Are We All Indians Now?

Nope - sorry - this isn't going to be a rant blasting The Lone Ranger.  I've heard lotsa bad things about it, and maybe I'll get to have some fun with it later, but right now I just  don't care much about some dumb movie.

This is about what's happened to the economic boom in India.  You remember - the one that Lil Tommy Friedman told us was the very model of this new fabulous economic system in which everybody becomes a plucky entrepreneur and go on to reap the riches of Croesus as we all thrill in "the race for the top" blah blah fucking blah.

From William Dalrymple at New Statesman, about a new book dealing with what's gone wrong:

...The economic boom, which began in 1991 and took off in the late 1990s, provoked a miniboom of New India books, some far better than others. First off the blocks was Gurcharan Das, a former CEO of Procter & Gamble, whose India Unbound in 2001 became an international bestseller and made a convincing case that the future was India’s: all that was needed was further deregulation and a stripping away of the economic coils – the “licence Raj” – that were tethering the Indian elephant to the ground and the country’s future as an economic superpower was assured.

You caught that, right?  Deregulation.  Git da gubmint out da way.

But of course, The Mustache of Understanding wasn't at all alone in his thinking.  And btw: these guys are never alone in their thinking - the herd is everything for these guys - as long as they're all wrong together, they never have to admit they have their heads all the way up their wealthy benefactors' asses.

Anyway, the thing goes on at length about how everybody was totes agog over the prospects of China and India overtaking the US as the world's economic superpower by mid 21st century.

But guess what?

Their thesis is simple: India’s failure to equal the success of China’s hyper-development is due in large part to the failure of the state to provide “essential public services – a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth”:

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians seven or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate . . . India’s health-care system is an unregulated mess. The poor have to rely on low-quality – and sometimes exploitative – private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care. While China devotes 2.7 per cent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 per cent.

So here's one take-away:  We were perfectly content to do fuckloads of business with China, even though we needed to be reminded to "hate" the Chinese government because of all the free stuff they kept giving their citizens under their dirty commie regime.  (they definitely have some pretty bad shit coming their way because of some of the fucked up government building projects, but that's a slightly different angle)

Meanwhile, the Indians were far more to our liking because they were doing it according to the Uncle Miltie Friedman formula - plus of course, if they could find jobs in Mumbai, maybe they wouldn't all be over here owning all of our 7-11 stores.

When Government is shut out completely;  when the people who are supposed to be doing the governing in a system of self-governance aren't allowed to do any actual governing, then we're volunteering for nothing less than to wear the chains of an old-style aristocracy from the 18th century that the flag-wavers and chest-thumpers keep telling us we're supposed to be so proud of having thrown off.

What the fuck, Murica!?!