Charlie Munger recently made
these remarks when asked about Indian
scenario (Berkshire Hathaway exited India in 2013 and haven’t returned since):-
“India is grossly
defective because they took the worst aspects of our culture, allowing a bunch
of idiots to scream and stop everything. And they copied it … They’ve taken the
worst aspects of democracy,”
On China he said:-
“The Chinese
government really tries to help its companies … What I like about China is they
have some companies that are very strong and still selling at low prices. And
the Chinese are formidable workers and they make wonderful employees,” .
All hell broke loose because
Charlie Munger was deemed as everything from an ugly old man who has lost it,
to a racist and many other epithets. The
renowned trader Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s blog has both the full length video, as well
as his criticisms and that of many others:-
I did not find it worth my time
to hunt for slurs thrown at him by various twitter warriors , and the readers
are free to do so if they wish. This is about what he spoke about, which
unfortunately happens to be true.
A lot of educated Indians lap up everything the left media
sells to them, because they have been weaned on a largely left dominated
English education system , that teaches them self hatred and makes them a
deracinated lot who are tourists in their own country. They go and blindly copy
everything that the west does (interestingly, the good they copy pales in
comparison to the bad they copy), even take pride in learning their own
identity from the west and agree with the clichéd narratives the west has about
us, but somehow become very aggressive when someone in the west makes a genuine
criticism because it is beneath our dignity to take it well ,but at the same time
we want the white man’s validation all the time and pride ourselves for
speaking his language. How very convenient.
Haven’t we adopted the worst
aspects of western culture? Crass consumerism,
extreme individualism, hedonism, drugs, screwed up marital life, selfishness in interpersonal relationships, promiscuity.
But we have never adopted their discipline, their work culture, largely
corruption free state of affairs in public and private life, their passion for research and innovation,
punctuality, traffic sense etc. Because inculcating positives into yourself
requires effort, negative does not. Noone has to be taught how to smoke a
cigarette, but one has to spend years for becoming a great painter. We Indians
are awesome when it comes to taking the easy way out.
Havent we taken the worst aspects
of democracy? We have reduced democracy to be something for the sole purpose of
conducting elections, and buying of
MLAs, MPs and Corporators post elections, stalling parliaments, useless
protests, ‘’off the people, far the
people, buy the people’’ remains our motto.
The bunch of idiots who Munger
refers to are the vote bank managers who get elected by promising the
impossible to their voters, and then bankrupting the state treasury to give
freebies to them in order to be reelected and stay in power. Or the civil
servants, who have put the entire country in the straightjacket of regulations and permits and red tape, and
bleed the country dry with their inefficiency and corruption. Or the paid
activists, who will try to scuttle any development project, be it a dam or an
industry or nuclear plant , under the garb of environmental norms. Or a huge part of the general public whose recommendation of
everything is ‘’government should do this, government should do that’’.
Socialism is the state’s control
on the means of production via licensing, regulation, permits and inspection.
It is a vampire that has slowly drained India’s blood and has left it an
emaciated and rotted country for much of its seventy years of post independence
existence. This cancer gives rise to starvation, unemployment, corruption and
poverty. After independence, India adopted a license and inspection
controlled socialist economy, where production was tightly controlled, crony
capitalism was the norm and shortages and long queues for everything was a part
of daily life. Till 1991, Pakistan had a higher standard of living than India,
a fact that is not mentioned very much. Thats what socialism does, makes you
poorer than even your incompetent neighbour whose main income was and even
today is , foreign aid.
It will not be an exaggeration to say that the time of 1947-91 was India's
wasted decades. Due to license permit raj and controlled production, no
businesses worth its name could come up. India prided itself for creating IIMs
and IITs, but it had no resources to employ its educated, the best of whom
emigrated to foreign shores at the first opportunity. Countries like Malaysia,
Singapore and South Korea, which were much poorer in 1950s than India, started
their reforms earlier and today have the kind of infrastructure which India
will struggle to catch up for two decades atleast. Noone wanted to touch China
with a ten foot pole in Maoist times, but after it began its reforms in 1980,
the rest they say, is history. It was only after India opened up its economy in
1991 under PV Narasimha Rao (India’s greatest Prime Minister till date, who
deserved a second term), that India shrugged of years of misery and set forth
to the journey of becoming the fifth largest economy in the world.
