Where have we heard this story before?

National Review, June 2, 2008

Where have we heard this story before? An angry populist politician with no time for economics demands protection for jobs at home--jobs that are being "stolen" by cheap labor in India. The odd twist is that this politician is himself in India. Raj Thackeray, who came up through India's fascist Shiv Sena movement before launching his own boutique political party, wants to pass a law to reserve 80 percent of the jobs in his home state of Maharashtra to natives of that territory. He may well succeed. Maharashtra is home to India's financial capital, Bombay (Thackeray and his ilk insist on "Mumbai," the Marathi name for the sprawling megapolis), and the support enjoyed by this dull doorknob of a man in South Asia's most sophisticated city is a reminder that the liberalization of India, which has helped lift many millions out of misery, is a weighty achievement that stands on fragile human legs. But Thackeray's illiberalism is no exotic abomination. His spirit and rhetoric are very much in evidence when Barack Obama promises to disrupt free trade in North America and when Hillary Clinton threatens to seize oil companies' profits. If the Democrats need a more efficient way to cook up crackpot protectionist schemes, they could always outsource the work to India.

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