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It is sometimes said that there is nothing more powerful than a good idea whose time has come.
But who stands up for the powerless? The awful ideas whose time has well and truly passed? It takes courage and determination to stand up for what you believe in when everything you believe in is wrong. Who among us can honestly say that we would, faced with insurmountable odds, faced with a mountain of evidence to the contrary, still carry the standard of a failed idea?
One person who can is Indian economist Jayati Ghosh, who bravely wrote 300 words for the BBC website explaining why capitalism should be replaced with something else. Pointing to India’s seemingly losing battle against poverty and deprivation, then to the much-talked-about ideal of free markets, Professor Ghosh concludes that India has a functioning free market system—that causes poverty. To link these threads together into a meaningless indictment of something that doesn’t exist is nothing short of heroic.
After less than 200 words, only Professor Ghosh has the raw heroism to say what no-one else could after so patchy and vague a lead-up: “Obviously, finance must now be controlled and directed.“
To ask by whom and to what end is to quibble in the face of an idea so simple that it approaches beauty, so powerful that it approaches inevitability.
Whence came this visionary, this seer who will lead us to a new global future in which “finance” is at long last “controlled and directed”?
The answer is New Delhi’s possibly elite Jawaharlal Nehru University. But was Nehru a hero when, as India’s first Prime Minister, he implemented the sort of policies Professor Ghosh favours today? Of course not. Nehru could not have known for sure how the socialism he imposed would entrench poverty in his country. He could very well have attributed the complete failure of socialism to raise living standards or deliver services to some transitory “growing pain.“
Professor Ghosh has no such comfort in her struggle with the dark, sinister forces of reality. She knows her beloved ideology, socialism, does not work. And, assuming she has access to books, she knows why.
History will reserve many pages for the great Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who crushed the lives of millions of his countrymen through the force of the state. But surely Jayati Ghosh is something much greater: a true hero who dares to dream of a world in which her people are crushed by the beauty of her shitty ideas.
