6/22/09

Labor Reform in India: Understanding the Ideal + Cause and Effect

In Every country, the more stringent you make the Labor Laws at the governmental level, the more you begin to punish the Labor market, and ultimately the laborers. The world is a capitalist's playground, so why would they ever want to invest in a country that only makes business very hard for them? Employers are quite keen to skipping over India, and creating jobs for places like China, and Hong Kong etc. It's important to understand the Ideal of Labor reform to know the proper direction India should take if it ever wants to become a more viable market force.

The Free Market, meaning a true laissez-faire policy driven country, will always have close to 100% employment, where all attainable resources will be put to use. In this sense people are now seen as assets to the market and not liabilities to the government. But what does this truly advocate? Complete Freedom in the Labor Market means that impoverished kids can choose to opt out for a factory job versus going to school, and that the employers can hire and fire willy nilly. I would argue that this is ideal, especially so for a poor country, because people will often choose for the better investment in their future. I'm not saying that child labor will not exist, but I firmly believe that even poor people would send their kids to a private school, rather than contributing to the perpetuating cycle of poverty.

Remember this is the ideal, and we should do little to deviate from it. I strongly believe that when we delineate from the realities of the free market, we will distort society. Mandating that all kids attend public school is definitely well-intentioned, but acts more as an imposing fantasy than an honest reality, and in the end does very little to actually help society grow.

To every country; if it ever wants to overcome poverty, it must abandon the idea that government has to work harder to make it come true. The honest truth is that every society is made up of people that generally make their on selfish choices in order to better themselves. The more we try to restrict these free will of the people, however many bad choices they may make, they more we stray away from and honest society, and hence the birth of corruption.
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6/11/09

Bus Rapid Transit Systems

I love the idea of  Bus Rapid Transit systems, because it is the best place to START for public transportation in practically all cities. I think that to jump right into a Metro system, is not going to be practical for everyone and way to costly for everyone's budget. 

 No matter how many roads you build, you will never satisfy city traffic, in fact I would postulate that city traffic would just grow, and just be a mess of fly-overs. NO city should have to look like Los Angeles, that would be a tragedy.  

What the BRT system allows for is a traffic-less bus networking system that is very easy to implement throughout the entire city. Lanes on streets would be strictly dedicated to the buses, and roads would be maintained by the private transit company. So, all around the city we'd see... well a lot of buses. Buses and Bus Lanes, sounds boring, I know. But what would be different about these buses compared to the buses of today, is that the would be MUCH faster, bc traffic is eliminated, and it would be more convenient because the network would cater to the entire city. 

I would imagine that the bus would eventually get more and more crowded, and bus would get longer, like a TRAIN... maybe double decker... maybe the buses will take on a metro like face to optimize speed... genius idea...
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