The worldwide left is in a funk. The smashing re—election victory of George W. Bush is driving them further into a dementia in which America becomes the global source of evil, not the terrorists.

Abject failure at the polls is one thing. Job insecurity is quite another. Reuters, the leftist "news" service, is going through a very rough patch, and is in the process of moving more and more editorial jobs to low—wage India, where capable graduates can perform many of the statistical and editorial functions once done in London or New York. Employees are wonderfing how high up the organization chart the outsourcing will go. (The answer: very high — they still teach English grammar and composition in the good schools in India. Many of the best writers in the English language are of Indian origin.)

All in all, this is a good thing. Beyond the normal quotient of schadenfreude (I love the sight of unemployed left wing journalists hanging out in coffee shops and spouting their increasingly deranged views to random strangers), the fact is that educated and upwardly—mobile residents of India have far less leisure to detach themselves from reality, and thus tend to be comparatively immune to the theories of the left.

To be sure, India went through a period of state socialism, mostly at the hands of London School of Economics—educated leaders who took over following independence from Britain. But it learned the hard way that theories developed by wealthy intellectuals are far too expensive for poor countries to implement.

Thomas Lifson   11 24 04