On the road to Liberty

There is a fine difference between a resource and waste. A waste becomes a resource when someone is willing to pay the owner to acquire it; it remains a waste if the owner has to pay someone to dispose of it. I look at the debate over ship-breaking in this article, " Breaking the set notion ", published in the Hindustan Times, on 13 January 2006. More than 150 years ago, the French economist and legislator Frederic Bastiat had written “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” The present debate over the decommissioned French aircraft carrier, Clemenceau, being sent to Alang in Gujarat for dismantling and recycling highlights the relevance of Bastiat’s idea of “what is seen and what is not seen”. Clemenceau is a 265-m long ship, weighing about 26,000 tons. Recycling it could open ...

The "Project Tiger" was launched thirty years back. But, there are only a few thousand tigers in the wild, and half of them are in India. The policy of prohibition of trade has hurt tiger conservation in India. The situation is similar in China. The officials of China are are considering harnessing a limited form of commerce for the cause of tiger conservation. At the same time, in India, the tiger crisis has expanded India’s bureaucracy.It is necessary to have a successful wildlife economy to build awareness of the value of environmental resources.This will result in the thriving of legal trade. My article titled China and India Move in Radically Different Directions was published in Perc in Fall 2006. NEW DELHI, INDIA—More than thirty years after the launch of "Project Tiger," the most high-profile conservation program in the world, barely 5,000 to 6,000 tigers are left in the wild, over half of them estimated to be in India. Since the 1970s, India has enacted to...