I can picture the fallacyman saying, “Hopefully this emotionally manipulative analogy is able to pierce the cloud of logic by which you’re trying to conceal the true emotions of the matter.” while letting out one blast of emotionally manipulative analogy on unsuspecting logic-lover.

HyperTree shall not take this unemotional libertarian capitalist hegemony of desi blogdom anymore.
Ravikiran; you’re on notice.

Why are we ‘reforming’ the economy?

There should be only one answer to that question, but it turns out there are two.

The first answer is that Nehruvian socialism failed to deliver the goods: it failed to drastically eradicate poverty, raise the standard of living of the people, remove social inequalities. In other words, India’s much-touted ‘mixed economy’ resulted in a dismal ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Capitalism, even in its regulated form, did the First World much more good: that indeed is the unequivocal conclusion of the Cold War.

The second answer, I gather, is that the state has no right to to “steal” public money via taxation and set-up public sector units or run public welfare schemes. This argument says that public taxation is ‘theft’, that the state is an evil ‘vampire’, and that use of public money for any ‘welfare’ schemes is not only unworkable (because of corruption) but also undesirable. This argument does not believe that the state could be doing this with ‘permission’ by the people, via democratic elections.

In your comment, there’s only one point that I think merits an asnwer: “and you will notice that neither this negative consequence nor this kind of economic growth is unique to the post reforms period. Coal mines were built, dams were constructed and people were displaced even prior to the reforms era.” Leaving the tomfoolery apart, the point is that displacement of people and such like are ignored under the glitter of ‘Shining India’.