Poverty Of Spirit

Bloggers, and op-ed writers, have validly argued that Katrina (and before then, the Mumbai cloudburst) are clear evidence that public bureaucracies are not particularly competent in handling complex human catastrophes. Instead, what's needed is strong leadership that can cut through the weeds of red tape.

That bureaucracies are inept is hardly news; that American bureaucracy too is incompetent is also not news to those of us who've obtained visas, driver's licenses, and postage stamps here. The surprise was the grand, public stage where the emperor was stripped of his clothes.

Few have pointed out an even more profound reality that washed up with the storm surge.

75 odd years after America's Keynesian New Deal, and 25 odd after Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty Great Society programs, America still has poverty -- poverty so extreme that people don't even have resources to escape known catastrophes on the way.

Thus, it can be safely argued, the American welfare state has come tumbling down. There are lessons here for India, where too many, naively yet aggressively, give voice to the claims of the welfare state.

Reality is, welfare states create dependency, not wealth. They sustain poverty, not eliminate it. In effect, they pay people to remain poor.

One could argue, that while wealth is created from risk taking and hard work, there are times when societal confidence is at ebb and government spending can bridge the years needed for such confidence to be restored. OK. But, this spike in government spending must be just that -- a bridge to a future where wealth creation will once again happen without artificial economic subsidies and constraints. Too frequently, alas, such bridges become permanent ends in themselves -- in effect, self-serving bridges to nowhere.

When the Great Society debate was raging in the 60s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (an early neo-conservative and later Ambassador to India) pointed out the difference between a poverty of means and a poverty of spirit.

People can find themselves in poverty for reasons beyond their control, but as long as their spirit is not broken, they get up each morning and go out there to work harder than they did yesterday. They may be poor, but their poverty is resolvable.

Then, there are people with a poverty of spirit. They are dependent on the state for survival, and when the state fails (as it frequently does), they are left marooned. Such poverty is not resolvable.

The key is to make sure that we don't end up with poverty of the spirit. In India, many millions are poor, but they work just as hard as all of us slightly more privileged. They are heroes who build India's wealth every day with their sweat -- it must be India's objective to resolve their structural poverty.

Instead, what India has been doing since independence, alas, is creating a dependency society -- with poverty of the spirit -- where all manner of reservations and subsidies and artificial jobs guarantees ensure a perpetuation of poverty for many.

Indian economy has, thus, become a badly distorted shadow of what it could have been -- like an image in an amusement looking glass.

Lets please learn from Katrina. Lets please not create a generation of wards of our incompetent state. Lets please attack and destroy our poverty of spirit and the political ideas that give it life.