Sukrit commenced his degree at the University of Melbourne in 2006, and received the prestigious J.A. Aird Award for achieving the highest score in the subject ‘Public Policy Making’ as he completes his undergraduate degrees in Arts and Law.
Sukrit’s academic interests include libertarian political theory and free-market economics. In his spare time, his pursuits include rock climbing, volunteering as a computer tutor and serving as a director of Liberty Australia. Sukrit will commence honours in political science this year and hopes to begin a PhD soon after graduating.
Early American history is full of clear thinkers who offered simple solutions to societal problems. Only since fashionable, but wrong, European ideas began to make their way into America did a pernicious myth begin – the myth that small-government types naively neglect the “complexities” of life. This is the sort of mentality that makes the average person trust people like Ben Bernanke or Hank Paulson; they think they have some special insight into how to centrally plan an economy because, after all, they must understand the complexities of stabilization policy. In reality, there is a simple solution to most of our problems: "Freedom".
The common sense of mankind has been confounded by the notion that we need tens of thousands of pages of legislation, and just as many bureaucrats running our life, because the modern world is supposedly just “too complex”. It is high time that this myth was debunked.
Climate change is unlikely to hurt humans as a species for the following reasons:
The sum total of water on the planet is fixed. Even if it doesn’t rain in one place, it is likely to rain in similar quantities in another place; hence humans can shift according to the way the rain shifts.
Man is adaptable and can live under a wide range of temperatures; accordingly, humans can move to more suitable places, if needed.
Each generation will invariably grow richer overtime. Hence we are the poorest generation of the future generations of mankind. This makes it particularly important not to worry too much about the future generations.
There is a ceiling on how much hotter the planet can become with the greenhouse effect. Even the IPCC doesn’t see this as going beyond 5°C. The immediate economic costs can, and should be postponed into the future so that future generations can play a part of these costs. Permalink
Medical doctor Wendell Rosevear, who works on the front-lines of the War on Drugs, explains the hypocrisy of state-sanctioned strip searches:
When individuals continue to use drugs in prisons, the system feels loss of power and face and with ‘mud on their face’ [and] wants to justify ‘coming down harder’ with strategies such as locking individuals in indefinite solitary confinement after overdoses or drug use and justifying forced internal body cavity searches, strip searches and observed urine tests which make individuals feel degraded and ‘raped’. To deny someone a choice in relation to protecting their body is rape even if you use the power of the state to justify it.The ‘Tough on Drugs’ strategy justifies rape, the very crime our society imprisons individuals for committing. To use the same strategies that cause the problem is to discredit oneself. Strip and Internal Body Cavity searches can happen to ordinary citizens coming through an airport as well as people in prison.
I never thought about invasive searches this way until I read Rosevear's article, but on reflection, it makes a lot of sense. Especially since the courts have always held that rape, in criminal law, does not require penetration of the penis but can also include insertion of any other object into the vagina or anus. In its futile quest to protect people from their own harmful vices, the government is encouraging its agents to do despicable things. Read more
An essay in Policy by Edwin van de Haar (Autumn 2009) does an admirable job of elucidating how libertarian principles apply to international relations. According to de Haar, libertarians are opposed to international organisations, treaties and foreign aid. They also advocate free trade as a means of increasing cooperation between nations and reducing the likelihood of conflict.
Leonard Read stated the libertarian position in a pamphlet published in 1951, “War is liberty’s greatest enemy, and the deadly foe of economic progress”.[1] This fact has been obscured in Australia because debate on issues of foreign policy is dominated by conservatives and social democrats, both of whom favour intervention overseas. The only difference between the two mainstream ideologies pertains to the particular instances on which they would intervene. Social democrats tend to be sympathetic towards so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’, while conservatives favour ‘police actions’ such as in Iraq. Read more
Milton Friedman, in his famous essay The Methodology of Positive Economics, says that we should not judge a theory by the realism of its assumptions, but by the accuracy of its predictions. So, assuming we accept Friedman’s argument, how should we judge the neo-cons who have been wrong about practically everything in relation to the Iraq war? Shouldn’t we instead listen to the likes of Ron Paul, a man who has been accurately predicting the disastrous consequences of American foreign policy since 1976?
The lifting of millions of Indians out of poverty after the country’s economic reforms in 1991 should have delivered a decisive blow to those who argue that capitalism exploits the poor. Thanks to deregulation, there has been a significant rise in India’s standard of living during the past 15 years. Unfortunately, the same arguments against the free-market persist. Yet the problem is government, not the market.
If governments faced the same discipline that private corporations face, the next election would result in all of India’s politicians being voted out. In spite of grandiose promises, hardly anyone doubts that India continues to remain near the top of the world in corruption and inefficiency. The sad reality is that India has fallen behind the East Asian nations. The subcontinent holds the dubious distinction of having the world’s largest number of poor people, despite the crores of rupees spent to “stimulate” development. Read more
Inspired by this article, I’ve decided to start up a monthly reading group for Melbournians. You don’t have to be a libertarian, you just have to keep an open mind. We will be focusing on the Austro-libertarian literature, and given the current economic climate may I suggest we begin with Tom Woods’ Meltdown.
I posted this on my earlier blog and got a few interested people. But I never followed it up. This time, however, I’m keen to get things rolling.
Libertarians should know better than to believe that anything funded by the government is "independent". There is copious amounts of evidence that the Reserve Bank of Australia is politically influenced. For example, during election times, the pressure is always to cut the cash rate. During the current financial crisis, the pressure has also been to cut the cash rate, even though the RBA Governor admitted it will lead to another housing bubble.
You have to have a certain degree of hardcore cynicism about the State to believe that even when something is labeled "independent", it is still open to political influence.Permalink
The rate at which the West is proceeding towards a full-blown war with Iran is shocking. Already, numerous sanctions have been placed upon the Iranians. There have also been reports that the CIA is conducting covert operations aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government.
Let’s not forget the parallels in the path to war with Iraq. The push to oust Saddam Hussein really began in 1998, under Bill Clinton, when the Iraq Liberation Act was passed calling for regime change. From then on, each step taken beat the drums of war until there was sufficient paranoia about Hussein to support a ground war.
I sincerely hope the Australian people resist the new warmongering against Iran.
How remarkable that there has been practically no debate on the civil liberties implications of the full-body scanners set to be introduced at Australian airports ("Airport security gets $200m boost", 10/2). These scanners will permit government employees to, essentially, produce pornographic images of men, women and children.
No doubt, there will be safeguards. But the machinations of bureaucracy guarantee that these safeguards will also be flouted on occasion.
If Australians permit this, we have given up far too much. Next, the government will parade us naked through airports in the name of security.
With so many Indian students being killed or assaulted, why is it that a very effective means of deterrence – pepper spray – is banned in this country? At present, any person walking alone late at night is a defenseless target for hoodlums. But legalising pepper spray, a non-lethal means of self-defence, would surely make thugs think twice before they attack someone.
