[lbo-talk] Friedman, Free Market and Freedom

Carl Remick carlremick at gmail.com
Fri Oct 19 10:29:57 PDT 2007


On 10/19/07, bhandari at berkeley.edu <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> relevant to discussion some time ago.
>
> Web| Jan 31, 2007
> Opinion
> Friedman, Free Market & Freedom
>
> The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for
> achieving participatory democracy. So spake Milton Friedman. But political
> freedoms may not flow naturally from economic freedoms...
>
> PRANAB BARDHAN
> BERKELEY
>
> ... In India it is arguable that the survival of political and human freedom,
> against all odds and at a time when government control over the economy
> was pervasive, had something to do with the fact that the elite was
> heterogeneous and fractured. No individual group could overpower others,
> and competitive politics provided a procedural device to keep the
> contending partners at the bargaining table within some moderate bounds.
> Democracy served as a resilient mechanism for conflict management in a
> highly divisive society. ...

Yes, that would certainly seem to be one of the prime lessons of a remarkable book I am reading now, "India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Greatest Democracy" (HarperCollins, 2007) by Ramachandra Guha. India dwarfs every other exercise in democratic nation-building ever conducted: Never has there been such an ambitious and successful effort to meld diverse ethnic groups into a stable democratic state while also building a modern technological economy. It's fascinating to see how newly independent India made such a systematic study of centralized economic planning in both the USSR *and* the US (e.g., examining the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority), and how India made such a concerted effort to develop the tools needed (e.g., advanced techniques in gathering and analyzing economic data) to make centralized economic planning viable. All in all, India has done an extraordinary job melding the dynamics of technocracy and democratic civil rights with respect for multitudinous ancient ethnic and religious beliefs.

While I haven't finished Guha's fascinating book, my impression so far is that India offers a much more impressive and inspiring example of democratic nation-building than the US does.

Carl



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