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I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

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Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video talk about Russian military handing out Million dollar contracts to companies registered weeks before the tender. Well, guess what, the exact same thing happened in UK for PPE contracts: "Within weeks of the company’s incorporation on 12 May 2020, PPE Medpro was awarded contracts worth £203m to supply millions of masks and gowns." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/07/michelle-mo...

It's actually kind of disturbing how there are basically only a handful of countries on the planet without systematic corruption. Maybe there are none. Perhaps it's a human trait.

It is not a human trait. It is a property of money. Interest is a bribe to keep money in circulation. There is an incentive to pass this bribe onto someone else. Why is it a property of money? Because money has a liquidity premium versus any other asset and no holding costs. It is rational to ask to be compensated for giving up this liquidity for the face value of money. Money is a payment network that introduces costs for businesses that accept it. Businesses must be close to consumers and open whenever consumers want to spend their money. They must also have a variety of uniform products and if it has to store them it will have to pay for storage costs. Think about it like being an on call employee. You must be ready to respond at any moment and this flexibility is worth a certain amount of money.

Now, you could call the national money system to be a public service provided by the government (and indirectly by private businesses).

If you were to issue your own money what would it's liquidity premium be? It would be very low to be sure because barely anyone accepts it.

So, the holders of money effectively own a free subscription to this public service. If they lend out money, they will obviously charge a fee in proportion to the liquidity premium. This fee is included in the interest rate.

The borrower is now paying for the liquidity premium, the cost has been fully internalized and the problem is gone right?

The problem is that the liquidity premium that is part of the interest rate is erroneously calculated as the cost of capital. It is not, it is the cost of liquidity.

Now, things will get very strange. When the borrower spends his money, he will be obligated to pay the subscription fee, the cost of liquidity, even though he no longer has the money and he is no longer benefiting from the liquidity services. What this means is that the money system constantly screws over people who use money as a medium of exchange and rewards those who sabotage it. It will look as if those who "save" money will be rewarded for their frugality and "moral" behaviour and those who are in debt are being rightly punished for their unsustainable and and "sinful" behaviour.

Now imagine if private households all follow this strategy of selling more than they buy and saving and lending the rest. There must be another sector that earns less than they spend and accumulates debt though borrowing. The government is forced to avoid austerity at all costs. It must become the "immoral sinner" that spends in excess to shield the private sector.

If you want to solve the problem you would have to make buying and lending symmetric. Lending passes the cost of liquidity onto someone else which is in theory ok but only if buying also passes the cost of liquidity onto the seller so that no liquidity premium accrues to the lender. He will pay a liquidity premium and earn liquidity premium which then zeroes. The only one who then collects the liquidity premium is the central bank that issues the money.

The problem with this is that the interest rate on cash would be negative and paper technology isn't advanced enough to calculate and display a dynamically changing face value. It isn't some conspiracy by a cabal, it is actually an engineering problem that originates from our historical and cultural attachment to cash. Humans aren't evil bribe collecting monsters, they are just in a rationality trap that is difficult to escape.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#452
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author doesn't get his permit stamped and obviously currently has no influence. He'll probably give up, and now the jobs he would have created and imports that would have become local production won't happen. It's not an obvious good vs bad situation here, a corrupt system that allows bribes is gross, but pretending you can just act like you are in a western country with rule of law is ignoring reality.

You got it upside down. Exactly because too many people think like that, this whole corrupt system works. Imagine the whole country refusing to pay bribes. They would disappear tomorrow. This whole "but this single action won't change anything " attitude may feel rational, and even be (selfishly) rational, but the effect comes through the aggregate. Lots of people in society behaving like that, and you get emergent p…

If everyone who has a problem with the corrupt system opts out, the system will chug along fine. Most people don't care, obviously. The people who make a moral stand will just be poorer and less able to thrive. You are basically suggesting something a lot like being Amish, they refuse to participate and as result they are a cute little subculture that is slowly disappearing.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visited a Cisco office in India, I noticed there was a prominent notice of business application and listed the Indian owner of the company. I thought that was interesting and went digging into India law about ownership. When I came out of that rabbit hole I immediately had zero interest in starting up in India. Simply because of the bureaucracy and would be way more wink-wink-$$$-nudge-nudge than what I'm even…

Well, I expected this article to be about bribes, because I assume it happens a lot. However, there were no bribes. Does anyone have actual experience with bribes in India (not traffic police)? Edit: sorry, one person openly asked for a bribe, the Panchayat. I would like to understand more about this. Do they just ask for an amount?

