Author Archives: Madhusudan Raj

The Wisdom of Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac – Part II

We saw the brilliant insight of Condillac in my last article. In the second part of his book Condillac discusses the evil effects of many different kinds of government restrictions on the free trade. He brilliantly uses the economic principles developed in the first part to prove his points. His arguments are so lucid and […]

The Wisdom of Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac

In this article I am going to review French philosopher Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac’s monumental work, Commerce and Government considered in their Mutual Relationship. Condillac originally published this book in 1776, just few months before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Today the book is published by the Liberty fund and is available in both […]

The Maternity Benefit Boondoggle

In March 2017, the Modi government amended the Maternity Benefit Act to increase paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks for all women employees in establishments employing ten or more people. At that time we wrote that the end result of this scheme will be more unemployment for women employees. Instead of getting any […]

RBI vs. Government

The RBI vs. Government battle is intensifying. The Narendra Modi government intends to keep pressing demands for the country’s central bank to relax lending curbs and hand over surplus reserves, amounting to whopping 3.6 lakh crore, even if it risks provoking a resignation by the bank’s governor. After the debacle of demonetization and GST, the […]

Is “Excessive Competition” a Problem?

The Finance Minister of India Mr. Arun Jaitley at the National Conference on Public Procurement & Competition Law recently said that, We wanted multiple players because they would ensure the largest consumer interest. But there can be several other impacts. Excessive competition, at times, can result in pricing of a nature that that sector of […]