Playing by the rule
Rebelling by the rule
Austria’s longstanding debate on rules vs freedom is an interesting one; and it is more so when one thinks of it in the context of Nazism that rose and demised on its border. Friedrich Hayek, who shared his 1974 Nobel Prize with Gunnar Myrdal, is known for his argument that a free society requires the rule of law. Another libertarian Ludwig Von Mises famously pointed out that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the State or its laws. Indeed, the debate on rule of law affects economists as much as the politicians, bureaucrats, thinkers, writers, activists, and all of us.
And Nepal is not untouched. Let’s revisit the armed tensions in Terai, or under our own Kathmanduite’s noses, let’s revisit the very Thapathali clash between the two youth factions and the Prasain scandal. And why stop there while we are at it? The internal party dilemma overpowering the Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and the Socialist parties about whether or not to go for the constituent assembly convey only one thing: The people might be desperate for a constitution and a set of new laws, but why risk their own comfortable political capitals when they can go on ruling the country under ad-hoc-ism and add to it any tag that seems to fit – revolutionary, democratic, progressive, consensual, you name it.
I do not mean to say laws are the panacea for all our problems. No law will be abided by all at all times. Nor will all laws be fair and relevant unless they constantly evolve and re-evolve taking into consideration the new demands of time. Gandhi-the-lawyer’s questioning of the British apartheid law in South Africa started with a simple acknowledgement, ‘As there are unjust men, there are unjust laws.’ Laws are not divyavanis. We saw what happened to our dear old King Gyanendra when he tried to army-force his versions of laws on media, telephoning, and governance. In plain words, spooning one’s ideas of law into others’ throats is the recipe for disaster.
The overall legal predicament permeates as much into business entrepreneurship as to party-building and national reconstruction. On one hand, it is an open secret in Nepal that the only way to save your valuable business recipes is to keep it tightly within your own little family simply because there are no intellectual property laws to protect patents and copyrights; nor are there credible certification laws that would sieve out originals from the copycats. Lawlessness has long been an implicit reason why Nepal cannot find a middle ground between monopolies tightly guided by secretism and inundation coming out of copycatting. This is only part of the story; what’s worse is that there isn’t a fair system for knowledge transfer. This means, we are barring the valuable knowledge from people who might have done something useful with them for the entire society..
And, yes, here we are not even talking about the lawlessness in broader business enabling environment and the claims that entrepreneurship is lagging behind in Nepal because the labour laws are doubly rigid than that of Bangladesh, or because entrepreneurs are forced to spend 424 days in figuring out the license laws before they can even start their businesses, or simply because of the rampant corruption and the skewed incentive structures.
