RE: a note on form; was: Suhrid Ganguly

[Charudatt <charu@iced.com>]

There is a thread running through a number of posts here that assumes or
seeks to justify the premise "All of India's ills are caused by
socialism and the only solution is capitalism, the US system is ideal".
I'm oversimplifying a little but you get the idea- for example:

	----------
	Sanjeev Sabhlok[SMTP:sabhlok@almaak.usc.edu] wrote

	. . . I think, was not a usual suicide in any sense of the word.
	Instead, it was a strong political statement about our system
from a very
	educated and honest engineer. It was a statement, a punctuation,
marking
	the nadir of our "inglorious" attempts at state control of the
economy. 

	If you note, this protest was against precisely the monopoly of
socialism
	that I have been talking about. It was about a telephone company
in
	Calcutta. We have complete government monopolies here. No
competition
	whatsoever. There is neither any choice before the people, nor
any
	rational way to meet the demand without bribing the petty
functionaries of
	our socialistic system. 

I see the facts here as follows: Suhrid Ganguly commits suicide to
protest corruption at a telephone company. To cite this as being caused
by socialism (because socialism is the root of all evil) without a
reasoned argument is sloppy and hence open to dismissal and ridicule.
The argument that US phone companies are not corrupt and dishonest
because of banishment of evil socialism and divine free enterprise is
also weak- up until 20 years ago the US phone system was a state
sanctioned monopoly and they had the "socialistic" mandate to supply
phone services to all regions- even non-profitable sparsely populated
rural areas. The phone company did this by making long distance tariffs
subsidize local calls, on the assumption that long distance was
primarily used by business. Nevertheless, the Bell System as it was
called was acknowledged to be the best phone system in the world.
De-regulation resulted in lower long distance rates and a 4-6x increase
in local charges. The point is- you cannot ascribe the quality of phone
service to capitalism/free enterprise/privatisation.

This just may be my perception (and if I'm the only one, hereafter I'll
shut up and forever hold my peace) but the way arguments seem to be
getting framed is reminiscent (to me) of situations pervaded by
over-arching dogma such as "four legs (read: capitalism) good two legs
(socialism) bad" in Animal Farm or China during the cultural revolution:
any thing to be liked was because of the beneficent thoughts of Chmn Mao
<capitalism> any thing you didn't like was "counter-revolutionary
<socialism>. Another example is McCarthyism in the 1950's in this
country when the term "communist" was shorthand for anyone or anything
the labeler didn't like. This, to me, smacks of political manipulation
where we need an object of our anger, frustration, and blame and the
simple solution to be the object of our adoration. This is covered quite
well in Orwell's 1984 as the "5 minute hate periods followed by the
loving glow of Big Brother".

Ideally I would like to see this discussion not use the labels
"socialism", "capitalism", "communism", "liberalism" and so on. These
terms are so overused that they are largely meaningless in any serious
discussion other than, depending on your tilt, to say "I like this" or
"I detest this". It is much clearer to state what specifically we
advocate or oppose. I believe there are valuable lessons to be learnt by
clear analysis of the past rather than trying to force fit it to an
ideology.

Now that that's out of the way, I'll lay out my opinions on public
services such as telephones and electric supply. These are essential
services- anyone in a modern society needs them to survive, it is in the
interest of the society as a whole for everyone to have access, meaning
the prices need to be kept low. Some of these are also natural monopoly
situations i.e. it is impossible for a supplier to make a profit if
there are a competing players fragmenting the market (if you're not
convinced, check into the current debate deregulation of electric
supply- no supplier in any state has expressed interest in supplying
domestic consumers who want to switch from their current supplier). The
result is, the simple laws of supply and demand do not apply because the
consumer needs the product and the supplier sees little or no penalty to
raising prices and making huge profits. In a situation like this there
is role for an body representing the consumers (the government maybe?)
to regulate the supplier. In the case of the Calcutta phone system I
would like to see it run privately with public regulation to prevent
rate gouging. I concede that this will never work if governments are
non-representative and not responsive to public pressure. There are
other examples where I see failure of supply and demand to work. One
example is in the manufacture and sale of drugs- they are essential for
people who need them so increasing prices does not depress demand. If
you need proof check the price of a single dose of valium in India vs.
the US. A friend recently did this exercise and discovered the price
differed by a factor of 30.

Some entity has to represent the interests of the majority to check the
power of bodies that have no interest in the welfare of the majority
like large corporations. In a democracy that entity is an elected and
representative government. The market alone will leave all power in the
hands of a few. Government has its uses just as markets do.

-Charu