So I learn about an even called the Bengal Famine of 1943 today and figure to read up more up on it. I hit up its wikipedia page, and it doesn't make sense.
The civil administration did not intervene to control the price of rice, and so the price of rice exceeded the means of ordinary people. People migrated to the cities to find food and employment; finding neither, they starved.
I think to myself who wrote this nonsense? John Maynard Keynes? So they argue famine happened because the government didn't fix the problem of scarcity by introducing price controls??
But not to fear a short Google search later I learn it was actually the government which caused the prices to rise sky high in the first place, by buying up all the food to the point people could not compete with their meager resources anymore and could not buy any for themselves: Food deliveries from other parts of the country to Bengal were refused by the government in order to make food artificially scarce. This was an especially cruel policy introduced in 1942 under the title "Rice Denial Scheme." The purpose of it was, as mentioned earlier, to deny an efficient food supply to the Japanese after a possible invasion. Simultaneously, the government authorized free merchants to purchase rice at any price and to sell it to the government for delivery into governmental food storage. So, on one hand government was buying every grain of rice that was around and on the other hand, it was blocking grain from coming into Bengal from other regions of the country.
http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalholocaust.htm
The lesson: sometimes Wiki sucks.
Another lesson: interventionism always sucks.
PS, isn't it interesting how we often hear about the Stalin-made famine and the Mao-made famine, but what about this Churchill-made famine? 3 million people died in it.
Wikipedia's content is decided through arbitration, so it's tyranny by majority. But, one would be hardpressed to find a more efficient method of operation.
I consider the Wikipedia an extremely useful tool. Besides being a great source of information, it also teaches the important lessons "nothing is perfect" and "there ain't no such thing as unbiased information". The climate change was/is one of the biggest frauds around, and much of the battle was conducted on the Internet. So there.
Get your facts (and opinions) straight, write them up, be nice, hope for the best. Anyway, there's more websites around than Wikipedia.
Mises Wiki | Economic Resources and Books (search engine)
The very idea of one source to rule them all is stupid. Wikipedia is the idiot's source.
I'd say it is pretty casual. Statist ideals are fully integrated in the cognitive discourse of your average person and they're not even aware of it. Hegel's infected everybody's minds.
Wikipedia is useful as a bibliography, and as a general encyclopedia. Nobody would suggest using a printed encyclopedia as your only source, either. But, Wikipedia is superior to your standard printed encyclopedia precisely because of the number of sources which are generally used for articles (and, a person should be able to distinguish between quality articles worth reading and poor articles that need improvement).
"Wikipedia has a vangaurd, dissention is not allowed."
I agree.
Wikipedia is garbage, any body can get on and "edit". And there is going to be someone who has the artical on their watch list, so if you fix it, you'll just end up in an edit war. That will end with an arbitrarily decision by an admin.
"Wikipedia is garbage, any body can get on and "edit". And there is going to be someone who has the artical on their watch list, so if you fix it, you'll just end up in an edit war. That will end with an arbitrarily decision by an admin."
As said, get your facts straight, write them up, be nice, hope for the best. It is still possible to put in dissenting views, one needs persistence and on occasion luck. The world's largest encyclopedia is not all garbage.
So for a while I wanted to look further into this and now I finally have.
Damn! A rather brutal account.
One quibble:
- "before the British conquest India was a rich land"
stands somewhat against
- "a colony where malnutrition was chronic" and
- "in the years just before the war India had been a net importer of food"
...could it be that India had its share of poverty and famines before the British arrived? Wouldn't excuse them one bit, but it needs to be said.
Accounts of Bengal before the British arrive describe it as a land of plenty. Famine was probably not totally unknown since there existed a state sponsored system of famine relief, which wouldn't make sense for there to be without an ocasional crisis. However there was nothing on the scale of horrendous Victorian famines. In fact the first famine in Bengal after the subjugation took people by surprise as they wondered how there could be starvation in a place renowned for its riches. But by mid 19th century starvation in India no longer aroused any shock. India actually continued to grow a surplus of food through most of the colonial era, however, so much of that food was being exported that despite that there was chronic malnutrition. That is to say not just the surplus, even some non-surplus food was being sold on the world market, because at the time it was the only way to meet the "Home Charge", seeing that there was little manufacturing the British having obstructed its rise (prohibition on import of machinery early on, and high tariffs later on). However shortly before the war, a decade or two at most, India no longer grew a surplus of food and was now an importer of it, albeit it never actually imported enough to meet its total need for food, because it needed to spend the money earned by exports on paying off the British instead. Hell, let me upload the scans I had for notes that are about some of this specifically: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/04e5a http://www.freeimagehosting.net/1d86e http://postimage.org/image/xh7m8r49j/ http://i43.tinypic.com/54bzut.jpg