The ideas of the 1991 reformers and the self-described classical liberals of today in India are not conducive to their goals. This applies to most Indian 'free market' advocates from public choice, chicago and neoclassical schools also. Basically, people who quote a lot of Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Coase (and surprisingly, even Keynes) et al. Economic ideas = between decent to good Legal, ethical and political ideas = between inconsistent to downright terrible Conducive to increasing state capture and crony capitalism To their credit, they identify the necessity of checks and balances, transparency, separation of powers, rule of law and due process (Sprinkle in the words 'freedom of' and 'freedom to' here and there). But they fail to *consistently* identify the necessary and unnecessary contents of a law, what constitutes a good law and a bad law, who does the checks and balances, the nature and corrupting characteristics of power and the state, what the law should and should not consist of, the correct methodology in coming up with a law and what exactly the so-called due process consists of. Any attempt at exploring this faces a charge from them as being utopian and unrealistic because they do not like the concept of objective truths in the realm of politics, ethics and law. For them, truth exists on a spectrum, so it is always subject to falsification. Everything in this field is subjective to them. The goal of objectivity in this field is, for some reason, un-intellectual to them. They scoff at it and deplore it. Maybe because they want it to be determined by a political authority that calls itself the state, who knows. Thus, for them, it is okay for an authority to 'make' laws, as long as it abides by the necessary principles mentioned above. Both a priori reasoning and a posteriori observation of what has happened since 1991 should tell us that their reforms has enabled crony capitalism, regulatory capture, special interest politics and an ever growing state. Clearly, like the ideas from post-independence India of socialist central planning, the reform movement of state-driven capitalism, i.e., interventionism, has failed at making India a free and prosperous country. Something is clearly wrong and we can all agree on that. These intellectuals talk a great deal about why the 'west' is 'advanced' and 'civilised'. And a lot of cultural, genetic, situational, historical and religious factors are cited as reasons for India not being so. But why not point out the legal and ethical factors? When you have a society where 1. Laws, the set of words that determine where violence is appropriate and not appropriate 2. Ethics, a set of norms that tell a person what he ought and ought not to do Are all considered as pseudo-sciences where there is no truth except what the state or a majority mandates it to be, you will have a broken society. This is a major reason why the west is in decline. They have forgotten what made their societies advanced and civilised in the first place: A Tradition of Reason.