I was called by a quasi-journalist today, who had read my piece on the stimulus package online and wanted me to ‘explain my stand again in 3 sentences or less.’ This was my reply.
“If you are one of those beautiful, child-like, innocent, naive humans full of love & giggles, pink unicorns & multi-coloured bubbles, afternoon naps & long baths, and you think that within the financial stimulus package offered by our most esteemed FM on the direction and vision of our most loving & visionary PM, any business which actually manages to lay its hands on any real money that did not already belong to them (and hence was not already allocated by that business in their plans and budgeted out to some project) is going to invest it into either development of new products, capacity building, asset purchase, expansion, distribution, marketing, or taking moonshots for new lines of business, thereby creating huge amount of wealth, leading to increased liquidity, which will then be transferred downstream to their vendors, suppliers, employees, and communities in which they operate, and there onwards further down to the labourers, restaurateurs, cab drivers, waiters, travel agents, airlines, railways, hawkers, hotels, authors, music producers, film makers, tailors, farmers, amongst others, and as tax to the local, state, and central governments, as well as partly be invested in stock, gold, and land, and the balance be deposited in banks to make its slow but steady way back to the RBI, and thereon, once again to the government, who will use it to spend on infrastructure, MNREGA, social welfare, and other important expenditure like defence, education, health, etc., pay close attention because this may be a chance of a lifetime for you amazingly credulous people: I got a slightly used riverside mid-17th-century pristine white marble mausoleum built on the plains of northern India by a loving but fratricidal billionaire with a penchant for tall pointy erections and large smooth domes for his second wife (of at least six) who died giving birth to her 14th child in 19 years of what we must assume to be a fairly happy marriage for sale, real cheap, if you are interested.
The point is that without demand, without customers, or at least potential customers, no business worth their salt will even consider investing into their operations or expansion, and most money, or at least that part that is not already owed to the business and already “spoken for” in some way in some internal budget, that any government will make available to them, whether as equity, grant, relief, or collateral-free-no-questions-asked loan (which means “free money” in lay terms) will go into increasing personal and shareholder wealth for reasons that do not require a PhD in economics to predict, and that is, and I hate to repeat this, but here goes: If I have NO REVENUE waiting for me and no one ready to buy what I produce (not because they don’t want to but either they don’t have the money for it or they don’t have the need for it because their buyers don’t have the money to buy whatever they are selling), I WILL NOT invest in my business but in creating as large and as soft a cushion for myself and my family as possible, because I need to be literally dead not to see that I will need as large a cushion and as long a runway as I possibly can arrange for if I need to remain not-dead for the foreseeable future.
That means that if you really need to throw money at this problem, the direction you need to throw the money at is the consumers, the actual people who buy shit and blow up paycheques (viz., those that have a paycheque), like the salaried, the working class, the central government employees, the labourers, the soldiers, the farmers (OK, they don’t have paycheques, but you get the point) etc and only a tiny bit to the businesses (since technically, they are consumers too), who can then be incentivised and wooed by these very businesses (which apparently you so love and want to save) run by enterprising, hardworking, and dynamic people who will find the money, technology, machinery, personnel, material, capacity, distribution, and anything else they need to attract the customer to their shop because that is what entrepreneurs fucking do, if you let them some leeway and allow them to get on with their fucking job, while you stimulate the right parts of the economy that puts more money in the right pockets, while parallely dismantling the huge obstacles we have created ourselves by writing complicated laws, generating Byzantine red tape, insisting on convoluted compliances, run by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, following confusing rules, and overburdened by a Daedalian officialdom resulting in a Gordian knot buried deep inside the Aegean stables filled with centuries of shit where the layers start from the British Raj and go all the way up to today’s “sarkar”, and ensuring that the government’s role is that of non-interference in people’s and businesses’ daily lives while protecting them from the vagaries of climate, external enemies, everyday dangers, fraud, personal loss & injury, and injustice & exploitation, whilst at the same time creating equal opportunity in education, employment, and the pursuit of happiness, with no regard to faith, age, birth, race, skin colour, gender, diet, or fashion, as they go about living and prospering, and minding their own fucking business without hurting, harming, or threatening to hurt or harm anyone else or their property.
Did you get all that?”
So, question: What do you think are my chances of being quoted by her as a source?
Supplementary question: कौन हैं यह लोग? कहाँ से आते हैं?
