Dreaming of Enlightened Governance!

ENTER, THE ENLIGHTENED NETA: Sunanda Mehta writes about R.V. Krishnan, who researched on “possible solutions” on how the country needs to be “set on the right track” and compiled them into a book - ‘Manifesto in Search of a Party’.

First, he waited "naively" for two years - "hoping something would happen of his book, someone would sit up and decide to do something about the solutions he had proposed for the country."

When nothing happened- he called 15 of his friends (on September 7, 2007) and had a "heated discussion" on the idea of a political party.

Thus, the Professionals Party of India was born in Pune. Their vision:

"Improve the Quality of Life of every Indian"

Last fortnight, PPI got an official acknowledgement from the Election Commission of India for its registration it as a political party.

Their Social Manifesto says:

Clean up and beautify the environment.Improve living conditions. Create a social environment where people live a happy, prosperous and peaceful life. Strife of any type shall become insignificant. Indians will be proud to be INDIAN.

How do they plan to win elections?

Their proposition:

India has an electorate of 671 million. A little over half of them voted in the last general elections. India is believed to have a “middle class” of about 250 million. But the percentage of those who actually vote or are able to vote, is abysmal. Roughly half of India was born after 1983.
...
You will find that if professional Indians stood and got elected to the Indian Parliament, they will bring new, enlightened governance to quickly improve our quality of life and win back our rightful place in the 21st century world, and the middle class has the requisite numbers to make this happen.
....
And even if that percentage of the middle class votes which is the national average, PPI can win elections.

Ready to vote?

Towards a Free Nation

In 1993, Richard O. Hammer asked:

"Imagine you are on a ship and there are no lifeboats. A hole breaks in the hull. Water gushes in. Many people bail. They yell to you, 'bail, bail!' But you can not tell if bailing will save the ship. You look around and see materials which might be made into crude lifeboats. Do you bail, or build?"

He goes on:

There have been several attempts to start small, libertarian countries. All have failed. A book, How to Start your own Country, by Erwin S. Strauss, tells about these attempts. It seems to me that none of these attempts had a significant chance. Not enough groundwork had been done before the flags were hoisted. The approach of the Free Nation Foundation differs. It proposes, for the time, to do nothing but groundwork. It would not suggest trying to obtain real estate till the force of a nation — people, assets, treaties — were in place. This is a "Front Door" approach. We would seek what we want openly, through negotiations in good faith, from a position of practical and financial strength.

For seven years Mr. Hammer worked full time to manage and lead Free Nation Foundation (FNF). It failed to sustain itself financially and Mr. Hammer withdrew "from full-time work in FNF to seek more remunerative work".

A daugther organization, The Libertarian Nation Foundation, was formed in 2001, which aims to:

To advance the day when coercive institutions of government can be replaced by voluntary institutions of civil mutual consent, by developing clear and believable descriptions of those voluntary institutions, and by building a community of people who share confidence in these descriptions.

An index of links to a large number of online articles is here (for example, Spontaneous Order). At the top, this page quotes:

The market in the broadest sense of the term is the process that encompasses all voluntary and spontaneous actions of men. It is the realm of human initiative and freedom and the soil upon which all human achievements thrive.
~Ludwig von Mises

A Free Nation, anyone?