I have been slowly working my way through Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion”. Everything one would need to critique not just development programs overseas, but also domestically is in this book.
In fact, it is quite easy to argue and document that the economic policies pursued by most of the European colonial powers in their overseas colonies from roughly the 1930’s–heyday of Fascist theorizing–through independence were, your choice of word, Keynesian/Fascist/Socialist; and that the continuation of those policies has led to grossly reduced wealth production, political control by privileged elites, famines and war.
Take India as an example: they implemented the tight government controls Keynes called for. The government invested heavily in infrastructure projects. They controlled wages and production. And what they got was 40 years of stagnation. In the early 1990’s, they opened things up, stopped riding the asses of every entrepreneur in the country, and have expanded steadily for 2 decades.
There is no ambiguity about how to grow an economy: it is to let people seek their own way, in conditions of freedom, including to the extent possible freedom from taxation.
These are a few general thoughts. I am going to quote Bauer extensively, as he has a way of saying things clearly and simply without the loss of important aspects of his meaning. That will be the next post.