i think that this and other articles confuse socialism with bureaucracy libertarianism as implemented in north america is not exactly the shining pinnacle of economic efficiency just try starting a telephone company in the us or even worse canada it can take a year or more to get the blessing of our own permit rajs at the fcc puc and ptts or in the decidedly more socialist leaning canada industry canada and the crtc yet despite all of this intense regulation and paper pushing as well as regulatory scrutiny by the ftc sec and irs the executives of telecom companies have managed to bilk the investment community for what looks to be tens of billions of dollars they finished their routine with the a quadruple lutz laying off hundreds of thousands of workers when it all came crashing down so tell me again how are we better off ian on tuesday august NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER pm john hall wrote the mystery of capital why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else by hernando de soto is something i m reading now my impression is that france is not anywhere near the permit raj nightmare that india is and became nor has its market been closed like india s has but de soto s work is perhaps just as important or more so he hasn t dealt specifically with india but i recall examples from peru philippines and egypt in lima his team took over a year i think it was NUMBER working NUMBER hr days to legally register a NUMBER person company in the philippines getting legal title can take NUMBER years in egypt about NUMBER of the population in cairo lives in places where they are officially illegal india hasn t been helped by its socialism socialism has certainly helped strangle the country in permits but perhaps de soto is right that the real crippling thing is keeping most of the people out of the legal official property system putting most of the people in the property system was something the west only finished about NUMBER years ago or japan did NUMBER years ago it wasn t easy but we live in a society that doesn t even remember we did it original message from fork admin URL mailto fork admin URL on behalf of robert harley sent tuesday august NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am to fork URL subject re the curse of india s socialism rah quoted indians are not poor because there are too many of them they are poor because there are too many regulations and too much government intervention even today a decade after reforms were begun india s greatest problems arise from a political culture guided by socialist instincts on the one hand and an imbedded legal obligation on the other hand nice theory and all but s india france g and the statements hold just as true yet france is NUMBER in the un s hdi ranking not NUMBER since all parties must stand for socialism no party espouses classical liberalism i m not convinced that that classical liberalism is a good solution for countries in real difficulty see joseph stiglitz nobel for economics on the fmi s failed remedies of course googling on stiglitz fmi only brings up links in spanish and french i guess that variety of spin is non grata in many anglo circles r URL URL URL 