MA Rangoonwala’s valuable treatise

Rangoonwala produced a truly remarkable and highly readable little booklet in 1958, titled 'Free Economy or Disaster'.

When Oswald Spengler’s classic dissertation “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” (“The Decline of the West”) was published in Germany in 1918, it caused a major stir in the West. Had the German historian predicted the collapse of Western civilisation? Did this prophecy mark the end of the capitalist system? The Great October Revolution had taken place in Russia in 1917 and a new economic order had been installed based on the philosophy of Karl Marx. However, the spirit of laissez-faire in advanced countries survived and eventually, Spengler’s theory, while it was still regarded as an important historical document, was no longer taken seriously by either the economists or the politicians.

In our own little place in the sun, we haven’t produced any historians like Arnold Toynbee who recognised life cycles of civilisations or even historians of the calibre of HAL. Fisher who confessed that he couldn’t detect any discernible pattern in the unfolding of events which followed one another like the waves in the ocean. But we did have some bright economists and businessmen who had a pretty shrewd grasp of how things worked in our country and could, on the evidence that was provided, make some sensible predictions. One such person was MA Rangoonwala, who produced a truly remarkable and highly readable little booklet in 1958 entitled Free Economy or Disaster. This treatise identified a number of policies which were practiced in both underdeveloped as well as developed countries, often with less than satisfactory results. Though the dissertation was produced 55 years ago, many of the conclusions that were arrived at are still very pertinent and relevant in the contemporary world of cut-throat competition. I wish his son Tariq would reprint this valuable document and distribute it to the relevant ministries in Islamabad.



In the short space of 18 pages, Mr Rangoonwala covered a wide spectrum of issues and made some hard-hitting observations which focused on many of the issues involved in ostensibly enriching the lives of the people. However, the fly in the ointment is that decisions by the government in states that practice laissez-faire are not always taken in the interest of the masses but are carried out for other reasons. That is why governments are inclined to get involved in distorted and irrational relationships which they find necessary to maintain for strictly political reasons. That is also why the rate of progress in the so-called free world is found to be much less than that of centrally planned economies. The archives are simply littered with examples of wastage of resources through misallocation, inefficiency, and idleness of capacity. And so, there is no alleviation of poverty despite the rise of prosperity. The working population labours under constant fear of unemployment resulting out of economic crises. To make things worse, there is a problem that just won’t go away — bureaucratic interference with its excess of procedures which have to be followed, formalities which have to be completed and permissions which have to be obtained before an order can be fulfilled or a shipment can be made by which time a foreign competitor is laughing all the way to the bank. The author also pointed out that in under-developed countries like ours, where some measure of concern has been shown in favour of some kind of economic progress, almost every policy is justified in terms of its effect on development and the success of the plans. But there is hardly any yardstick by which the precise effect of any particular policy on efforts of development can be measured. This certainly gives one food for thought.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2013.

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