Saturday, March 4, 2006
The Wall Street Journal is positive, as well they should be, and thinks India needs to shed its Socialist ways to achieve growth, which is sensible. American workers are right to be worried about increasing market openness with an impoverished nation that will suppress our own wages, but to a certain extent, this is inevitable.
That's the economics. Strategically, closer relations between the US and India are a natural fit.
OpinionJournal: Passage to Freedom - The Bush visit to India heralds a new democratic alliance.
Still, there is no turning back India's nuclear-power status. Nor would it have been smart for the Administration to deny India's fast-growing economy an American source of energy supplies when one alternative would be a gas pipeline linking New Delhi with Iran. The U.S. is India's largest trading and investment partner; U.S. merchandise exports to India have more than doubled since 2001, and vice versa. This is a relationship that could blossom by removing every trade and regulatory barrier to it...
I'll leave it to others to argue the merits of the regulatory issues, although it strikes me that between our massive illegal immigration problem and free trade, something has to give. I'll choose getting those borders closed and enforcing our immigration laws. Losing some exportable work overseas, it seems, would be far more palatable if we didn't have an artificially depressed manpower market here at home.
Power Line points out that the reception to Bush's visit in the Indian press was far more positive than the Western press -- which frames its narrative around flag-burning protesters without explaining that these are a minority composed of Islamists and far-Leftists -- portrayed it.
As a semi-related aside, remember this anti-Sharon article at Indian web site Rediff.com from May of '03 (First linked here)? The article is followed by 22 pages of almost uniformly pro-Israel opinion excoriating the author -- pleasantly surprising, especially if you had watched (if I recall correctly) what the MSM had portrayed as Indian public opinion at the time.
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