The Swiss know about money, we need to learn.

One topic that is guaranteed to arouse extreme passion is whether poor people should be provided with monetary help. Leftist liberals firmly believe in distributing welfare to the poor and political parties win elections by promising handouts. A lady was extremely impressed with welfare schemes in Tamil Nadu where Amma canteens are spotlessly clean and serving ladies are polite. However, she has confused social service with outright handouts. Waiver of loans to farmers has been tried many times before, always with bad results. Banks are left with huge holes in their balance sheets, it usually helps the rich because poor farmers borrow from moneylenders and banks refuse future loans to farmers who are marked as defaulters. Giving free electricity will only add to the Rs 800 billion debt of the state power distributing company. Most state electricity companies are bankrupt because of handouts by state governments so the central government has instituted a restructuring plan, called Uday, which will allow these companies to become free of debt. Amma canteens, Amma salt or Amma bottled water, on the other hand, are available to everyone, regardless of income, as the lady found out, and although cheap are not completely free. They are a service to the entire society and hence objections to them are muted. A couple of days back 77% of people in Switzerland voted against a proposal to provide a basic income of 2,500 Swiss Francs, about $2560, to every adult, whether they work or not, and 625 Swiss Francs to every child below the age of 18 years, in a referendum. Those in favor said that it would guarantee a dignified life for everyone, especially since robots and artificial intelligence will reduce the number of jobs for humans. Those against said that it would cost too much, will encourage people not to work and will result in a flood of economic migrants. Finland is experimenting with a similar scheme, paying 550 Euros to 10,000 adults, to see if it works. Strangely, Milton Friedman, the guru of free- market economics, supported such an idea as being better than a lot of social schemes. Since being elected Mr Modi has converted all handouts to Direct Benefit Transfer, in which subsidies are paid directly into bank accounts of recipients. Banks were encouraged to open zero balance accounts for the poor and benefits are transferred directly into those accounts. The government has saved Rs 36.5 billion by cutting out waste and theft. As one leftist acknowledges, such schemes are only possible in capitalist countries that create wealth and not in socialist India which has the largest population of modern-day slaves. The largest handouts naturally go to politicians, as a Member of Parliament wrote. Now that Switzerland is clamping down on black money maybe we will learn from the Swiss.