Ninan: “Taking all four decades (1981-2021) together, the IMF numbers show that only three countries did significantly better than India. China was in a category by itself, multiplying its economy 62-fold (in current, not constant, dollars); South Korea was next at 25 times, followed by Vietnam. India fitted into the pack of countries that followed. Along with four others (Egypt, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Taiwan), it multiplied about 16-fold, while Thailand and Malaysia were not far behind. So it has been a creditable but not an outstanding record. Nevertheless, the country’s share of world GDP, after shrinking in the 1981-91 decade, from 1.7 per cent to 1.1 per cent, rose to 2.5 per cent by 2011 and then to 3.3 per cent in 2021, with still higher shares to come.”
Leonard Read: “Property – access to valuable resources – is simply a tool to help satisfy human desires. As long as the ownership and use of property is determined and guided by the market forces of open competition, everyone has access to these valuable resources in proportion to his own productive effort. Private ownership means personal control over the tools of production and, thus, personal control over one’s life. But when government owns and controls the property and thereby denies the functioning of the market, then government controls lives.” [via CafeHayek]
strategy+business: “When a business is going well, I’ve seen leadership teams conform to an unwritten 80-20 rule of thumb: They spend about 80 percent of their time focused on growth for the long term and only 20 percent managing the short term. But when things are not going well, I’ve observed the opposite: The temptation is to focus almost exclusively on the short term, with leaders spending a mere fraction of their time looking ahead. An ultra-short-term focus, however, is not sustainable. As pressing as today’s demands are, as businesses continue to struggle with impact of COVID-19 and economic uncertainty, leaders should strive for balance between the short term and long term to produce value that benefits all stakeholders.”
Donald Boudreaux: “In the private sector, we rely upon two core features of markets to protect against…abuse [of government power]. First, each person is free not to patronize firms that fail to deliver sufficient value. Second, firms prosper only by — and only so long as they continue — competing successfully for consumers’ dollars. But because government agencies are funded with taxes — and because those agencies face no competition — greater reliance than is necessary in the private sector must be put on the integrity, altruism and diligence of elected officials to oversee government agencies in ways that ensure that those agencies don’t abuse their awesome powers.”
