a usual democracy, you don’t get to do that. You can, in theory, have a “democracy” where the winner gets to be an absolute ruler for five years, but it would never work. That’s obviously because the winner can still kill the loser and all potential rivals so that there is no one to challenge him five years later. His rivals will know this, so the election campaign will quickly turn into an actual civil war.

So democracy is meaningless without limited government, which in turn is meaningless without rule of law, and rule of law is meaningless without institutions. This post is about institutions, not about democracy.
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In a comment at Desipundit, Amit Kulkarni provides the best proof that Communism, as a scientific theory, was false.

Yazad, Ravikiran

To address the criticism of you people about Communism, it does not really matter what badge you wear if you are hellbent on killing people either by waging wars or conducting mass genocide, for the sole profit of a few people. In recent memory of last 100-200 years, you could be a ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ or ‘Khmer Rouge’ or ‘Imperial’ or ‘democratic’ or ’socialist’. If you can get away with it, you do it. Just because you can. You coincidentially align with the people in power. You change your stripes when necessary. To justify to your unconscious hidden self, and to the public, you lie. It has been clinically proven, if you tell lies consistently, a point comes when you believe your own lies, and it becomes the truth.

It is just pure coincidence that the Communist Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Khmer Rouge, Fascist Germany, Imperial Japan, etc… killed 100 million. It could very well have been that if Communism had triumped, all that is ‘democratic’ would be villified

Read the whole thing.

Amit asks:

“This leads me to wonder why people in jails should not be allowed to throw parties and suchlike with their own money, if they disturb no one else in the process. Sure, jails are meant to confine criminals, but besides free movement, should all the other rights that an individual normally enjoys also be suspended?”

Umm.. as long as he is talking of convicted criminals, is “Because we want criminals to suffer” a sufficient answer?
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The debate on the whole regulation thing has gone its predictable course, i.e. we libertarians have asked “Are you in favour of free-markets or are you in favour of regulations?” and we’ve got the answer “Being pro-markets does not mean being against regulations” to which we’ve replied “What about the license-quota-permit raj? Do you think the free market could have flourished under those regulations” to which again we’ve got the answer “So are you saying that there is no need for laws at all? If someone does wrong, shouldn’t we punish them?” to which we’ve screamed back “Where have we said that there shouldn’t be laws? We are against regulations. Completely different thing.”

I think the fault is on both sides. We FMSs have never made it clear what we mean by the laws we support and the regulations we oppose, and the NHBs constantly claim that “some regulations are needed” without specifying which ones are.

I had in fact thought of remedying this problem some time back. I will still do it in more detail, as a post on the Indian Economy blog. But in the meantime, let me propose a way to distinguish between “good” regulations and “bad” regulations. We libertarians tend to call those good regulations “laws” but let me drop that terminology for clarity. Also, I must caution you that this is not the only distinction. These “good” and “bad” regulations form the extremes – good ones are unambiguously good for the market, bad ones are unambiguously bad for the market, but there are others in between which are not so clear.
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The Longest Comment In The Indian Blogosphere draws a parallel between the left and libertarians. It is not a particularly original parallel; many others have drawn it before. He is saying that just as the left was saying that “true” communism has not been really tried anywhere, it cannot be said to have failed, we libertarians are saying that just as there is no “true” free market anywhere, it cannot be said to have failed. I don’t think that parallel works, and here is why.
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I think I do need to post more on The Longest Comment In The Indian Blogosphere.

Some 2000 words down the comment, he says that Don Boudreaux “dismisses the phenomena of global warming” and then Chetan launches into a tirade on how Global Warming is in fact occurring. Except, of course, that Don wasn’t saying that global warming was not occurring. He was saying that even if it was occurring, we should not get the government involved in solving the problem, because the government will invariably make things worse.
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Once again, we’ve been accused of condescension – this time it is by The Longest Comment Ever In The Indian Blogosphere. As the condescendingest Cartelian, I am tempted to simply link to what I had said on the subject some time back.
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