Prosperity Without Liberty: Rethinking the Capitalist Free Market Orthodoxy

The belief that privatization inherently advances freedom is not only overly simplistic—it is historically indefensible. Far from being bastions of liberty, private corporations have at times been among the worst violators of human rights. Some of history’s most exploitative systems of slavery were not the result of feudal tyrannies or authoritarian regimes but were driven by private enterprises operating under the banner of commerce and profit.

Institutions like the British East India Company, the Royal African Company, and the Dutch West India Company—respected and even celebrated in their time—trafficked in human lives while amassing vast political and economic power. These were not outliers; they were emblematic of an era where profit was pursued without ethical constraint. Their legacies serve as a sobering reminder: privatization is no guarantee of liberty. When left unregulated and unaccountable, private enterprises can be just as oppressive as despotic governments or feudal warlords. 

This historical insight invites us to question the assumptions underlying modern economic orthodoxy. Is economic success truly the product of private ownership and unregulated markets? Or is it better explained by the presence of strong institutions, effective governance, and coherent national strategies?

China presents a striking counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of free-market supremacy. Despite being a one-party authoritarian state, China has witnessed the fastest economic transformation in modern history. Its rise to the status of the world’s second-largest economy has been driven not by liberal democracy or laissez-faire capitalism, but by long-term planning, centralized control, and strategic reforms. Crucially, state-owned enterprises have played a central role in this transformation—demonstrating that public ownership, under the right conditions, can be both efficient and globally competitive. China's experience challenges the idea that prosperity depends on privatization; instead, it underscores the importance of institutional stability and visionary governance.

Even in the supposed heartland of free-market capitalism—the United States—the notion of an open and competitive market economy is more illusion than reality. American capitalism is deeply skewed in favor of large multinational corporations that often operate in lockstep with political and bureaucratic power. The lines between government and corporate America have blurred to the point of indistinction, creating a system where policy is routinely shaped by lobbyists and campaign donors rather than public interest.

While these multinational giants enjoy deregulation, tax privileges, and global reach, small and medium-sized businesses are burdened with red tape, compliance costs, and structural disadvantages. In this landscape, the promise of equal opportunity through market competition is hollow. What emerges instead is an entrenched oligarchy—where wealth translates into power, and power perpetuates privilege.

U.S.-style capitalism does not represent the triumph of freedom. It is increasingly the fountainhead of global oligarchy—producing economic dynasties that seek not only to dominate markets, but to influence politics, control narratives, and shape the rules of the game to their advantage. The idea that market forces will spontaneously align with public good is not only naive—it has been consistently disproven by history.

Khrushchev's Fire: From Stalin’s Purges to Kennedy’s Philandering, and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

Stalin once lost his pipe. A few days later, Lavrentiy Beria, the ever-diligent head of the NKVD, arrived with an update. “Did you find your pipe?” he asked. Stalin, deadpan, replied: “Yes. It was under the sofa.” Beria blinked. “Oops,” he said. “Three people have already confessed. They’ve been executed.”

Such was the bureaucracy of terror—pre-emptive, paranoid, and wholly indifferent to truth.

After Stalin’s death, and Beria’s prompt liquidation, Nikita Khrushchev emerged from the shadows—bald, voluble, and eager to cast himself as the conscience of the new Soviet era. This was the same Khrushchev whom Stalin had once publicly mocked by tapping his pipe on his head and declaring, “It is hollow.” When the Wehrmacht stood poised to overrun Stalingrad, Stalin ceremonially poured ash on Khrushchev’s head, invoking a Roman ritual used to shame defeated generals.

Yet Khrushchev would have the last word—or so he imagined. Once in power, he launched the grand campaign of de-Stalinization. Out went the cult, the statues, the steely iconography of the vozhd. In came the anecdotes, the horror stories, the grainy memoirs. On a 1958 visit to Hollywood, Khrushchev even told John Wayne that Stalin had once ordered the actor’s assassination over his anti-communism—and that Khrushchev had heroically rescinded the hit. The tale appears nowhere in his memoirs and served mainly to flatter American egos while recasting Khrushchev as the enlightened reformer.

But Khrushchev’s true alliance was not with the West’s movie stars—it was with its propaganda mills. He handed them, gift-wrapped, the caricature they had long desired: Stalin as a paranoid butcher, a geopolitical maniac juggling nuclear grenades. And while Stalin’s cruelty was both real and immense, the irony lies in the balance of terror. For all his crimes—and they were numerous and grave—Stalin presided over a world that, however brutal, never flirted so openly with nuclear annihilation.

