Hacker News Reader

Comment by padmanabhan01 | Hacker News Reader

It is not a Government's job to make tablets.

If they can only fix their corruption, bureaucracy and the totally broken governmental system, thousands of entrepreneurs can emerge and create millions of gadgets...

View on HN

In a country where the GDP per capita is around $1300? You can play up the "market will solve all ills" all you like, but if everyone is too busy scrambling to get enough calories to get by then they probably don't have enough to buy the latest iPad.

Subsidized government programs exist because this is where the market fails and governments have a larger and more important mission than just maximizing profits and putting on fancy keynotes for drooling fans.

//In a country where the GDP per capita is around $1300? You can play up the "market will solve all ills" all you like..........governments have a larger and more important mission than ....

GDP per capita is around $1300 precisely because the governmnet always felt it had a LARGER and MORE important mission than (simply doing their job with no corruption). And these larger and more important missions almost always end up channeling tax payer's money into politicians via some crazy project like this

You're mixing up two different issues, corruption and socialist tendencies.

While corruption in socialism is bad, corruption in capitalism is just as bad. Even the most developed capitalist countries have failed to remove corruption. (hence the 2008 subprime crisis)

To India's credit, its socialist tendencies kept the country unaffected from 2008 subprime crisis.

> To India's credit, its socialist tendencies kept the country unaffected from 2008 subprime crisis.

No boom, no bust....

> While corruption in socialism is bad, corruption in capitalism is just as bad. Even the most developed capitalist countries have failed to remove corruption. (hence the 2008 subprime crisis)

The 2008 "subprime crisis" wasn't capitalist corruption, it was govt corruption. The US govt decided to subsidize home ownership via various means, which created a property bubble. Bubbles eventually pop, and the govt then decided to "socialize" the losses and try to restore the bubble.

The Irish govt went one step further - it decided to guarantee all bank losses.

That's not capitalism.

That looks a lot like an instance of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

Or as I like to call these posts YALK, yet another libertarian kiddie.

At first glance, you're right. The problem is, though, that the word "capitalism" has different meanings for different people, and has also undergone a general shifting of the meaning of the word. This is not unlike the word "liberal" (as in politically liberal), which has changed in a similar fashion.

This snippet from the Wikipedia entry for capitalism synthesizes it pretty well: "Classical liberals such as Mises, Rand, and Rothbard define capitalism as a market system with no interference by States (laissez faire). Some define capitalism as a system governed by capital accumulation regardless of the legal ownership titles."

anamax is referring to what could be referred to "classical capitalism," while you, ramchip, seem to be referring to "state capitalism".

"No boom, no bust..."

I meant to say India was unaffected from 'global recession'. Obviously there was no housing bubble in India.

"...it was govt corruption."

You mean in a crony-capitalism govt alone is guilty? How?

No GDP per capita is around $1300 cause there are over 1.2 billion people. There are just too many people living on the land. It's grossly unsustainable.

Things are bad enough for the vast majority. If left to the "market" 3/4 of the population would be starving.

By the way, there is no such thing as government without corruption. There is always corruption. Always.

As a learning device, it's amazingly well priced. See it as a replacement for 1,000 textbooks and it suddenly makes beautiful sense and all for the cost of a single textbook.

If India now creates a national or city wide free wifi network, their economy would skyrocket in the next two decades.

The government isn't making tablets in the same way they make watches (HMT Watches) or artificial limbs ( Artificial Limbs Mfg. Corpn. Of India). The government floated a tender and a private company developed the tablet. There is a huge difference between the two.

Also, if this device proves to be the best way to deliver essential public services (e.g. education, tele-medicine, etc.), it most certainly is the job of the government to make tablets. If this is a platform on which people can innovate and build apps on top of, it is not a stretch to compare this to US federal funding of basic science.

I would want my government to provide me with access to the best possible education, irrespective of my socio-economic status.

May be those who come out of such an education system will know better than working within a corrupt, bureaucratic and broken system.

Here we go again with false dichotomies. Having such cheap tablets will disseminate more information which will help people in multiple ways. Just 5 in 100 having access to the internet is appalling and needs to be fixed, government or not.

I agree, it's not the governments job.

But I've always wondered, what came first, the corrupt government, or citizens who don't pay tax?

I see the same thing in Greece. The government is corrupt, but the people don't pay taxes.

Does the government become corrupt because there isn't enough money to pay civil servants, or does do people refuse to pay taxes because they will be misused by a corrupt government?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com