Article - 81 Week 45 Understanding Compulsive Business Dishonesty?

Article - 81  Week 45

Understanding Compulsive Business Dishonesty?

Its wonderful for an industry to do well. This creates jobs and helps other industries to thrive with cheaper and efficient support. We know that consumption, skill, technical know-how, people, infrastructure, raw materials, ecology, and cheaper connectivity to the consumer are clear givens. What we really underestimate is the role of our Big Daddy - the Government. It decides on its policy, taxes, skill development, education, health, infrastructure building, and freeing up consumption climate. Assuming, people explore ways around to combat the defects in infrastructure and skill developments etc, our Big daddy finds a way to tax the ingenuity and productivity of the entrepreneur - stealing a major chunk. Sometimes, Big daddy steals every thing that is produced in the industry. The industry becomes sick like a non-milch cow. Big Daddy wakes up and starts doling put subsidies to keep it alive, so that he could continue milking.  

There are times, when Big Daddy steals more than the industry could produce. In such a scenario, the business heads for sure death. The entrepreneur sees this. And with an instinctive survival mechanism hard-wired into him from evolution, finds a way to steal back part of the taxes from Big Daddy. The harder the Big Daddy tries to extricate its claimed pound of flesh, the more ingenious the entrepreneur becomes in devising his stealing back mechanism. This prolonged struggle results in systematic (at times open and blatant) supremacy of wits of the nimble-footed entrepreneur over the slow and large Big Daddy. The industry does survive with a culture of dishonesty and deceit. This trait gets embedded in to the psyche of the people, until such a time when the words 'business' and 'dishonesty' become almost inseparable. Businesses are considered dirty. Businessmen are assumed to be dishonest, treacherous, conniving, and ruthlessly unscrupulous. 

A stage comes, when Big Daddy realizes loss of revenue and finds a sickly industry living two lives of deception. It loses its power and potency to deal with the menace. The people working for the poor (some times almost insolvent) Big Daddy find it logical and beneficial to cozy up with the businessman. They join hands and connive the contrivance of tax escapades and duping an unsuspecting population. Stealing taxes becomes legitimate. Subsidies are doled out. And budget deficit snowballs into ugly inflation. The best possible example of this can be seen in our domestic shipping industry - an incurable culture of dishonesty and a helplessly miserable government. Can we come come out? Time will tell for sure. Until such time, we need to pray that the Big Daddy steals lesser than the sum total of productivities of our industry - both direct and indirect. And invests in better policies and institutions. 

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Capt Rath