[sherr]

This article in The Economist recently would tend to agree : "Why all Indians are rule-breakers [1]

"IF YOU HAVE ever relaxed with a cold Kingfisher beer at the end of a long, sweaty day in Mumbai, the party capital of India, you have almost certainly broken the law. Specifically, you violated section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, under which you must hold a permit to drink booze. A first offence is punishable by a fine of 10,000 rupees ($115) and up to six months in prison. Welcome to India, where everything is against the law."

[1] https://archive.is/ONfHw

[crop_rotation]

One golden piece of wisdom from the above article

> The state of Uttarakhand, to pick one, requires couples in live-in relationships to register (and pay a fee) within 30 days of shacking up. Failure to comply attracts a fine and up to three months in prison. What of love lost? The unhappy couple must de-register (and pay another fee).

[geodel]

I mean this is indeed most important thing as opposed to minor issues like wholesale ecological destruction of mountains and rivers in Uttarakhand.

[southernplaces7]

The exact lunacies and irrationality that this Economist article describes are something that the Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto described in enormous detail in his book "The Other Path" (El Otro Sendero) roughly three decades ago when describing the at the time deeply dysfunctional aspects of regulatory administration in his native country, and in other Latin American states. He later wrote an abbreviated summary of the same findings in a book called "The Mystery of Capital".

Either way, (writing this purely from memory, so any mistakes entirely my own) his basic thesis was that states with massive informal markets and underdevelopment often far from having few laws, suffer from a grotesque surfeit of regulations, so many, so arbitrary, haphazard and irrational, that enforcing them all, or complying with them all, becomes completely impossible, and thus they're both enforced selectively, and adhered to selectively, based on convenience for either side of the equation. The result is widespread informality, a chronic inability to create formal capitalization that can be used in sophisticated ways for long-term economic development, and endemic tax evasion (not because almost everyone is a disgusting parasitic tax evader but because not evading while still trying to be entrepreneurial is nearly impossible).

EDIT: I can't speak for India, but in the country that I currently live in, Mexico, though things have improved in many ways for regulations around the basic process of starting a business or handling its financial paperwork, they're still totally inadequate for a vast portion of the working-age population, which includes dozens of millions of self-employed people who sustain themselves and a huge part of the economy entirely through informal service and product businesses that it would be extremely difficult for them to ever formalize. At the same time, without these businesses, run by these millions of people, the country's economy and social development would both collapse catastrophically.

Very worth reading, the books above, as warnings for any country and as solid analyses of how some countries lurch from economic disaster to economic disaster and never really develop effectively in a thorough way.

[FallCheeta7373]

Laws like these come in handy when you have politically prosecute people.