The Modi government of India has made it legal (sic) that any business in India cannot make profit! If they make profit then they go to jail. The recently implemented new tax regime GST (goods and service tax) has a new amended clause in it, clause 171, which debars producers from making profit; any profit that they will be making due to the passing of GST rate will have to be compulsorily, and supposedly, to be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Recently acting on the basis of this clause the Modi government increased taxation on cigarette manufacturers because they were making ‘windfall profits’! Not only GST, Modi has created an atmosphere in India where being rich is a crime and being poor is a grace of God!
This whole mentality of the government that any business cannot make profit and no one can become rich beyond the limits set by the Modi government is the big danger for this country. Such mentality and policy environment only means that the Indian economy will be killed sooner or later; it has already started to falter. The crux of the market capitalist system is the ‘profit making motive’ of the individual. What drives our lives and economies, as Milton Friedman said, is greed. Without profit no private business can survive in the market. As discussed by Jean Baechler in The Origins of Capitalism the single minded pursuance of profit instinct to its limits by the individuals was responsible for the emergence of the capitalist system and its end result the industrial revolution in the Western world, which ultimately made the West both materially and culturally far superior than the rest of the world. By banning this very profit motive Modi is making sure that Indians will never become rich.
Ironically, the greediest people on display today in India are politicians like Modi himself who doesn’t want anyone to make profit except himself; he wants all money in his own pocket so that he can spend it freely to win votes and elections all over India to ultimately declare India a Hindu nation (sic)!