That particular honor fell to Khrushchev himself, who in 1962 blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis with the finesse of a sleepwalker juggling live ordnance. Opposite him stood John F. Kennedy—charming, reckless, and depending on which document you read, either a Cold War tactician or a pill-popping philanderer with mafia entanglements. Together, they brought the planet within a hair’s breadth of incineration.

The Cold War had many architects, but few episodes captured its lunacy like those thirteen days in October, when ideology, ego, and testosterone collided in the tropical humidity of Havana’s shadow. And Khrushchev’s moral indignation rang hollow when set against history’s broader ledger. Yes, Stalin built an empire through repression—but he was not unique in brutality.

The founding fathers of the United States, after all, were slaveholders—men who spoke of liberty while owning other human beings. They waged wars of extermination against indigenous peoples, laying the foundation of the so-called “land of the free” atop a continent-wide genocide. Empire is never a clean business. And those who sit tall on their moral high horses often forget the dried blood crusted on their own saddles.

What made Stalin intolerable to the West was not his cruelty—it was his defiance. Khrushchev, by contrast, sought applause. In condemning Stalin, he hoped to win legitimacy abroad. Instead, he shattered the internal scaffolding that had held the Soviet system together through war, famine, and fear. What followed wasn’t reform, but entropy.

A parade of uninspired leaders—Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko—offered stagnation as statecraft. And then came Gorbachev, with glasnost and perestroika in hand, determined to hammer the final nail into the Soviet coffin. Enamoured with the West and eager to remake the USSR in America’s image, he proved a willing listener to the whispers of Washington’s deep-state strategists. The reforms he enacted were incoherent, ideologically muddled, and economically disastrous. The result was not renewal, but ruin: a plummeting economy, a crumbling state, and the quiet, almost ceremonial dissolution of an empire.

And the West? It was not content with victory. The goal was never simply to dismantle the Soviet Union—it was to fragment Russia itself. A patchwork of compliant mini-states, stripped of sovereignty and saturated with Western capital, was the ultimate ambition. First came NATO’s eastward creep. Then the velvet revolutions, IMF shock therapy, and NGOs with strategic subtexts. The Cold War ended. The playbook didn’t.

Khrushchev was no Stalin—but he may have been something worse: a man who mistook applause for strategy, and sabotage for reform. The Soviet Union didn’t collapse in a day. It began to decay the moment the round-headed fool tried to look clever by setting fire to the house he once helped build.

China Chose Order Over Freedom—And Prospered. Should India Rethink Its Path?

Can freedom survive without order? Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.

Liberty without structure is fragile. It fractures under pressure, degenerates into chaos, and ultimately becomes susceptible to co-option—whether by demagogues, mobs, or malign external forces. Freedom, when unmoored from order, becomes not a birthright but a mirage—an illusion that dissolves the moment institutions falter, insurgencies erupt, or ideological fragmentation goes unchecked.

Freedom does not exist in a vacuum. It requires scaffolding: a dependable legal system, robust institutions, and a shared cultural framework that engineers stability. Only in societies where peace and predictability prevail do people begin to assert liberty as a right. Where violence dominates and governance collapses, survival supersedes sovereignty. Under such conditions, freedom is not merely endangered—it becomes irrelevant.

China’s modern trajectory exemplifies this logic. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party imposed an unforgiving form of political control. Yet it was precisely this imposition of order—ruthless though it was—that laid the groundwork for China’s meteoric rise. By extinguishing internal dissent, the CCP created the conditions necessary for long-term economic planning, infrastructure development, and integration into global markets. In three decades, China transitioned from inward-looking authoritarianism to a formidable global power—not because it embraced freedom, but because it prioritized stability.

The key insight is simple: chaos is the enemy of progress. Disorder—whether driven by ethnic strife, sectarian politics, or decaying institutions—has been one of India’s most enduring challenges. Since 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought a degree of cohesion and clarity to the governance model, restoring direction to a state long beset by drift. Yet, fault lines remain. From separatist movements to criminalized politics, several regions in India continue to struggle with chronic instability.

