Indians are routing around their ineffectual local governments:
Fareed Zakaria agrees in Newsweek that India really feels like a boomtown right now… Tired of waiting for the government, some desis are running parallel local services…There’s little regulation by private tort… because the courts take 30 years to resolve cases. So you see exposed wires hanging from strip mall ceilings, parking lots using barbed wire at toddler level and outdoor barbers using straight razors. You still risk stomach upset or worse by eating food from unlicensed street vendors, which makes you want to just shake the local babus and say, ‘Come on, guys, this is just so basic. Nothing should come between me and my kachoris…’
I have new respect for government regulation of food, transportation safety and public health. If ‘there are no atheists in foxholes,’ I’d add that there are no pure libertarians in developing nations. If ‘no revolution on empty bellies,’ I’d say that libertarianism is uniquely a rich person’s vice 🙂
Because the legal system doesn’t work, it forces people to turn to the parallel legal system, gangsters. Any time you see a country with a parallel legal system, a parallel black economy, parallel power generation and parallel street sweeping, you know its government is dysfunctional.
i thought a legal system was going to be india’s leg up on china?
I totally recommend Hernando De Soto’s Mystery of Capital for a great discussion of how – even with the most Libertarian mindset – the problem for most developing nations is almost always not enough government rather than too much.
Aside from the most cartoonish libertarian ideas of the state, almost all serious poli scientists agree that a working judiciary is the silent backbone of a robust free market economy. Contract enforcement often ultimately relies on force and force is a “monopoly” of the government.
One classic question is the choice of a French statutory law model (legislative bodies passing laws) vs. the British tort law (judges building up a body of precedence.).
Alas, India has potentially the worst of all worlds here — a political infrastructure that prefers the direct mandate style of French Law with an economy replete with “hidden information” which tends to be best served by the strong preference for precedence embodied in British law.
The result — too many laws, pathetic enforcement, and vast vast swaths of the economy utterly untouched by the benefits of normalization created by legal infra… It’s just sad all the way around.
Off topic- Did you know that Sephia has been nominated for “Best Group IndiBlog” in the Indie Bloggie Awards (http://indibloggies.blogspot.com/)?