Charlie Munger said, “Safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want. Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end” in a commencement address to the USC Law School in 2007. A copy of full transcript is here. The “Cliff notes” of that speech was posted by some kind soul and I am reproducing them with gratitude (but without permission.)

Mr L K Advani, the leader of the opposition in the lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha), addressed the 80th Annual General Meeting of the Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in New Delhi on 15 February 2008.
Here are some excerpts:
I can, in all humility, claim that ours is one party that has consistently followed a policy of supporting private enterprise and voicing our opposition to the license-quota-control regime even in those years when there was hardly any debate on economic reforms. Indeed, the …

Of Economic Freedom and Bondage
This is the concluding part of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the CII. (Previous part on Social Contracts here.) The PM in his speech had quoted from Tagore’s Gitanjali. I suppose the irony of quoting Tagore in the context of the government’s sustained effort to divide the country along caste and religious lines is lost on him. Severe cognitive dissonance perhaps. I have critically examined the PM’s speech for what it was, an attempt to browbeat the Indian industrialists into further crippling …

Social Contracts
I have a strong aversion to sanctimonious hypocritical idiotic talk (just to spell it out) but it happens, as they say. Perhaps it doesn’t just happen, it is demanded. A sort of reverse Says’ law, “demand creating supply.” If not actually demanding it, sufficient people are not disgusted by it that the supply is maintained. Lack of aversion, or at least a publicly stated aversion to the peddling of it.
With that, here is part four of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the Confederation of …

Fair and Just Profit
Why has profit become such a profane word in India? I believe that it is due to a failure to fully comprehend the nature of what humans do when they engage in economically productive activities and what results from that action. If you believe that the world is static in the sense that there is only a limited amount of stuff to go around irrespective of what one does, then naturally you would believe that it is a zero-sum game, a game in which Ramesh gains only …

Governance
Yesterday I posted the first part of the fake speech that I wish the real PM of India had delivered. The message in the first bit was simply that there are things that the government is supposed to do and there are things that individuals and the private sector is supposed to do. There is a natural division of labor arising from comparative advantages of the competing parties. The government has a comparative advantage in governance, not in producing stuff. The government must stick to governance. Here’s why.

Division of Labor
The “fake”qualifies the “speech” and not the PM, I hasten to add lest there be any misunderstanding. You must have come across the much celebrated speech that appointed Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh gave the other day at a CII conference. I read it with rising disappointment and dismay. Smeared with high-sounding socialistic rhetoric, the message was clear: take care of the mess or else dire consequences will follow. Never mind that the mess was not the creation of the Indian industries, that it is not their responsibility, …

Charlie Munger delivered the 2007 Law School Commencement address at the University of Southern California on May 13th. Munger is a guru in the original sense of the Sanskrit word, a person who conveys wisdom. He begins the talk with “Safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” The transcript of the talk is worth reading very very slowly. Take this line near the end, “The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”
There are too many lines that …

All the successful techniques for manipulating matter originated mainly in the West but the greater achievement of manipulating the mind – I am justifiably proud to claim – originated in India. In my opinion, the mind has precedence over matter. For the moment I will sidestep the other matter that it is a mistake to make a distinction between mind and matter – there isn’t in my opinion. But for the moment, I will treat them as being different as most people do.