Sure, China was a bastion of prosperity before even a perverted model of capitalism (please don't call it free market capitalism) was introduced (sarcasm). Beside what makes "democracy" a good thing anyway? Protection of rights has nothing to do with it.
I will say the obvious. History showed that whoever wanted to implement Communism ended up in a similar situation. Perhaps we should drop the game of empiricism and accept that Communism is very very hard to implement and no matter how much you tune the parameters most likely it will end up a freak Totalitarian setup. It just does not worth it.
You can deny everything and anything. However claiming Turkey is governed with dictatorship will not make you right. You need to put more evidence on the opposing theories and so far they do not add up.
It is overwhelmingly evident that coup was at least partly planned by Gulenists. There are tens of coup confessions making a direct link to the group already. All political groups in Turkey have a consensus on this.
However somewhat foreign press is trying hard to see it other way. Many foreign journalists even supported the coup instead of condemning until failure is imminent. Some reasons can be that they just dislike the current president and often their information sources are people who are affiliated with the cleric's movement.
Clearly this coup attempt gave a golden opportunity to the president to purge Gulen followers from the state and nobody is denying this. But that is the expected behavior, whether or not it is justified. To me, Gulen and his upper hierarchy just blindly pushed all their low rank followers to the fire (most probably did not have a clue about the coup).
Perhaps it is because it is not applicable to most countries. Netherlands has a very strong private industry and a reasonably small population. High tech - high profit Industry can withstand the very high taxes imposed by the government. To me, Netherlands would probably much more prosperous if taxes were lower and Govenment is less socialistic. But, if people are ok with current situation, it is their choice.
It is easy to play socialism where you have strong private industry and/or abundant natural resources with small population. Try that in say, India and you will see the catastrophic results in very short time (In fact, they have recovered by abandoning socialistic policies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#Post-liberali... ).
Perhaps today the meanings are different (one is a superset). But according to Von Mises:
"In the terminology of Marx and Engels the words communism and socialism are synonymous. They are alternately applied without any distinction between them. The same was true for the practice of all Marxian groups and sects until 1917. "