I weary when talking with my lefty friends. Of course, they blame everything on the U.S., expunging all Third World peoples of any responsibility. Behold the New York Times reporting today how Indians are embracing capitalism:

Fifteen years after India began its transition from a state-run to a free-market economy, a new culture of money - making it, and even more, spending it - is afoot.

This domestic hunger for goods has become an important engine for an economy that still lags in exports. So intense is the advertising onslaught, so giddy the media coverage of the new affluence, that it is almost easy to forget that India remains home to the world’s largest number of poor people, according to the World Bank.

Still, India’s middle class has grown to an estimated 250 million in the past decade, and the number of super-rich has grown sharply as well.

And, after more decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living rooms, they have ever more wares to spend it on: cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars.

India has become one of the world’s fastest-growing car markets, with about a million being sold each year. It once had only two kinds, Fiats and Ambassadors. Now dozens of models ride the roads, from the humble, Indian-made Maruti to the Rolls-Royce, which has re-entered India’s market some 50 years after leaving in the British wake.

Indians are discovering in cars everything Americans did: control and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status. Car showrooms, the bigger the better, are the new temples here, and cars the icons of a new individualism taking root. Foreign car companies, meanwhile, have discovered the Indian consumer - not to mention the country’s engineering brain power - and are setting up plants across India.

One of my leftist friends was shocked when I told her about India’s military alliance with Israel. But when India and China’s cars start creating more carbon emissions than the U.S., I’m sure she’ll blame it all on those evil American auto marketers.