The following musing is an excerpt from a booklet under the same name, authored by Murarji Vaidya and published by the Forum for Free Enterprise in 1956. The author addresses the objectives of the Second Five Year Plan proposed by the Planning Commission of India – highlighting the restrictions on private enterprise to prevent concentration of economic power, arguing that extension of the public sector is bound to result in the same outcome. 

The obvious objective [of the Second Five Year Plan] is to eliminate the supposed existence of a concentration of economic power in the hands of a few and to prevent the growth of such power in the hands of a few in the future. But the extension of the public sector in an expansionist economy is bound to result in the concentration of economic power in the hands of those who form the Government and of those who administer public enterprises. Consequently economic power will be concentrated in the hands of those who have the political power in their hands. With the development of the country’s economy at a rapid rate, such concentration of economic power will also grow equally rapidly in the hands of politicians or of bureaucrats who will be working initially under the directions of the politicians who occupy the places of power under our present democratic set up. 

Human nature being what it is and the standards of integrity, patriotism and selfishness being at a common low level among all the sections of the community whether they are businessmen, industrialists, politicians or civil servants, what is the guarantee that the evils which are supposed to exist at present by the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few so-called capitalists will cease to exist when a larger and greater concentration of economic power in the hands of a few politicians and civil servants takes place under the new economic order?

It can hardly be denied that having taken several generations for the achievement of political freedom, we should value democracy, freedom and liberty of the individual citizens as of far greater basic value than the pace at which the economic development had taken place. Having granted this, can it be denied that it would be unwise to run the risks which I have indicated? Can it then be denied that it would be in the larger interests of the basic preservation of our freedom, of the strengthening development of our nascent democratic institutions and of the development of our economy that the new economic order which is intended to usher in an era of social and economic equality should be achieved through the surer and historical proven processes of comparatively slow moving democracy rather than through the rapid but highly dangerous methods which have been witnessed in totalitarian countries? 

The new economic order should not endanger our newly won freedom and towards that end it is the duty of all the citizens, no matter what station of life they find themselves in to see to it that our leaders and our planners follow the surer path of democracy and of gradual achievement of economic development rather than the dangerous paths of totalitarian methods to achieve a higher degree of economic development at a faster pace.