Shekhar Gupta: “A society that does not give its entrepreneurs, wealth and job creators love and respect, is doomed to be frozen in a low-middle-income hole. That’s where India is now located, with a $2,800 per capita. If it has to reach 10,000 and, therefore, the middle-income status in the next 15-20 years (it will still be two-thirds of where China is today), a lot of Indians will need to work very long and productive hours. Like the Japanese and the Germans did post-World War-II, Koreans all along, the Chinese and the Vietnamese now. Of course, in the process, they will build wealth and a better life for themselves and their families. For every individual angered by the call to these long hours, you will find millions desperate for jobs, especially of this quality.”
Deirdre McCloskey: “We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little – and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick.” [via CafeHayek]
The Daily Economy: “Milei’s central campaign goals, and his actual actions in his first year in office, included two things none of the other leaders have even said, much less actually done. The first is to cut spending; the second is to reduce state meddling in the determination of prices.”
Timothy Taylor: “Hayek argued that many people have a tendency to emphasize the role that government plays in economic outcomes, because government actions are large-scale, associated with prominent leaders, and commemorated by writers. The actions of government are the facts that we have written down. But we typically don’t write down, or even observe, the myriad small-scale reactions of individual consumers and producers across an economy as they continually react to changes and shift…Government economic policy, whatever its announced goals, doesn’t create outcomes. Instead, it changes the context in which economic actors make decisions, which in turn leads to economic outcomes. The distinction matters.”
Ajay Shah: “While gross domestic product (GDP) measurement in India has many difficulties, the estimated Indian GDP — of around Rs 325 trillion in 2024-25 —is perhaps in the ballpark. There was a time when initiating a new expenditure programme of Rs 10,000 crore was big. But today, it’s perhaps 0.03 per cent of GDP. The revenue receipts of the Union government are at about 10 per cent of GDP. The taxation and expenditure power of the Union government is small when juxtaposed against the size of the economy. We can see a certain political logic around most paragraphs of the Budget speech, but economic policy needs more than these pawn moves. The emphasis on projects and programmes has limited effectiveness in creating economic growth; what matters is remedying all the ways in which the Indian state coerces private persons, where fear has been created that makes private persons cautious.”
