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Johan Norberg, the defender of global capitalism had an interesting experience while giving a talk in Jordan.

Yesterday at an overcrowded lecture at the university in Amman, I got a lot of interested responses and questions from the students, until the moderator, a teatcher and supervisor, intervened and said that my book was offensive, and that it was an attempt to force western concepts of human rights and free markets on Arab countries, that the girls here were perfectly happy with the traditions and the arranged marriages and that I should really stay at home.

Shocking, but not terribly novel. It reminded me of another story where the speaker was Milton Friedman, the teacher VKRV Rao (then Director of the Delhi School of Economics) and the venue was the same Delhi School—in the fifties. Friedman’s critique of India’s socialist planning and promotion of free markets did not go down too well with Rao who, in the presence of Friedman, told his students that if they wrote what Professor Friedman espoused, he would fail them.

I heard this story first from Parth Shah. Parth’s Centre for Civil Society in New Delhi published the Friedman’s work when he was here in the fifties and sixties in a neat little volume called Friedman on India. Worth a read just to see how right Friedman was way back in the fifties and lament why it took India forty years to start implementing those ideas of economic freedom.