[jseliger]

"Apart from Peron's protectionist policies (which some call a drive toward self-sustenance)"

Trade protection and autarky have long been defended by words like "self-sustenance," and the like, but such policies have never turned out well: just ask India and China before they modernized and liberalized their economies.

"Peron might have been mistaken on many counts, but so many things are ignored behind the veil of apparently protectionist policies, like worker protection and upliftment, social infrastructure growth, etc."

Maybe: but by virtually every metric, Argentina is now worse off than countries like Spain and Italy, which have (relatively) liberal economic policies and relatively high rates of education.

[tayssir]

Actually, Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that the economic powerhouses (US, UK, Japan, etc.) relied on enormous protectionism when they were developing. However, now that they're powerful, they "kick away the ladder" and push developing nations to struggle under the ineffective free-market principles that they knew to avoid. http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/why_world_isnt_flat

[miked]

the ineffective free-market principles that they knew to avoid

Compare and contrast:

The US, Canada, Japan, and western Europe, Australia, New Zealand.

Maoist China vs. Hong King, socialist India, the Soviet Union, Germany under the National Socialist German Workers Party versus today, East Germany vs. West Germany, Africa, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc, etc, etc...

[alecco]

Menem, a peronist president in the 90s, undid many things Peron did. His government was a poster child for deregulation and what's called neo-liberalism. They privatized almost everything in a ruthless manner. The crisis of 2001 was a consequence of all those policies.

I am against publicly owned corporations and services but I'm against raw short-sighted capitalism, too. Some of the privatized public corporations had operating surplus, were not monopolies and were worth billions. Those were given to foreign investors who bought them taking credits over the same assets bought. Then proceeded to raise prices, perform massive layoffs, and vacuum capital to service companies owned also by those same investors.

I am quite against socialism (left or right) but you clearly lack knowledge on Argentina. The country is far more complicated that you might think.

[berntb]

It is not an argument against capitalism when corrupt politicians sell companies below value to crooks. It is an argument for good governance, which countries also need.

[confusedcitizen]

"...just ask India and China before they modernized and liberalized their economies."

Well, modernization and liberalization of economies have increased the economic divide in India. It's not that liberal economic policies are wrong, just that their implementations are always skewed by greedy corporations. A government's responsibility is not only to cater to cash sinks but also the people they govern, which especially in India, is the poor majority. Of course the GDP goes up, there is no question about that. But at what cost?

[randallsquared]

Note that "increased the economic divide" sounds bad, but there's no way from that statement alone to know whether people are better off or worse off, on the whole. If the "economic divide" was broadened merely by making some people better off faster than others, as is usually the case in a freer market, then there's no problem. It's only when people actually get poorer in terms of what they can do and have that "increasing the economic divide" is a problem, but that's much less common than nearly everyone getting poorer, which would have the effect of narrowing the gap by at least some measures.

[confusedcitizen]

I agree to what you say, but by economic divide in India, I meant, the rich get richer, the poor, frankly cannot get any poorer there and are untouched, maybe even adversely affected by the economic boom.

For the sake of free-market policies and rampant industrialization, people are displaced without their consent. For example, dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people in India.

Successive governments like to publicize decreasing poverty figures, which are constantly rebutted by independent agencies.

A 2007 report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) found that 77% of Indians, or 836 million people, lived on less than 20 rupees per day (USD 0.50 nominal, USD 2.0 in PPP), with most working in "informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty." [http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSDEL218894]

[randallsquared]

For the sake of free-market policies and rampant industrialization, people are displaced without their consent.

If people are losing their land without their consent, then the market isn't free. I guess we're losing the original meaning of "free market", here, which is just the latest in a list of such redefinitions to suit whatever the politicians want to do, while saying nice things. The euphemism treadmill strikes again! :)

[foldr]

> If the "economic divide" was broadened merely by making some people better off faster than others, as is usually the case in a freer market, then there's no problem.

This seems a little optimistic. Having a large gap between the rich and the poor does in fact cause problems (e.g. social unrest).

[randallsquared]

It's unclear to me if this is human nature, or just cultural.

[foldr]

Either way, it still causes problems. And one can certainly point to historical examples of it causing unrest in culturally quite different societies.

[tokenadult]

What is the evidence that things are worse off for anybody in India today as compared to 1965?