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