Educated economic illiterates endorsing the Nehruvian mindset failed to
comprehend a few simple facts:-
*Its the businesses that create employment, and not degrees. Scores of
colleges cant make any change unless there are businesses to employ the
graduates coming out of them, failing which they will be forced to work for a
pittance. Too much government regulations and controls kills the economy and
makes the country barren for any sort of real business activity. Mere job
creation without any business activity is a sham designed to fool everyone, and
will end up bleeding the economy as the remuneration will be paid from the
exchequers pocket.
* A country becomes economically strong by its
manufacturing power, may it be USA, Germany or China. In absence of
industrialisation, the educated woking age population is reduced to a horde of
unemployed degree holders, who have to beg, borrow, steal their way to finding
greener pastures. China is a giant because it is the manufacturing hub of
every major corporation in the world, Indian companies too benefiting from the
same. India's economy is largely driven by its service sector, and till it
improves its manufacturing potential, it cannot join the ranks of the greats.
And if we naively think that we become great by exporting software engineers,
construction workers and nurses to other countries, we need a lesson in
reality. But then, we are a
country of educated fools who thinks that a child’s success in life is
determined by his board exam score.
* You cannot tax a country to prosperity. You cannot make the poor rich by
making the rich poor. Wealth cannot be distributed without creating it first,
because the biggest problem of socialism is that you soon run out of other
people’s money.
* Service sector cannot accommodate every graduate churned out by the
numerous colleges and institutes. Degrees matter, but skills matter more.
* Government cannot create money/wealth, it can only allocate it. We indeed
have converted democracy into mobocracy where 51% quash the rights of the
remaining 49%, where their elected candidate appropriates all the state’s
benefits to them, keeping the others miserable. In India, democracy has become
secondary to elections and vote banks. If this is not the worst aspect of
democracy that we have adopted, what is?
* Means of production in the hands of the state leads to inefficiency,
unemployment, stagnation and corruption. India even today is a power deficient
country because power generation is solely in the hands of the state. In energy
sector too, India has got no counterpart of Exxon or BP. In license permit raj,
production control resulted in shortages, shoddy consumer goods being
available, and waiting periods of five to seven years for a simple
scooter. The buying power of the middle class remained limited and that of
the lower middle class and that of the poor, non existent.
* Government intervention in the market should be to promote businesses,
not curtail them. Japan and China have kept their currency values low in the
international market, this makes their exports cheaper than what the west will
pay for domestically manufactured goods. In India, local wines can never dream
of competing abroad because they are taxed heavily, making them exorbitant even
in the eyes of the domestic consumers.
* The huge percentage of doctors, engineers etc in US of Indian origin that
a lot of Indians quote with pride, is not a matter of pride, its a matter of
shame. If our best and brightest cannot reach their highest potential and have
to migrate to start all over again, something is wrong with our society and not
the people who migrate. They have burnt their blood becoming what they are and
they deserve the full right to go where they want to achieve the highest for
themselves. Referring to this as ‘’brain drain’’ is stupidity. The real drain
is our polity and public administration, which does not even have the
competency of building decent schools or public toilets. Sundar Pichai, Vinod
Dham, Sabeer Bhatia etc are a slap on our face, because they could never have
been what they are had they stayed back, because not even in dreams can India
have its own create a domestic counterpart of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo,
Walmart, because the civil servant and the his political masters have perfected
the art of aborting dreamchildren, via reservations, quotas and regulations.
The leftists and the neta babu kleptocracy has kept India poor by
preventing its industrialisation, which has ensured that rural India remains on
the brink, employment opportunities remain minimum, a farmer can be destroyed
by just one bad harvest, and then has to migrate with thousands like him to a
city which can be halfway across the country, to spend the rest of his life in
a slum working menial jobs. This is the progress brought to this country by
‘’pro poor’’ leaders and their voters who sell their country’s future for the
next five years for a few thousand rupees and some booze and biriyani.
Ofcourse, there is a difference
between the scenarios in USA and India, but what we should be ashamed of is the
fact that a 93 year world famous renowned investor who has never visited the
country can state a simple truth in simple words, but none of our overrated corporates
dare to mention. India will continue to languish unless our policymakers are filled
with leftist thugs and vote bank managers and our voting public is full of daru
chicken crowd. No amount of ‘’make in India’’ or ‘’digital India’’ will change
the scenario as long as India abandons socialism and promotes meritocracy.