If India is serious about achieving the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, political order cannot remain a rhetorical ambition—it must be institutionalized. And this requires a blunt reckoning with the inherited architecture of governance. Many of India's institutions are colonial holdovers—designed to rule a subjugated population, not empower a sovereign citizenry. Their functioning is slow, opaque, and frequently obstructive. Unless these institutions are thoroughly reformed, they will continue to frustrate developmental ambitions rather than facilitate them.

The Modi government has shown resolve in pockets, but systemic reform remains an unfinished—and perhaps deliberately avoided—agenda. Transforming governance demands more than technocratic tweaks; it requires political courage, intellectual clarity, and the ability to question sacrosanct liberal orthodoxies. 

For instance, diversity is often celebrated as a national strength. But history offers a more sobering picture: societies with less internal fragmentation—more cohesive in religious cultural aspects—tend to move faster in achieving economic and cultural ascendancy. Homogeneity, for all its discomforts in polite discourse, has often gone hand in hand with order and effectiveness.

If India is to become a truly developed nation by 2047, it must make difficult choices. It must find ways to reduce friction—political, ethnic, administrative—and foster a more unified sense of purpose. That does not mean eliminating difference, but it does mean subordinating factionalism to national coherence. Political freedom, far from being the starting point, is the end product of a stable order and a flourishing society.

A republic is only as strong as the foundation it rests upon. India must decide whether it wants to be a nation permanently negotiating its internal contradictions—or one that builds durable order and, through it, secures lasting freedom.

Kissinger’s warning and the India-Pakistan ceasefire: When friendship with America turns costly

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.” ~ Attributed to Henry Kissinger by William F. Buckley Jr.

This darkly prophetic remark, reportedly made by Henry Kissinger during a phone conversation in 1968 amid the bloody churn of the Vietnam War, encapsulates the paradox at the heart of American foreign policy. 

The conversation, as recounted by Buckley, revolved around the tragic fate of two South Vietnamese presidents—Ngo Dinh Diem, overthrown and executed in a CIA-backed coup, and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who was later abandoned by his American patrons and left to flee his crumbling nation. Kissinger, the master tactician of realpolitik and the quintessential deep state functionary, understood the ruthless logic of empires better than most.

Contrary to the high-minded rhetoric peddled by Hollywood stars, media pundits, and Ivy League theorists, the post-World War II American foreign policy has rarely been about promoting democracy, human rights, free trade or global peace. 

These are the ornamental veneers, the palatable narratives sold to the world. Beneath them lies a colder, more enduring objective: the consolidation and perpetuation of American hegemony. Whether in Latin America, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Washington’s actions have consistently favoured strategic dominance over ethical consistency.

It is in this broader context that America's recent role as a peacemaker between India and Pakistan must be viewed. While Washington claims to play the benevolent intermediary, its deeper motivations are strategic. Peace talks, ceasefires, and crisis diplomacy offer the United States not just influence but leverage—particularly over two nuclear-armed neighbours with divergent trajectories.

Pakistan, economically fragile and politically unstable, remains deeply enmeshed in what is often described as the triad of the “three A’s”: America, Army, and Allah. The first provides aid and international cover; the second runs the state; the third, increasingly, offers the ideological glue in a fracturing polity. In such a context, America's leverage is overt, structural, and near-total.

India, on the other hand, presents a more complex challenge. A rising economic power and a vibrant, if often chaotic, democracy, India is not easily amenable to external pressure. But therein lies the risk. 

If New Delhi begins to rely on Washington to maintain strategic equilibrium in the subcontinent—especially in moments of acute crisis—it could slowly cede space in its foreign policy to American calculation. And when American interests inevitably diverge from Indian ones, history offers a clear warning: the United States has rarely hesitated to jettison even its closest partners in pursuit of its own geopolitical calculus.

Moreover, while the U.S. may occasionally make sacrifices to protect the interests of Western allies, its track record with non-Western nations is far more chequered—and often catastrophic. From orchestrating coups in Iran and Chile to plunging Iraq and Libya into prolonged chaos, American involvement has frequently ushered in not democracy, but disorder; not freedom, but tyranny; not development, but economic devastation. For many countries outside the Western fold, the American footprint has meant political instability wrapped in the language of liberation.

The lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—and indeed Pakistan itself—are not ancient history. They are cautionary tales still unfolding. India must remember: alliances with superpowers can offer short-term gains, but dependency, however gradual, may prove fatal in the long run.