I grew up in India. I can confirm whatever you said is true and is a euphemism. Few people talk about the poverty in India (it is almost similar to quite a bit of Africa) and how India was a socialist country where you required license to conduct almost any business. But even fewer people talk about how, culturally speaking, seniority has always been more important than the merits of what is being said and the fact how in practice everything - the law, police services, elections, etc. - falls under the government and aren't independent bodies. The main ruling party for most of history (called Congress) has always been run by one family alone. Nepotism?
E.g.: Facebook did not have to go get approval from the government that they could run Facebook. And since there was no license involved, there was no limit, on say the number of users, etc. Pretty different from pre-liberalization India.
People are voting me down, but I was not making a loaded statement, I'm honestly interested in knowing the difference how it differs from state licensing agencies in the U.S.
For instance, since Facebook is a Delaware corporation, here is the state of Delaware's Business Registration and Licensing:
Its difficult to understand if you haven't lived it. I did,thankfully for a short time before I escaped. So let me try to explain. Facebook had to incorporate so they could pay taxes etc and be "legal". This is a LICENSE to operate. OK.
But lets say some govmint wizard decided that the US economy needed only one social networking company. Back in 2004 that would be myspace. So Mark Z would have applied for a license to become the next social networking company, would have waited 10 years to get it, wouldn't have gotten it, and would've eventually leaped off the Golden gate bridge.
That's what socialism is. What the tea-partiers are calling socialism is nowhere near what real, oppressive, mind-bending, government control is.
There is no more "License Raj" in India. But its still quite crazy, not that different.
