!["Male/31-35.]("http://www.blogchalking.com/media/chalk16.gif" "\"Male/31-35.")
This is my blogchalk:
United States, California, San Jose, English, Hindi, Male, 31-35, Watching movies, Reading, Writing.
Niti in Sanskrit means policy/strategy/vision. This blog hosts my political views, along with news and commentary. This blog has moved here.
My Page at Amazon
Blogroll Me!
The United States unveiled plans Friday to help India become a "major world power in the 21st century" even as it announced moves to beef up the military of Pakistan.
Under the plans, Washington offered to step up a strategic dialogue with India to boost missile defense and other security initiatives as well as high-tech cooperation and expanded economic and energy cooperation.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the Bush administration's outline for a "decisively broader strategic relationship" between the world's oldest and largest democracies, a senior US official said.
"Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement."
Even after its accession to the Indian Dominion, J&K's internal administration was governed, not by a diktat of New Delhi, but by the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution Act, 1939. It was under this Act that Maharaja Hari Singh appointed his former adversary, Sheikh Abdullah, as the emergency administrator for the state. The appointment was a victory for the people who simply loved Abdullah. He began giving them a large share in the administration of the state's affairs.
...
On May 1, 1951, Yuvraj Karan Singh issued a proclamation declaring the convening of a State Constituent Assembly, consisting of representatives of the people on the basis of adult franchise, for framing a Constitution for the state of Jammu and Kashmir. For the purpose of elections to the proposed Constituent Assembly, the state was to be divided into territorial constituencies each with a population of 40,000 or thereabouts.
Elections to the Constituent Assembly were completed by August that year with the idolised Abdullah's National Conference Party simply sweeping the polls. Addressing its first meeting held on October 31 that year, Sheikh Abdullah declared that the assembly's objectives and functions included, inter alia, a reasoned conclusion regarding accession and the future of the state. He enumerated three alternatives: accession to India, accession to Pakistan and complete independence.
The 'Drafting Committee' of the above assembly presented its report on February 12, 1954. Its report, adopted on February 15, 1954, embodied the ratification of the state's accession to India, with 64 of the assembly's strength of 75 voting unanimously while 11 members were absent.
The State Constituent Assembly enacted, on November 17, 1956, a Constitution that is, today, the Constitution of Jammu & Kashmir. It has 158 Sections. Section 3 therein says, 'The State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.' Section 147 in it prohibits any bill to amend Section 3 from being introduced or moved in either House of the State Legislature.
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call "his own", and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.
In contrast, from the Christian vision of the human person there necessarily follows a correct picture of society. According to … the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good.
As for Fed money creation, remember that the demand for money shifts back and forth all the time. Simple money creation is decidely not inflationary if the economy is growing such that it needs lots of
money.
That's what happened in the late '90s: the capital gains cut in '97 put the economy into high gear and while monetary aggregates suggested the Fed was loose, gold, treasuries and the dollar's value vs. foreign currencies suggested the Fed was way too tight.
Conversely, the Fed extinguishing dollars is not per se deflationary if the economy is growing so slowly that extinguishment by the Fed should be even greater.
That's why we can inflate in a slowing economy (see Irrational Exuberance Is Not Inflationary), and we can deflate even if money creation seems high. I'm for a gold exchange or gold standard for that reason - let the gold price be the indicator for how much or how little money the Fed should be creating.
Consider Gillette. It’s top-of-the-line M3Power
Razor sells for $13.99 in the U.S. In England, the same product sells for $17.78. The 27 percent markup is without a doubt a positive for Gillette and its shareholders, but for those who calculate trade imbalances, the $3.79 gained overseas would add to the U.S. trade deficit.
..
remember that exports are counted in terms of their value when they
leave our shores. The $13.99 is the value exported, the $17.79 is what returns to us; thus whether we buy Rolls Royces from England or whether we convert Pounds to dollars and buy Nissan cars, positive trades will always increase the value of imports we bring in in
exchange for our exports.
When a white racist government was oppressing Zimbabwe, the international community united to demand change. These days, a black racist government is harming the people of Zimbabwe more than ever, and the international community is letting Mr. Mugabe get away with it. Our hypocrisy is costing hundreds of Zimbabwean lives every day.
The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.
"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."
Instead, I am prepared to make the following bet: ten years from now, it will be objectively clear that the United States provided significantly better health care to its citizens between 1990 and 2005 than did other developed countries. From the vantage point of 2015, the policy blunder of the past fifteen years will not be that the United States spent too much on health care, but that other countries spent too little. The socialized systems, forced to ration health care because tax revenues are not sufficient to pay for state-of-the-art care, are constraining their citizens from being diagnosed and treated as well as Americans.He explains the reasons why health care is expensive in US:
Physicians are paid more than twice as much in the United States as in other developed countries. Because physician services are about one fourth of all health care spending, we could eliminate one eighth of our health care spending by reducing doctor salaries to the levels of other countries.On measures of health care quality:
The other big factor is utilization of high-tech procedures, such as MRI's, CT scans, and open-heart surgery. If Americans would cut back on the utilization of these procedures, that would reduce health care spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.
