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Economic reforms

As a solution to inflating prices, people must have their liberty to transact and save any currency of the world. The people and businesses will choose their currency; acquire those that are steady in value (like the Swiss franc) and reject those that are falling, like the Dollar or the Taka.Economic reforms should mean greater monetary and financial freedom at the individual level. Money should not remain the monopoly of the government nor the Taka the only official medium of exchange. The Taka should be denationalised and flowing in competition with other issuers of money as Austrian economists have been stressing ever since USA nationalised its Dollar in 1913.

Nizam Ahmad and Sheikh ASHRAI UDDIN ANARUL
” A I.L the government needs to do is to get X A. out of the way," Dr. Ron Paul, US libertarian presidential candidate.
The government is failing on two counts. The first is their failure to bring in economic reforms. The second is their overemphasis on corruption and the tough means they have adopted to eliminate it.
In any democracy, widespread corruption would undeniably mean that economic rules are horribly wrong and not people friendly. Overregulation and complex rules rob individual freedom and induce people to dodge rules as a way of survival with the help of those who implement such rules. To change national economic behaviour and to cut corruption levels, a pro-reform government should first repeal bad laws, and slash and simplify taxes.
Without substantial deregulation and liberalisation of the economy, corruption cannot wither away simply on moral grounds or through the fear of imprisonment. It will only take different routes.
Surely, in the past, the heavy hand of the government, its authoritative role in development, its command and control of economic ventures from production of electricity to FDI in mining, and its downbeat attitude towards private enterprise, had impoverished Bangladesh and made corruption a part of our lives.
Bangladesh's breed of economists, engaged in the business of collecting data, is least liberal in ideas and fails to provide viable solutions, other than their weak textbook expositions, to stimu-
late the economy. Unpardonably, they see the government as a deity holding the power to fulfil national wants and bring down prices too.
No one, not even the Bangladesh Bank, categorically blames inflation -- the increase in the stock of money -- as the principal cause of mad price hikes. The last few years of high remittances of around $4 billion annually, and the pumping in of equivalent amount of Taka, have space-rocketed market prices of rice, and maybe of share prices also. Commodity shortages, or clogged supplies, do increase prices, but so does increased stock of circulating money.
To stabilise prices, Bangladesh must rethink its standard practice of printing Taka against incoming Dollar, Yuan, or Yen.
As a solution to inflating prices, people must have their liberty to transact and save any currency of the world. The people and businesses will choose their currency; acquire those that are steady in value (like the Swiss franc) and reject those that are falling, like the Dollar or the Taka.
Economic reforms should mean greater monetary and financial freedom at the individual level. Money should not remain the monopoly of the government nor the Taka the only official medium of
exchange. The Taka should be denationalised and flowing in competition with other issuers of money as Austrian economists have been stressing ever since USA nationalised its Dollar in 1913.
Our economists blame the international price hike, as they did in the 1970s when consumer prices also rose sharply, but these are excuses and do not conceal the failure of a government to reform the economy, as it did not in the 1970s when oppressive government policies devastated the economy.
Economic reforms should mean the decriminalisation of our energetic informal economy, which would stop the migration of people to cities in search of bare livelihood. Economic reforms would mean that laws will penalise only those who hoard or trade in stolen and fraudulent products and fake currencies, but nothing more.
What is a black market or an informal economy? Is it where the anti-state elements engage in profitable economic activities that a government does not authorise, or is it rudimentary economic actions that fulfil the demands of the people, which a government fails to provide or procure?
Reforms would mean free trade and an open economy on a unilateral basis, not multilateralism as envisioned by
WTO and member governments. Reform is about establishing a free export and import regime, not corridor and transit arrangements. Only increased economic activities between people of all nations (not governments) will eliminate threats to national security and enable peaceful coexistence.
Reforms would mean that private Investors are the major importers and stockists of fertilisers and producers of electricity, not the resurrected BADC, TCB, or the highly inefficient PDB The SOEs need not be privatised or scrapped, but freed to operate in competition with the private sector. Reforms would mean that security forces do not seize goods, search warehouses, and shops on suspected black market or anti-hoarding laws unless on grounds of theft, forgery, or security matters. Would security forces raid the Bangladesh Bank for holding huge Dollar reserves when the economy could benefit with a lower stock in their vault?
Reforms would also unquestionably mean the commercialisation and modernisation of agriculture, and the abandonment of subsidised subsistence farming of today. Only reforms as these would purge corruption, sustain democracy, and boost Bangladesh's economy. Nizam Ahmad and Sheikh Ashrafuddn Anarul are freelance contnbutors to The Daiy Star.