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Saturday, August 15, 2020

Government: Dos and Donts

Let me define some terminologies in the beginning.
Government tasks (sarkaar): The tasks that government carries out using tax money.
Voluntary collective (samaaj): People supporting a cause who come together, pool money and work for the cause. Unlike the taxes collected by government under threat of a gun, the contribution to the collective is entirely voluntary. Example: Ramkrishna Mission, Resident Welfare Associations, etc.
Market (bazaar): Profits in free markets drive this entity. No coercion, only earning through customer satisfaction.

I prefer to restrict the government to only those tasks which need some form of coercion or force. Like police, military, judiciary, community discipline in case of pandemic etc. I want to explain the above with some examples:
Task Responsibility
Impoverished seniors Voluntary collective
Military spending Government
Community health, pandemic Government
Education for poor Voluntary collective
Helthcare for poor Voluntary collective
Homelessness Voluntary collective
UBI Voluntary collective
Bail out industry Market. Industry should create its own rainy day buffer out of its profit/initial investment. If no longer feasible to run the industry, shut it down.
Regulatory Agencies. RBI, IRDA, CSRIL, RERA Government. It is government's job to prevent chaos across industries such as Finance, Insurance Real estate. Thanks to Ashutosh for this point.
Non intrusive testing/tracing capabilities for pandemic management Government. This is public-health-issue, as opposed to personal healthcare. But I cannot imagine any government building a tracking/tracing capability which it won't misuse by invading into citizen privacy. Honouring privacy requires ethics of the highest order, and no government can maintain high ethics.

None of the ideas is my original. It is a synthesis of ideas that I picked up over the years from Swaminomics, Atanu Dey, Gurucharan Das, Paul Graham, Ayn Rand, Amlan Dutta, Ashok Desai.

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