Gandhiji On Economic Matters

Today’s post is a way of recalling Gandhiji’s thoughts on his Birth Anniversary-Gandhi Jayanti. The UN observes it as the International Day Of Non-Violence.

Taxation
All taxation to be healthy must return tenfold to the taxpayer in the form of necessary services.

Utility
The amount of public support that an institution can command affords a true measure of its utility.

Capital
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.

Japan
I am convinced that the capitalist, if he follows the Samurai of Japan, has nothing really to lose and everything to gain.

America
America is today able to hold the world in fee by selling all kinds of trinkets, or by selling her unrivalled skill, which she has a right to do

Labour
Every labourer is worthy of his hire. No country can produce thousands of unpaid whole-time workers. Labour was a great leveller of all distinctions.No labour is too mean for one who wants to earn an honest penny. There is a worldwide conflict between capital and labour, and the poor envy the rich.
I do not regard capital to be the enemy of labour. The employers ganging up against the workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants. The rich cannot accumulate wealth without the co-operation of the poor in society. Where there are millions upon millions of units of idle labour, it is no use thinking of the labour-saving devices.

Agriculture
To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves. Weeding is as necessary to agriculture as sowing.Agricultural colleges to be worthy of the name must be self-supporting.

Rural economy
Healthy and nourishing food was the only alpha and omega of rural economy. India’’s way is not Europe’’s; India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in seven hundred thousand villages. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye.

Poor – Poverty
Let there be no distinction between rich and poor, high and low. The spinning wheel and the spinning wheel alone will solve, if anything will solve, the problem of the deepening poverty of India. Unless all the discoveries that you make have the welfare of the poor as the end in view, all your workshops will be really no better than Satan’’s workshops.

Here are the links to some older posts on Gandhiji’s thoughts:

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