The question is whether our medical care would deteriorate if we were to pay our doctors much less while at the same time reducing our utilization of expensive capital resources. It seems reasonable to conjecture that the quality of diagnosis and treatment ultimately would suffer.
Longevity calculations are not a sensitive measure of improvement in medical care. In my essay on lifespan, I showed how the longevity number is calculated as a peculiar weighted average of the survival rates for different population cohorts. I produced a simplified example in which the longevity number came out to be 68.9 years. In that example, suppose that 10 percent of the people who otherwise would die at age 60 instead receive treatment that allows them to live at least to age 80, when they die at the rate of other 80 year-olds. In that case, the overall longevity number would increase by less than 1.5 years, to 70.3 years. In international comparisons, such an increase easily could be swamped by other demographic and genetic factors.
Moreover, even if we controlled for other factors, the increase in longevity due to medical treatment will take many years to work its way into the actual longevity calculations. For example, my wife was treated for breast cancer a few years ago. If she had not been treated, she might still be alive today, but she would almost certainly have died by age 55. As of today, therefore, her successful treatment counts for no increase in longevity as it is conventionally calculated. In twenty or thirty years, however, the difference will be quite noticeable (certainly to me).
In another ten or fifteen years, it may be possible to document a significant increase in life extension for people over the age of 55 in the United States compared to what is now occurring in other countries. However, as the example of my wife illustrates, superior medical care will not necessarily show up in the backward-looking statistics that are calculated currently.
In 1984, after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, thousands of Sikhs were killed in Delhi and elsewhere. But the same USA accorded her son Rajiv Gandhi a red carpet welcome six months after he took over as prime minister.
Pakistan has been sending terrorists from across the border and is responsible for forcing Kashmir Pandits to flee their homes, but the same United States accords a warm welcome to Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf.
But Narendra Modi is denied a visa on grounds of religious intolerance.
“We respect the sovereign right to grant or refuse visa to any person. We do not believe that it is appropriate to use allegations or anything less than due legal process to make a subjective judgement to question a Constitutional authority in India,” Singh told the Rajya Sabha.
1. Michael Moore portrays the country as a kite-flying paradise
2. Jimmy Carter sanctioned their last election
3. The UN certifies that there is no genocide
4. They sign friendship pacts with other dictatorships (also here and here and here too)
5. They are a member of the UN Human Rights commission (not 100% foolproof but getting closer every year)
6. They were once a French colony, and/or France is opposing sanctions against it (also here too)
7. Their people are impoverished and they lag the world in economic growth
Mr. Rabushka's book "The Flat Tax" has just been published in Chinese, with a preface by Lou Jiwei, the vice minister of finance. If China were to climb on board the flat-tax train, more than a quarter of the world's population would be filling out their taxes on the back of a postcard.
Despite all of its advantages, the flat tax faces enormous ideological opposition. Envy and the lust for the political control that complicated tax regimes can provide are powerful motivations to keep progressive tax systems in place. Karl Marx in "The Communist Manifesto" was among the first to call for "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax" at a time when a flat rate was the norm in advanced countries. He listed it as second in the list of priorities for a new society based on the class struggle.
It is therefore ironic that every country that has adopted the flat tax is a former communist nation--except Hong Kong, the modern originator of the concept, which has seen its new communist rulers retain the flat tax as a centerpiece of its economic policies.
The people of India choose to adopt socialist pattern of economic development.
Mr. Ram Karan do you think people, whose properties were appropriated
by Indira Gandhi's Govt. in the name of Nationalism, choose to have
socialism? If they indeed "choose" to have socialism why was force
necessary to take their property.
Oh, I see. You mean to say MOST of the people chose to adopt
socialistic pattern of economic "development". Indeed, according to
same logic a village can "choose" to make a widow sati. You see, in
socialism people have freedom to choose for others. What a craze!
Economists are labelling the current monetary arrangements as Bretton Woods 2. Under this system, the U.S. is running massive current account deficits to be the source of export-led growth for other countries. To fund this deficit, central banks, particularly those on the Pacific Rim, are buying up dollars and dollar-denominated assets.Why do most of the countries accumlate dollars? If all they wanted to subsidize export-led growth they could have purchased any other currency, say Euro. I think a major reason is because their biggest import is oil from the Middle Eastern countries. To buy oid they need dollars. Why?
