Limited Government Nepal

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (Frédéric Bastiat, The Law)

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property." (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged)

Liberty 's founding principles are grounded in the idea of private property. It is property, after all, that enables individuals and organizations to exercise their other rights and enjoy the freedom that property affords.

We hold that property rights are entitled to the same respect and protection as other individual rights, because the owner of property has the full moral right to control, use, dispose of, or in any manner enjoy her/his property without interference, until and unless the exercise of her/his control infringes upon the rights of others.

Property designates those things commonly recognized as the entities in respect of which a person or group has exclusive rights. Important types of property include real property (land), personal property (other physical possessions), and intellectual property (rights over artistic creations, inventions, etc.). A right of ownership is associated with property that establishes the good as being "one's own thing" in relation to other individuals or groups, assuring the owner the right to dispense with the property in a manner he or she sees fit, whether to use or not use, exclude others from using, or to transfer ownership.
Public property is any property that is controlled by a state or by a whole community. Private property is any property that is not public property. Private property may be under the control of a single individual or by a group of individuals collectively.

We all heard the scenario. The world is poised for ecological disaster because man is polluting the atmosphere and heating up the earth. Global climate change became the pet cause of environmentalists only in the late 1980s. Before then, some believed that the earth was cooling, not warming. The Climate Change- meaning an alteration of the planetary temperature by human activity.

The climate of the Earth has always be en in a state of change, ranging from long periods when the planet was nearly covered by ice to warm periods with no ice caps whatsoever. Climate is highly variable, climate can change rapidly and we should not expect the climate of our day to persist over long periods of time. Researches also tell us that climate change has occurred many times on a grand scale during the history of the Earth without any interference from human activities.

Despite the rich understanding of the climate history over the past five billion years of the Earth's existence, we have recently witnessed the emergence of global climate change as one of the pre-eminent environmental issue of the day.

Uncertainties regarding the future of the Earth's climate will remain for many decades to come. Given these uncertainties, many scientists and policy makers believe that we should cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and avoid conducting an unknown and largely irreversible experiment on the global atmosphere.

The argument that we have only one atmosphere and should therefore avoid making substantial changes to its composition that may significantly alter the 'normal' climate system is certainly a compelling one.

Environmentalists are naturally drawn into the seductiveness of a potential global disaster brought about by the build-up of greenhouse gases emanating largely-at present- from the world's most developed nations. However, they also realize that policies aimed at substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions are expensive and that have only limited funds for environmental issues, and relatively simple cost/benefit analyzes reveal that spending money on the global warming issue produces few, if any, benefits. Money targeted at global warming issue produces is not available for other environmental issues (often local issues) where real returns on investment are far more certain.

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development released a report entitled Our Common future, in which it stated

'Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.'

Most discussions of sustainable development have failed to give due attention to 'meeting the needs of the present' and many such discussions have focused not on promoting development but on restrictions it- typically in the name of the protecting the environment. Policies have focused on identifying specific outcomes, such as controlling the climate or saving periwinkles, and then setting about developing policies intended to achieve those outcomes. Usually these policies require stronger systems of global governance.

Good intentions are laudable but if good intentions were enough to alleviate poverty, malnutrition and disease, these dreadful problems would no longer plague us. Indeed, the fact that more than 10 million people each year die of preventable or curable diseases and that 800 million people survive on less than $1 per day are testament to the failure of good intentions- and the many billions of dollars are spent in their pursuit.

For over fifty years, governments in rich countries have been taking money from their tax payers and transferring it to governments in the poor countries. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on such 'aid', yet a balanced assessment indicates, that, although there many have been a few benefits, on average this 'aid' has caused harm.

The reason transfers of financial resources from the governments of rich countries to the governments of poor countries have been largely unsuccessful in stimulating economic development is that lack of resources is not the primary problem in the countries.

The more fundamental problem is that 'aid' is based on a largely false premise, namely that poverty itself is a barrier to development. In most cases this is not true. If countries are to develop sustainably, then institutional reforms, not aid, is the solution.

But what do we mean by 'institutional' reform? Institutions are the framework within which people act and interact – they are the rules, customs, norms and laws that bind us to one another and act as boundaries to our behavior. Institutions reduce number of decisions that we need to take; they remove the responsibility to calculate the effect of each of our actions on the rest of the humanity and replace it with a responsibility to abide by simple rules. In a system in which rules emerge spontaneously and are changed by evolutionary processes, good rules will tend to crowd out bad rules. That is to say, over time, rules that result in better outcomes will survive and rules that result in worse outcomes will become extinct.

It is the institution of private property that, more than any other, has enabled people to escape from the mire poverty. Property rights are capital; they give people incentives to invest in their land and they give people an asset against which to borrow, so that they might become entrepreneurs. Property also begets wealth. Use of property as a collateral against loan is a classic example.

Property rights and contracts are nothing if they are not enforceable. And enforcement is only possible if there are courts wherein disputes over the rights and duties of parties may be resolved and a legal system that will enforce those judgments.

Nepal is claimed to having the second largest potential in the world to generate hydro-energy. Yet, two-third population lives without energy supplied to their home for cooking, cleaning, and above all there is no water to drinking. The water resources are done by governments. Water is both a vital and instrumental good. It is vital because all life requires water. It is instrumental because humans use water in a variety of products and processes, at different times, in different places and with different quality and requirements.
Government rarely manages water supplies well and often bears the responsibility for shortages and inferior quality. The drinking water supply in major urban areas is one of the examples, so is the continuous load-shedding over consumers imposed by the Nepal Electricity Authority.
Experiences have shown that markets produce good outcomes for users. The task for the public authorities is not to create or preserve an inefficient state monopoly, but to identify where competition is possible and to institute incentive regulation where it is not.

It is often claimed that water is a 'common good'. However, the claim that water is a 'common good' is often a ruse for justifying all manner of inappropriate policies for its use and management. These include- but are not limited to –government subsidies both to companies and users (for which taxpayers ultimately foot the bill); allocation by politicians and government agencies; and collective ownership. Ownership of water is truly a complex issue relating to the presence or absence of institutional arrangements in any society at a given time.

Referring to water as a "common good" is also used to justify opposition to any form of valuation by commercial or individual means, through prices (but more importantly, through markets which generate prices). Markets are connected with real choices made by real people, which lead to real consequences. These attributes enable markets to value resources in a superior manner compared to alternative arrangements. That is, markets provide the only way to value resources, including water resources, in a manner which does not provoke conflicts among competing users.