How receptive is Nepalese society to economic freedom? A principled case vs a pragmatic
Every decade, someone argues that Nepal needs economic reform because it will produce growth, reduce poverty, lift incomes. These things are true. And every decade, the argument dies when a recession comes, or inequality rises, or a politician promises a better distribution of whatever GDP we managed to produce. We start over. The cycle repeats.
Kina? Because the whole thing aproaches it from pragmatic prospective and not pincipled prospective.
Kina? because of this one unexamined premise jun our society embraces as a bramhashatya: A social system must justify itself by what it delivers to the collective. Once you accept that, ofcourse another social system does that more on paper, or that the current one does it unequally then whole thing gets diverted implicitly and feri arko decade ma restart the cycle.
Instead, we need a principled case. Because the moral is the practical.
A principled argument, made and held, changes the ground on which every future political argument stands. Once we establish that each person's productive effort belongs to him by right, every new regulation, every new license, every new fee must defend itself against that standard. The burden of proof shifts. The political class must justify each act of coercive intervention, not assume its legitimacy by default.
Over 2.5 million of us left Nepal in three years. Remittanses now account for nearly 29% of GDP. Each person who left made a judgment: my effort produces a better return somewhere that does not consume it before I see it. That judgment is the principled case stated in action.
Here is an attempt to make a principled case.
- Man's mind is his basic means of survival. Everything each of us needs, every piece of food on the table, every roof over a head, every medicine that works, had to be discovered by someone's mind and produced by someone's effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival. A theory describes a possibility. This describes what is already happening every time any human being stays alive.
- Because this is true, the right to act on your own judgment and keep the product of your effort is not a policy preferrence. It is a condition of existence required by human nature. The Newar merchant who crossed the Himalayas to Lhasa with a caravan of 100 yaks did not need a philosophical argument. He needed two things: a counter party willing to trade, and the freedom to set terms. That right belonged to him because he was a thinking, producing human being. Not because a government granted it.
- Capitalism is the only social system built on the recognition of that right. Every person keeps what they earn. Every trade happens on terms both parties accept. No man or group may use force against another to take what he did't earn. The governent's only legitimate function is to protect this principle, not to manage commerce, not to license your labor, not to extract its share from every productive transaction before you see yours.
- The moral justification for this system does not lie in what it delivrs to "society." It lies in what it is: the only system consonant with man's rational nature, the only one whose ruling principle is justice. If capitalism also happens to produce more wealth than any alternative, that is a consequence of getting the principle right. The consequence is not the justification. The nature of man is the justification.