I had a traffic parking violation recently. When I showed up at my car, I found that there was a traffic police's wheel lock on my car's front right wheel, which I assumed is because I parked in a no-parking area (a no parking sign was about 20 meters away from where I was parked). My car was one among many cars parked in that lane and mine was the only one they fined (I guess because they had only one wheel lock to deploy).

The phone number of the constable who deployed the lock was written on the lock itself. So I called it. The constable and a sub-inspector promptly showed up within 15 minutes. They spoke very politely when I asked why I was the only one being fined. They were even apologetic as they were promptly issuing me a ticket for Rs.500. I had looked up the fine before they arrived and Rs.500 was correct. I paid the fine, they removed the lock and I drove away. They were deploying that lock on another vehicle on the same lane. No bribe whatsoever. Overall, I was surprised/delighted/dazed by the whole experience.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually kind of disturbing how there are basically only a handful of countries on the planet without systematic corruption. Maybe there are none. Perhaps it's a human trait. More disturbing (to me) is how easy it is to eliminate corruption in any given area - without any brutality or anything else extraordinary. Just setup the process correctly, incentivize workforce - and the same people who were building ro…

>2. The clerk will be fired if he asked - not just for any unnecessary documents, but just for asking any legally unnecessary question. >3. The clerk will be also fired if he accepts a registration that does not confirm to federal guidelines. Fired by whom? Who is in charge of checking this? How do you ensure that the clerk isn't just accepting false businesses and giving a percentage to whoever's above? On its face…

> How do you ensure that the clerk isn't just accepting false businesses and giving a percentage to whoever's above?

What do you mean by a “false business”? Here in the US the state of Nevada have not asked me anything except Articles of Incorporation (the state of California later found my file and… also has not asked me anything except $800 a year - which exactly what I was hoping to avoid by filing in Nevada, lol). Number of federally required papers was 0 (zero).

Federal regulations in Russia required much more paperwork. But the libertarian city council in Troitsk just deliberately didn’t care to add anything to the pile. Bad documents - it was actually a problem for the business being registered. If federal regulators caught a discrepancy- the business will be in a huge trouble. So checking the documents- it was nothing more than a service provided by a city council to the company being registered. If the documents were inconsistent - the business will complain.

This setup really worked, as I said in the original post. It’s not a theoretical suggestion.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#455
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got it upside down. Exactly because too many people think like that, this whole corrupt system works. Imagine the whole country refusing to pay bribes. They would disappear tomorrow. This whole "but this single action won't change anything " attitude may feel rational, and even be (selfishly) rational, but the effect comes through the aggregate. Lots of people in society behaving like that, and you get emergent p…

If everyone who has a problem with the corrupt system opts out, the system will chug along fine. Most people don't care, obviously. The people who make a moral stand will just be poorer and less able to thrive. You are basically suggesting something a lot like being Amish, they refuse to participate and as result they are a cute little subculture that is slowly disappearing.

Ah right. And women still can't vote and Jim Crow laws are still in full swing. Because if somebody would take a stand it would be meaningless, right?

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#456
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone who has a problem with the corrupt system opts out, the system will chug along fine. Most people don't care, obviously. The people who make a moral stand will just be poorer and less able to thrive. You are basically suggesting something a lot like being Amish, they refuse to participate and as result they are a cute little subculture that is slowly disappearing.

Ah right. And women still can't vote and Jim Crow laws are still in full swing. Because if somebody would take a stand it would be meaningless, right?

What is a strawman? Do you know?

So you're saying during Jim Crow people should have refused to build factories? I don't follow your point, laws which attack black people are very different from bureaucracies that require bribery to give you permits for your business. I mean both are bad, but they are very different, and Jim Crow is a thousand times worse, both because of it's basic nature and because it was the law of the land and enforced with the full power of the government (vs corruption, which is people sneaking around in violation of the law).

This is what you are doing: "So you think it's ok to just pay it when the police to give you a speeding ticket when you weren't speeding!? That means you are fine with the holocaust!"

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