All premises and postulates of employment guarantee are deeply flawed. To begin with, it is assumed that the government can solve the problem of unemployment. It is worthwhile to quote former US President Ronald Reagan from his first inaugural speech in January 1981: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Nowhere in the world this holds truer than in India; and one need not be a political analyst to know this. A visit to any government office will assure anybody that the most ailing institution in the country is the state. Incompetence, lack of imagination, inefficiency, corruption, callousness, apathy-these are the terms we frequently associate with government, and not without reason. In India, government is not only the problem but also the progenitor of the gravest problems the country is facing. It was government, under the influence of Leftist ideas, that strangulated the economy so badly that we lag behind the countries like South Korea and Thailand, the countries that were much behind us at the time of our Independence. Even after 14 years of liberalization, the Byzantine rules and regulations of government play a major role in impeding economic growth and development. One has to be absurdly credulous to believe that the same officials and babus, who revel in bureaucratic opacity, can redeem the poor. Yet, the public discourse is littered with the paraphernalia of redemption. It is not only the incorrigible Leftwing politicians and academics who talk about the shortcomings in the “delivery mechanism”; politicians, technocrats, bureaucrats, and experts of liberal persuasion also use this term; the term never appeared ludicrous to our policy-makers. Nobody has ever asked who is the deliverer, and who is to be delivered. Is government the deliverer, much like Moses who delivered the Hebrews from the clutches of an oppressive Pharaoh? The undertones of the term are surely Biblical and overtones point towards the redemption paradigm: the redeemer (government) and the suffering humanity (the poor) to be redeemed. The worst aspect of the redemption paradigm is that it perpetuates “the culture of poverty.” Edward Banfield, a prominent conservative philosopher, holds this culture to be responsible for the poverty of the lower classes. The poor are present-oriented; the middle and upper classes are future-oriented. According to Banfield, the “lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot use immediately he considers valueless. His bodily needs . and his taste for ‘action’ take precedence over everything else-and certainly over any work routine. He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in his work.” An illustration: A middle class householder, even when impoverished, would loathe to pull his child out of school; a slum-dweller is most likely to send his child to a sweatshop, even if he is able to afford education in a government school. The reason is that the middle class householder believes in “deferred gratification”; for the slum-dweller, the orientation pertains to what is immediately present. The problem, therefore, is social rather than economic; it has got exacerbated because of socialism; and the cure for socialism is not more socialism. In order to remove poverty and create more jobs, socialism has to be discarded lock, stock, and barrel; concomitantly, capitalism has to be embraced. For, as the American broadcaster Rush Limbaugh once said, “Poverty and suffering are not due to the unequal distribution of goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism.” Nothing else explains the strong correlation between the prosperity and economic openness of nations. The writer can be reached at raviskapoor@gmail.com
