Indiran Ghandi's father, on power, privilege and kindness- Letters to his 10-year old daughter

[canoeist52]

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/16/letters-from-a-father-to-his-daughter/

"In India, we have still many rajas and maharajas and nawabs. You see them going about with fine clothes, in expensive motor cars and spending a lot of money on themselves. Where do they get all this money from? They get it in taxes from the people. The taxes are given so that the money may be used to help all the people in the country — by making schools and hospitals and libraries and museums and good roads and many other things for the good of the people. But our rajas and maharajas still think as the French king did of old L’etat c’est moi — “the state, it is I.” And they spend the money of the people on their own pleasures. While they live in luxury, their people, who work hard and give them the money, starve and their children have no schools to go to."

"In a letter on the origin of agriculture, which created a surplus of food beyond a tribe’s daily needs, Nehru ties this development to the invention of money and questions the warped dynamics of surplus:

"If you think about it, you will see that this money is all surplus, that is people do not want to spend it all at one time and so they keep it in banks. The rich people today are those who have plenty of this surplus, the poor have none at all. … It is not so much because one person works more than another, but nowadays a person who does not work at all gets the surplus, while the hard worker often gets no part of it! This seems a very silly arrangement. Many people think that it is because of this stupid arrangement that there are so many poor people of the world."